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Listen to the Wind

Listen to the Wind
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
Author: James Reaney
Publisher: Talonbooks (cover image may change)
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 142
Pub. Date: 1972
ISBN-10: 0889220026
ISBN-13: 9780889220027
Cast Size: 5 female, 5 male

About the Play:

Listen to the Wind is a full-length drama by James Reaney. An imaginative but seriously ill teenage boy persuades his three female cousins to spend their summer staging a show based on a Gothic novel. They intend to entice his mother to return to act in the play and remain with the family. This play-within-a-play is a Victorian melodrama to beat all Victorian melodramas. In an elaborate plot, the teens deal with questions of love, death and betrayal.

Listen to the Wind is about a teenage boy escaping reality of his parents' divorce. Owen decides to spend the summer putting on plays with the help of his cousins Ann, Harriet, and Jenny, his grown-up relatives, and the neighbourhood children. One of the plays they put on is their adaptation of a Victorian novel, The Saga of Caresfoot Court. The two stories are intertwined, the story set in a Perth, Ontario farmhouse in the 1930s and the other set in England in the 1860s. The story of Devil Caresfoot, the struggles of his son Pierce and Douglas, his scheming nephew, who wishes to become heir to the manor, are as a dark mirror for the problems facing Owen and his parents. For Owen is very ill and his mother is leaving for another man. The parallels between the problems of the couples in Ontario and the strange couplings in the Victorian melodrama continually play one against the other. The audience watches a double story unfold: they see Owen fighting illness and trying to get his parents back together again; and they see Angela Caresfoot treading her way through a world of evil manor-houses and sinister Lady Eldreds. The two stories intertwine and reveal Owen's melodramatic view of the morality of life.

Listen to the Wind premiered in 1966 at Althouse College Auditorium in London, Ontario. Since then this Canadian theatre classic has been mounted by high schools, colleges, and community theatres.

Cast: 5 female, 5 male

What people say:

"Keeps reminding us that the way through our world of sickness and breakdown is play." — Profiles in Canadian Drama

About the Playwright:

James Reaney (1926-2008) was one of Canada's finest poets and dramatists. The three time winner of the Governor General's Award, he was the author of numerous plays and poetry collections and taught at the University of Manitoba and the University of Western Ontario for a total of forty years. He received his doctorate with Northrop Frye.

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