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Listen to the Wind
Listen to the Wind
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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
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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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James Reaney, Introduction by Alan Filewod
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