About the Play:

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

Whylah Falls is a full-length drama by George Elliott Clarke, based on his book of poetry by the same name. The story surrounds the Clemence family and a small black community in Nova Scotia in the 1930s. The return of the wayward poet X to the village affects the family and the village forever. As X strives to forge a relationship with the community he left behind, he triggers changes that result in betrayal, infidelity, and murder. Whylah Falls is a passionate play about poets and the lies they tell in the pursuit of love.

Whylah Falls tells the intertwined story of love and murder in the village of Whylah Falls, a mythic African-American-founded community in Nova Scotia's pastoral Annapolis Valley in the 1930s. The story focuses on two roving poets, X and Pablo, who decide to court the beautiful but jaded Clemence sisters: Selah, Amarantha and Shelley. Entangling their courtship is a power struggle that involves the girls' protective brother Othello, a corrupt politician named Thompson, and his lackey Scratch. When a murder ensues, the poets' ideal of a carefree Nova Scotia life changes forever. Blending language rich with humour and a score rich with blues, Whylah Falls is an original, unforgettably emotional, theatrical experience.

Whylah Falls was performed as a CBC-Radio drama in 1996 and premiered in 1997 as a stage play in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia by Easter Front Theatre Company. Subsequently opened in 2000 to an enthusiastic audience (serendipitously during Black History Month) at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

Cast: 4 female, 4 male

About the Playwright:

George Elliott Clarke is a Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic who was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains. Clarke has won the Governor General Literary Award for poetry as well as the prestigious Portia White Prize. He is now the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.