About the Play:

Winner of the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

It Is Solved by Walking is a full-length drama by Catherine Banks. This two-character play is framed by the American poet Wallace Stevens' famous poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Tantalizingly surreal, it is the story of a woman determined to escape the prison of a failed marriage and reclaim her creativity. It Is Solved By Walking is full of passion, wit, grace, and sensuality.

It Is Solved by Walking is about a woman struggling to unearth the roots of her failed marriage and her thwarted dream of becoming a poet. When Margaret learns of the death of her former husband, she recalls their earliest days together as Ph. D. candidates, beginning a journey through her past. Told through the sensations of the Great American Modernist Poet Wallace Stevens's brilliant if enigmatic poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the subject of her uncompleted thesis, Margaret evokes beautiful, ordinary and painful sexual memories from before, after and during their marriage. Stevens, a guiding voice in her head for twenty-five years, cajoles Margaret into unearthing the reasons she never became the poet, scholar, wife or mother she thought she would be. Bold and poetic, It is Solved by Walking is an intimate portrait of a writer making her way back to poetry one step at a time.

It Is Solved by Walking premiered in 2011 in an Urban Curvz production at the Joyce Doolittle Theatre in Calgary. Since winning a Governor General's Literary Award for English drama in 2012, it was staged at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax and at LSPU in St. John's in 2014.

Cast: 1 female, 1 male

What people say:

"A beautifully written and bountiful play." — The Calgary Herald

"Poetic, beautiful, intriguing, and brave." — The Chronicle Herald

"A cerebral, sensual, and very classy production." — The Telegraph

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.