About the Play:

Sisters is a full-length drama by Wendy Lill. For more than 100 years, First Nations children in Canada were removed from their homes and families and sent to special schools, called Indian Residential Schools. Sisters explores the life of a nun who burns down a Residential School, examining the cultural infrastructure and values of the white society which created them.

Sisters focuses on the relationship among three nuns who run a Residential School in the 1960s. Back then, First Nations children were taken from their homes and treated abusively in Catholic schools, their culture, language, and customs suppressed. Sisters follows the journey of Sister Mary from young woman, very enthusiastic and full of good will, to middle-aged, a tortured soul. After Mary, a young nun, burns down the residential school she teaches at, her path from faith to disillusionment plays out before her eyes. Haunted by her youthful hope, transformed by the nuns and First Nations students she lives with, Mary sits in the county lockup and does the only thing her burning soul will allow her to do: confess. Did she choose wisely? While the play chronicles in graphic detail the by now well documented agenda of cultural genocide which motivated the establishment of Residential Schools in Canada, the daring triumph of Sisters is that it reveals the far less well documented cultural infrastructure and values of the society which created those schools – the church and the state of white, colonial, paternalist Canada. Sisters is a tough, uncompromising look at a tragic and shameful chapter in Canadian history

Sisters premiered in 1989 at Ship's Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. Since then the play has been produced at professional theatres across Canada, premiered in the US in 2002 at The Phoenix Theatre in San Francisco, and has been mounted by high schools, colleges, and community theatres.

Cast: 4 female, 2 male

What people say:

"…a powerful work… a moving theatrical experience." — Theatrum

"Lill plunges deeply into the mysteries of the human heart." — NeWest Review

"…a powerful dramatic exploration of hypocrisy and the human conscience." — Halifax Chronicle Herald

"…intelligent and articulate." — Winnipeg Free Press

About the Playwright:

Wendy Lill is a Canadian playwright and former parliamentarian who worked in various parts of Canada, finally settling in Nova Scotia. Her experiences in journalism and broadcasting influenced and encouraged her to "fictionalize real incidents and events." She has been described as a writer of "contemporary social issues with a clear-cut women's perspective." Her plays are produced in professional and community theatres and universities across Canada and internationally.