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Doctor Thomas Neill Cream (Mystery at McGill)
Doctor Thomas Neill Cream (Mystery at McGill)
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Author: David Fennario Publisher: Talonbooks (cover image may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 126 Pub. Date: 1993 ISBN-10: 0889223327 ISBN-13: 9780889223325 Cast Size: 4 female, 6 male
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About the Play:
Doctor Thomas Neill Cream is a full-length drama by David
Fennario. In 1876, Canadian Thomas Neill Cream graduated from
McGill's faculty of medicine. Cream was a backstreet abortionist and
managed an exclusive brothel called The Elite Club. His notorious
reputation eventually forced him to flee Canada for London. He was
hanged in Britain in 1892 for the murder of four prostitutes. As the
gallows trapdoors fell, he cried out, "I am Jack the..."
Doctor Thomas Neill Cream is the Canadian entry in the
great Jack the Ripper mystery. Thomas Neill Cream, a McGill-trained
doctor who was hanged in Britain in 1892 for poisoning prostitutes,
is the university's dark and dirty secret – a thief, a blackmailer
and a backstreet abortionist. As the tale unfolds, it mixes fact and
speculation with its cast of unlikely characters: khaki-covered union
organizers – the good guys; five white-faced zombies
representing such illustrious Founding Fathers of Confederation
and distinguished members of the McGill fraternity as Sir Wilfred
Laurier, Sir Hugh Allan, Sir William Osler, Lord Dufferin, and Lord
Strathcona – the victors implicated in murder, blackmail and
conspiracies of silence; and their young prostitutes – the victims.
Intended as a cultural exorcism, playwright David Fennario
charges with murder the capitalists who are now paraded through
Canadian history books as nation-builders. Past evil is paralleled in
the present.
Doctor Thomas Neill Cream premiered in 1988 at the Theatre
Centre in Toronto and was nominated the annual Arthur Ellis awards
honouring Canada's crime writers.
Cast: 4 female, 6 male
What people say:
"Fennario's in-your-face
irreverence [is] ferociously funny." — University of
Toronto Quarterly
About the Playwright:
David Fennario is an anglophone playwright and a novelist
born David Wiper in Montréal. He grew up and still lives in the
working class district of Verdun-Pointe St. Charles, and zoomed from
obscurity to national fame in 1979 with his play Balconville.
His pen name, given to him by a girlfriend, was part of a Bob
Dylan song, Pretty Peggy-O. He worked in a number of small
jobs before he enrolled in Dawson College. With his teachers
encouragement, he developed and fine tuned his creative writing
skills. He was the first writer-in-residence at Montréal's Centaur
Theatre, has won the Chalmers award twice, and received the Prix
Pauline Julien from the United Steelworkers' Union.
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