About the Play:

Saint Frances of Hollywood is a full-length drama by Sally Clark. The tragic life of Frances Farmer is re-traced in this drama about the promising young actress who briefly soared to the pinnacle of Hollywood stardom, then entered a tailspin of alcoholism and mental illness from which she never fully recovered. Saint Frances of Hollywood takes the biographical details of Frances Farmer's life and transforms them into a mesmerizing and quintessential classical tragedy.

Saint Frances of Hollywood is the story of rebellious 1930s American movie actress Frances Farmer, whose self-destructive tendencies involved alcohol, drugs and an abiding resentment of authority. In Moo, the play that made her, Sally Clark wrote about a woman wrongly committed to an insane asylum. She continues this fascination in her fact based play Saint Frances of Hollywood, about the tragic life of actress a Hollywood diva. Frances Farmer was a movie actress from the 1930′s and 40′s, loved for her radiant natural beauty, admired for her powerful, passionate acting, but remembered and immortalized for her tragic, wasted life. At the height of her film career, she turns her back on Hollywood, joining the socialist Group Theatre in New York to star in Clifford Odets's Golden Boy. A failed relationship with playwright Odets sends Farmer back to Hollywood where she faces harassment for her contempt of the studio system and her alleged communist beliefs. Struggling with an addiction to pills, she is confined, with the aid of her mother, to a Seattle psychiatric hospital. She would finally be released as "cured" a good seven years later, after a lobotomy had reduced her to a dull shell of her former self. Saint Frances of Hollywood examines artistic integrity, political dissent and self determination and portrays Frances Farmer as a patron saint of tortured, yet resilient souls.

Saint Frances of Hollywood premiered in 1996 at The Canadian Stage Theatre in Toronto. Since then the play has been produced at professional theatres, including the Manhattan Theatre Source off-Broadwayin in 2005, and at community theatres and performed in college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 4 female, 4 male

What people say:

"It is this mix of fact and fantasy that Clark has captured so brilliantly and used to striking advantage … the effect is brutally chilling." — Variety

"A searing tragedy…." — Toronto Star

"Saint Frances of Hollywood ... is the closest Canadian theatre has come to contemporary tragedy: in this play, consumer capitalism takes over from fate in a universe that makes the commodification and exploitation of women the equivalent of tragic inevitability, and resistance is configured as madness." — The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature

About the Author:

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.