About the Play:

That Summer is a full-length drama by David French. In 1958, Maggie and her sister Daisy spent the summer at Wolf Lake in Ontario. Many years later, Maggie revisits the lake... and the memories that haunt her still. Maggie relives the joy of first love and the pain of loss as she comes to terms with her past and with the summer that marked the end of her innocence.

That Summer is set in 1990's Ontario cottage country and follows the main character Margaret's memories of her family's vacation there in 1958. It's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage where she vacationed with her family thirty-two years earlier. For Margaret and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery. Both of the girls fall in love with two of the local boys. Daisy, on the lookout for action, cruising the dances at the resort, can't deal with what she initiates, and falls victim to her own confusion and naiveté. Not even the neighbour, the eccentric, bourbon drinking, cigar smoking Mrs Crump, who knows all the fairy-tale spells to capture the heart of a lover can save Daisy from drowning in her own misadventure. Margaret, bookish and withdrawn, inhabiting a universe defined by poets and novelists, is seduced in spite of herself. As Margaret, the narrator, watches her younger self relieve the beauty of that long-ago summer, the play moves inexorably back to the heartbreak of a headlong surrender to experience, and to what was won and lost in a single day.

That Summer was first produced in 1999 at the Blyth Festival in Blyth, Ontario. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres across Canada and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 5 female, 2 male

What people say:

"At a time when worldliness and cynicism dominate the literary arts, the quiet sense of wonder, of bygone innocence conveyed through this lovely play is as refreshing as a summer storm after a heat wave… Like the plays and short stories on Anton Chekov, the particulars of time and place in That Summer speak of universal experience for all time." — The Record

"That Summer is a lyrical and beautifully constructed meditation on the passage of time, and the transition from one generation to the next. David French is a playwright at the height of his powers." — Canadian Book Review Annual 2000

About the Author:

David French (1939-2010) was one of Canada's most popular and critically-acclaimed playwrights. He is best remembered for the Mercer family plays, such as Leaving Home, which chronicle the lives of a Newfoundland family with humour and pathos. The Mercer plays have received hundreds of productions across North America, including a Broadway production of Of the Fields, Lately. This quintet of plays has also touched audiences in Europe, South America and Australia. His backstage comedy Jitters has been performed all over the continent, and most of his plays have had successful international runs, including two Broadway productions. In 1989, David French was inducted into the Newfoundland Arts Hall of Honour, and in 2001 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.