About the Play:

Finalist for the 1999 Governor General's Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

Corker is a full-length satiric comedy by Wendy Lill. The story begins when the homeless title character Corker appears on the doorsteps of a highly successful, ambitious and well-to-do couple of professionals and he refuses to leave the premises. Surprisingly funny and at times very touching, the play examines the effects of decades of cutbacks on the crumbling social safety net and challenges our society's choice not to care for the disadvantaged.

Corker is the story of a dysfunctional family and the developmentally challenged young man who tries to attach himself to it. The play uses the familiar but difficult and treacherous nineteenth-century device of representing the family as a microcosm of the nation state. Opening with the extended family's awkward attendance at the funeral of Serena, aging flower child of the sixties, the symbolic conflicts build quickly. Serena's sister Merit, a hard-driving, social-program-budget-slashing ambitious politician, and her husband Leonard, a lion of free enterprise, are hell bent on dismantling their government's social services by replacing them with a privatized human warehousing system whose track record to date has been the streamlining of the American prison system. But there's a problem: Serena's developmentally challenged friend Corker, the family's faded and failed country gentleman brother Galahad, and their octogenarian mother Florence, all become victims of Merit and Leonard's policies. It is Wendy Lill's great skill as a playwright that actually makes this symbolism work by unravelling it into a devastating conclusion that is seen in two completely different ways by the characters and the audience. While everyone in the play is celebrating their "one big happy family" reunion (brought about by Merit and Leonard having seen the "error of their ways"), the audience, having realized the characters are all about to lose their comfortable designer house and are headed for the unheated trailer park, watches in horror as the social worker brings in huge green garbage bags of junk.

Corker premiered in 1998 at Neptune Theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia and was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama in 1999. Since then the play has been performed in professional and community theatres across Canada as well as college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 2 female, 4 male

What people say:

"Using the dysfunctional McPhee family as a microcosm for the nation, Lill's play offers a highly entertaining, satirical glance backwards at recent Canadian history and a passionate plea for a new course of direction." — The Times (Moncton)

"Wendy Lill's play Corker is a huge thrill. This is theatre at its best, inhabiting that ancient intersection between the personal and the political." — Prince George Citizen

"...Lill's sharp and surprisingly funny political satire about our uncaring society." — The Record (Kitchener)

About the Playwright:

Wendy Lill is a Canadian playwright and former parliamentarian who worked in various parts of Canada, finally settling in Nova Scotia. Her experiences in journalism and broadcasting influenced and encouraged her to "fictionalize real incidents and events." She has been described as a writer of "contemporary social issues with a clear-cut women's perspective." Her plays are produced in professional and community theatres and universities across Canada and internationally.