About the Play:

We the Family is a full-length dark comedy by George F. Walker. Multicultural mayhem. Love. Larceny. And death! Follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed. As they struggle to understand one another, their own failings and bad choices set them on a collision course with a devastating – and hilarious – end.

We the Family looks at the after-effects of a wedding between culturally divergent families. The list of characters reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed, it is, at least in part: the son of the main characters, David and Lizzie Kaplan, a Jewish-Irish Catholic mixed marriage, marries the daughter of Jenny Lee, a Chinese Canadian widow. There's also a Russian mistress, a Palestinian lover, and a glamorous, possibly fraudulent Italian psychologist, while offstage Pakistani terrorists kidnap the also-offstage honeymooning couple, then sell them to Sicilian gangsters who sell them to Russian gangsters, one of whom turns out to be the father of the Russian mistress (another family). By the end of the play, acclaimed Canadian playwright, George F. Walker has deconstructed the dysfunctional Kaplan and Lee families and family love as well. Through the play's pervading treachery, with family members and lovers betraying each other in horrifying ways, he satirizes the hypocrisy of expounding family values while behaving in viciously selfish and self-centred ways. These hyphenated Canadians certainly aren't "nice," and no amount of "sweet-and-sour matzah balls" (which the Kaplan matriarch serves at the multicultural wedding reception) can hide the nasty taste.

We the Family premiered in 2015 at Hart House Theatre in Toronto.

Cast: 7 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Walker's finest work: it is both endlessly relatable and completely over-the-top; sharp yet sympathetic; dark and macabre without verging on sentimental pathos. As a family member in 2015, you must see this play." — Novella

"If you have a taste for cynical and irreverent humour, death and depravity with a drum roll, this darkly comic culture clash will be right up your alley." — Mooney on Theatre

About the Playwright:

George F. Walker is a prolific Canadian playwright with working-class roots in Toronto's hard-luck Cabbagetown, the city's now trendy East End. Instrumental to the 1970s alternative theatre movement in Canada, the self-taught playwright has written more than 30 plays and created screenplays for several award-winning Canadian television series. His plays have been presented across Canada and the United States and in more than 700 productions internationally. His work has been honoured with two Governor General's Awards, eight Chalmers Awards, and five Dora Awards. He is also the recipient of the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement and is a Member of the Order of Canada.