About the Play:

Finalist for the 1993 Governor General's Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

Glenn is a full-length drama by David Young. Glenn Gould's two distinct versions of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" serve as a structuring device for the playwright, who explores the music, ideas, and remarkable life of this iconoclastic and celebrated pianist who thrilled listeners by conquering Bach's most maddening piano pieces.

Glenn is an ingenious and deeply moving portrait of the remarkable life of the celebrated pianist, arguably the most important artist Canada has ever produced. Glenn Gould captured the imagination of a worldwide audience, becoming an instant celebrity with his eccentric performance style and his definitive renderings of Bach's "Goldberg Variations", which Gould recorded twice – early in his career and late. David Young has used Gould's early and late recordings as a structural template for the acclaimed Glenn, his dramatic exploration of the four stages of the musician's genius. There's the Prodigy, an awkward newcomer to New York, astounding Columbia's technicians with his unconventional interpretation of the "Goldberg Variations"; the Performer, at the height of his celebrity as a world-renowned concert artist; the Perfectionist, who searches for absolute clarity through the marriage of technology and art; and the Puritan, following a late-career studio recording of the "Goldberg Variations," an older Glenn Gould remembers how he felt as a young man approaching the same piece 30 years earlier.

Glenn premiered in 1992 at Harbourfront Centre Theatre in Toronto and was nominated for seven Dora Mavor Moore awards, the Chalmers Award, and the Governor General's Award. It subsequently had numerous productions in Canada (including at the Stratford Festival, where it became the second-highest selling Canadian play the Shakespearean festival had ever mounted) and overseas. This Canadian classic is the play upon which the film 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is based.

Cast: 4 men

About the Playwright:

David S. Young is a Canadian playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He has written extensively for film and television, beginning with Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock. He is the author of seven plays, two novels and several screenplays and teleplays. Two of his plays, Inexpressible Island and Glenn, have been nominated for multiple Canadian drama awards.