About the Play:

Perfect Pie has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Female/Female scene-study showcases.

Perfect Pie is a full-length drama by Judith Thompson. In the course of an afternoon's reunion between two long-estranged women, a long-concealed childhood trauma, and two teenager's wild secret, slams into the present. Together they unravel the painful memories and find strength in each other. Perfect Pie is an intimate and emotional drama by acclaimed Canadian playwright Judith Thompson.

Perfect Pie is the story of two estranged women; childhood friends who were separated in their teens and have not seen or heard from each other in thirty years. While Patsy marries a prosperous farmer and stays in the town she grew up in, wild child Marie – now called Francesca – follows the lights of the big city and has become a glamorous, much-married actress. When Patsy invites Francesca to her home in smalltown Ontario the two women reunite with a certain amount of unease. As the day progresses, we learn how their friendship blossomed in their adolescence and how, on one fateful day, it all ended. Based on a true story, Perfect Pie explores the friendship shared between two childhood friends whose lives were ruptured but whose bonds of friendship hold over a lifetime. The two women appear as children and adults to re-construct the moments which affected their lives forever.

Perfect Pie premiered in 2000 at Tarragon Theatre Mainspace in Toronto. Since then the play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been mounted by professional and community theatres across Canada, the US, and UK, and in college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 4 female, with doubling

What people say:

"This is undoubtedly the best new play set on a farm and reaching back into the past since The Drawer Boy." — The National Post

"Playwright Judith Thompson has taken the archetypal Canadian homecoming narrative and reinvented it afresh in her remarkable and richly rewarding new masterpiece, Perfect Pie. ...It's still true that you can't go home again. But Thompson poignantly illustrated that where we come from is always a part of us." — Toronto Star

"Canadian playwright Judith Thompson ruptures all sentimentality about rural and small-town life in a way that would have stunned even Peyton Place novelist Grace Metalious." — Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St. Paul

"Filled with the stuff of female lives – the remembered ecstasy of girlhood friendship, the baking of pies, the caring for dying mothers, the keeping on keeping on, through the children and husbands and chores – Perfect Pie is ... an engrossing drama of a woman whose inner life has been locked away ever since an unrevealed trauma separated her from her best friend 30 years prior." — Variety

"Perfect Pie is a bittersweet slice of rural Canadiana that will both charm and challenge audiences." — Salmon Arm Observer

About the Playwright:

Judith Thompson, OC is a highly esteemed Canadian playwright and educator. She has twice won the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama for White Biting Dog and The Other Side of the Dark. Other often-produced works include Sled, The Crackwalker, I Am Yours, Lion in the Streets and many more. In 2006 she was invested as an Officer in the Order of Canada, and in 2008 she became the first Canadian to be awarded the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring the best English-language women writers worldwide for her play Palace of the End. She is currently a professor at the University of Guelph for the School of English and Theatre Studies teaching courses in acting and playwriting.