About the Play:

Winner of Canada's 3rd annual Clifford E. Lee National Award for Playwrights

Hide and Seek is a full-length mystery thriller by Lezley Havard. This Canadian-bred play was presented on Broadway. Set in a long abandoned farmhouse, which is being refurbished by its new owners, this suspense-filled and gripping play blends present terror with past mysteries as it probes into the chilling secrets which the old house yields only at great peril to the present occupants.

Hide and Seek is about a woman left alone in a mysterious house. After 18 years of marriage Richard and Jennifer Crawford are finally about to become parents and have moved from the city to an old farmhouse, which had previously been vacant for 10 years. Richard continues commuting to the city to work, while Jennifer stays in the country to oversee the restoration of the house, supervising the shambling handyman and cook who work for them. At first it is mostly the slow pace of restoration that nags them, but a general sense of unease begins to build as the old house seems to be resisting their intrusion. The lights fail, the plumbing malfunctions, a threatening farm neighbour stops by with an odd gift (a prayerbook for the burial of the dead), and her poet husband ominously warns Jennifer that she should go back to the city before it is too late. Further complications arise when they are joined by Richard's ne'er-do-well brother and his fiancee, but it is the silent little girl whom Jennifer claims she has seen swinging in the backyard who brings on the chilling climax of the play – in which the real and the supernatural clash with disturbing and breath-stopping results.

Under its original title of Jill, this play won Canada's 3rd annual Clifford E. Lee National playwriting award, and received a premiere in 1976 at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, followed by a very fine production at Festival Lennoxville in 1977. It attracted the attention of New York producers and the title was changed to Hide and Seek before it premiered in 1980 at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway in New York City. Since then it has been performed in regional repertory, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 4 male, 1 girl

What people say:

"…cleverly contrived to keep audiences gasping as the unexpected ceaselessly unfolds." — Variety

"Any Broadway season is better off with a new suspense thriller…." — New York Post

"Broadway's newest and finest fist clenching, scrunching in your seat, richly complex, beautifully acted thriller." — CBS-TV

"Playwright Lezley Havard used the near-culmination of Jennifer's pregnancy to add still more tension to the play, a tension that consistently increased to the final climax. But Havard has written more than a thriller. She has shown an insight into the psychological problems inherent in environmental change. She probes the adjustments that must be made from sophisticated, fast-moving city life to the slower pace of a farm existence." — Toronto Star

Lezley Havard is a British born Canadian playwright. Born in London, she grew up in Australia and England, living 12 years in Toronto and two in Edmonton, before moving to the US. She went into the theatre at fifteen. She has worked as an actress, stage manager, and director and started writing in 1975. She is a recipient of: Clifford E. Lee Playwriting Award; Canada Council for the Arts Grant (twice); Best Play, Women-Write-For-Theatre; Best Play, Multi-Cultural Play Festival.