About the Play:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

Winner of the 1984 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

White Biting Dog is a full-length drama by Judith Thompson. A suicidal young man is rescued by a white dog who gives him a mission: "Save your father to save yourself!" Thus begins the comical and absurd journey of a desperate man trying to save his dying father so that he might regain a sense of his own place in the world. His mission flounders until the dog's owner helps him by bringing his reluctant mother back into the family.

White Biting Dog is a surreal black comedy, wrapped up in overtones of suspense, horror, and the supernatural. At twenty six years of age, Cape Race is used to getting what he wants. A compulsive liar, charmer, and manipulator of human emotion, Cape seems to have acquired it all; a career with a future, a relatively inoffensive looking young wife, a home in the suburbs. With everything in place, he has little more to do than get on the subway each day, go to work, come home, eat, sleep, fornicate, and repeat the process ad nauseam. The only problem is that the future he's living is not the one he had in mind. Spurred on by the ramifications of a crippling mental disease that only he can diagnose, one which has robbed him of the ability to feel anything but hate, contempt and disgust for everything and everyone he sees, he inevitably makes the decision to end his own life, on Sunday afternoon in January, by throwing his body from the Bloor Street overpass in Toronto. That is, until, on the verge of oblivion, he's stopped by a precocious white dog who informs him that the key to his salvation lies in his returning home to save his ailing father from death. When he joins forces with a teenage psychic, life starts to look a little brighter, until a visit from his sex-obsessed mother and her latest boy toy stirs up old feelings that threaten to push him and his father over the edge.

White Biting Dog premiered in 1984 at Tarragon Theatre Mainspace in Toronto. Since winning the 1984 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama, the play has been produced at professional theatres across the North America.

Cast: 2 women, 3 men

What people say:

"Judith Thompson's White Biting Dog... is orgiastic and poetic in its use of language, excessive in its theatricality, and achieves its power by an accretion of extraordinary images… Any play… which pushes against the limits of theatrical naturalism has to accomplish one very difficult thing: it has to create its own world. Miss Thompson, in White Biting Dog, does this. And that is an amazing accomplishment… Thompson has the best ear of any playwright now writing in Canada." — The Globe and Mail

"[In White Biting Dog] Thompson has crafted each line with precision, and all the characters speak with their own rhythm." — NOW Magazine

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.