About the Play:

Finalist for the 2025 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

Downed Hearts is a full-length drama by Catherine Banks. It tells the story of Aaron, a fisherman who goes out to try to find survivors after a jetliner crash. He searches the water trying to make sense of what's happened, until he finds a young woman amongst the wreckage. Downed Hearts is a play that delves into the possibility that healing sometimes comes to us in mysterious ways.

Downed Hearts is an intimate look at the resilience and beauty of a Nova Scotia island community in the aftermath of tragedy. Ten days after an air-sea disaster, an island fisherman struggles to recover from the aftermath of his participation in the rescue-turned-recovery operation of a downed jetliner. Aaron's mental fragility is compounded by his wife's recent decision to take their twelve-year-old autistic son to live off-island so that he will get better schooling. Aaron, determined to regain his equilibrium, boards his small boat and heads out to where he feels most at peace, on the ocean. When he returns to shore hours later with a silent young woman wrapped in an airline blanket, the question foremost in everyone's mind is, "Who is she?" But more concerning to Aaron's mother is whether Aaron might really believe he has found the sole survivor. Inspired by the local response to the Swissair 111 disaster that struck off the coast of Peggy's Cove in 1998, Downed Hearts is a play about healing and hope and how we recover from major disasters.

Downed Hearts premiered in 2023 at Ship's Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia and played to sold out houses. It was a finalist for the 2025 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama.

Cast: 4 female, 2 male

About the Playwright:

Catherine Banks is a Canadian playwright whose work has been described as poetic, darkly humorous, courageous and beautifully theatrical; her characters as Atlantic Gothic. She began her career as a special education teacher, and published her first play in 1991. Catherine Banks says she learned the power of drama from listening to real-life stories in her grandmother's kitchen. She lives in Sambro, Nova Scotia, a rural fishing village in the greater Halifax area.