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Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit

Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit
Your Price: $24.95 CDN
Author: Martin Morrow
Preface by: Ronnie Burkett and Ken Gass
Publisher: The Banff Centre Press
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 400
Pub. Date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0920159974
ISBN-13: 9780920159972

About the Book:

Born in Calgary in 1982, One Yellow Rabbit has an impressively long history for an experimental theatre troupe. It can boast of high-profile fans including Adrienne Clarkson. The Kids in the Hall hang with them. Canadian troubadour Leonard Cohen sent them flowers on opening night. Canada's own Holocaust denier James Keegstra wanted them locked away. They've been banned by the courts, shut down at Expo, feted in Australia and awarded in Scotland (playing in one Edinburgh theatre 10 times in 12 years).

How did an avant-garde theatre of international calibre emerge from the suburbs of arch-conservative Calgary, land of ranchers, oil barons and urban cowboys? Why does it stay there in defiance of logic? And why does it insist on that childish name?

Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit is a breezy, irreverent chronicle of the company considered by many to be English Canada's foremost avant-garde group. In its romp through the company's first 20 years, Wild Theatre also documents One Yellow Rabbit's friends and tight-knit collaborators – puppet master Ronnie Burkett, playwrights Daniel MacIvor and Brad Fraser, and comedians Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney of the Kids in the Hall. There are also guest appearances by everyone from Beat poet Michael McClure to New York performance artists Karen Finley and Penny Arcade. At the heart of the book, however, is the story of an unlikely troupe of artists with diverse talents and shared tastes who have forged a unique style of physical theatre away from the world's cultural centres, combining a western entrepreneurial spirit with a creative imagination and edginess that defy Alberta's conservative image.

"After yawning my way through a number of dry, academic tomes and articles on Canadian theatre, I thought someone should write a book that captured the excitement of seeing this work and the kind of unusual personalities who create it," says author Martin Morrow. Although Wild Theatre makes a well-researched contribution to Canadian theatre literature, the book is first and foremost a story, guaranteed to make you laugh out loud as you peek behind the scenes to see the Rabbits at work and play.

What people say:

"In both its brainy wildness and in its highly theatrical structure, Morrow's great new book reflects, with accuracy and wonderful abandon, the dynamic, free-wheeling, nose-thumbing and yet reverent world of creativity which is the rare, true domain of the Rabbits and their numberless offspring." — John Murrell

"The story of One Yellow Rabbit tracks like a long, deep tire print through the sand. The prose is as motivated and curious as the subjects themselves." — Dave Bidini

About the Author:

Martin Morrow is a Canadian arts journalist who has been reviewing theatre regularly since 1988. A two-time winner of Canada's Nathan Cohen Award for excellence in critical writing, he began his career in Calgary, where he was chief theatre critic of the Calgary Herald; and since 2010 has been a regular theatre critic for The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. His writing has also appeared in Canadian Theatre Review, The Stage (U.K.), Toronto Life and other publications. In addition, he is the author of Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit, a popular chronicle of the seminal avant-garde Canadian theatre company.