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Democracy: one whole day beside a pond
Democracy: one whole day beside a pond
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Author: John Murrell Publisher: Talonbooks Format: Softcover # of Pages: 64 Pub. Date: 1991 ISBN-10: 0921368283 ISBN-13: 9780921368281 Cast Size: 4 men
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About the Play:
Winner of the Alberta Writer's Guild Prize for Drama
Democracy is a full-length drama by John Murrell.
The play details a fictional meeting between American poets Walt
Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson during the Civil War. Democracy
is a challenging and eloquent examination of human nature and the
nature of war.
Democracy consists almost entirely of vigorous fictional
discussions between two 19th- century intellectual giants – the
American poet-philosophers Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It
is July 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, not far from
Washington, D.C. The two old friends meet in the stillness beside a
pond in the woods with two soldiers, a deserter from the South and a
blinded, dying veteran from the North. Because these men are Walt
Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson they discuss the human sacrifice of
war with a particular passion.
Democracy premiered in 1991 at Perseverance Theatre in
Juneau, Alaska.. The Canadian premiere was later that same year at
the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. Since
then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across
Canada. Its
British premiere was in 1994 at The Bush Theatre during The London
Fringe.
Cast: 4 men
What people say:
"Even the simplest lines have
a quiet eloquence…soft explosions of the heart.." —
Quill & Quire
About the Playwright:
John Murrell (1945-2019) is one of Canada's best known
international playwrights. His dramas focus on real people and
cultural icons. He has also written operas, and translated works by
anyone from Sophocles to Chekhov. He has headed the Banff
Playwright's Colony and the Theatre Section of the Canada Council,
been Associate Director of the Stratford Festival and Artistic
Director of the Banff Centre for the Arts, and is a multiple Chalmers
Award winner. For his enormous contributions to the arts in his
adopted province and country, the Texas-born Murrell received the
Alberta Order of Excellence and was appointed an Officer of the Order
of Canada. His plays have been translated into 15 languages and
produced in more than 35 countries around the world. He is also
nationally and internationally prominent as a translator of classic
theatre texts into English, including Chekhov's Uncle Vanya,
The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, Sophocles' Oedipus
Rex and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. All these
translations, and a number of others, have gone on to become the
"standard versions" for English-language theatres around
the world. |
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