About the Play:

Lost Souls and Missing Persons is a full-length comedy by Sally Clark. A housewife and mother goes missing while on holiday in New York City. As her husband searches for her, she becomes a gibberish-speaking street person not knowing who she is and ends up as an "installation" in an artist's studio.

Lost Souls and Missing Persons follows Hannah Halstead, a wife and mother of two teenagers, vacationing with her husband Lyle in New York. She fails to return from a routine outing. As her husband Lyle and teenage children puzzle over her absence, she suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and looks at the man sleeping in the bed next to her and screams. She does not remember who she is, who Lyle is, how she got there, and finally, how to speak. Revealed to the audience in a series of flashbacks and through Lyle's search for her, she ends up wandering among strangers and street people like herself, and is picked up by an artist who "mounts" her in his studio as another of his "installations." Lost Souls and Missing Persons is a comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class – a trope of insulating banalities which trades the body's physical and spiritual content for the artifice of a formalized security and predictability.

Lost Souls and Missing Persons premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1984. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres and performed in college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 9 female, 11 male

About the Playwright:

Sally Clark is a critically acclaimed Canadian playwright who was born in Vancouver, where she currently lives. She is best known for her frequently produced play Moo, and has been playwright-in-residence at Theatre Passe Muraille and the Shaw Festival. She is also an accomplished painter, director and filmmaker. Her plays have received a Chalmers Award, two Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations, and a Governor General's Award nomination.