Public Lies and Other Plays - 9780887547430

Detaining Mr. Trotsky was winner of the Chalmers New Play Award in 1988. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, returning to Petrograd from New York in April 1917, is arrested by British authorities in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and sent to an internment camp at Amherst. His turbulent presence threatens the authority of the commandant and creates a crisis of loyalty for the young lieutenant who falls under his spell.
The Dershowitz Protocol was winner of the Ottawa Little Theatre New Play Contest in 2005. If the judicially-sanctioned torture of suspected terrorists might actually forestall a repeat of 9/11, why not use it? In its starkest form, this is the question posed in his book, Why Terrorism Works, by Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz. The Dershowitz Protocol dramatizes the first actual use of "rigorous interrogation" of a ticking-bomb terror-suspect by court-appointed US officials, under newly established Department of Justice rules.
Public Lies was nominated for both a Chalmers Award and a Dora Mavor Award in 1994. Who controls the way we see the world? John Grierson, first Commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King's "propaganda maestro" in the early 1940s, declared that "public lies must not be told" - but they sometimes were. Back in Canada in the fall of 1970, an elderly Grierson is confronted with unfinished business, both personal and political, by two of his wartime assistants, and is re-engaged in issues of media manipulation by the unfolding October Crisis.
Borderline was winner of the Herman Voaden New Canadian Play Award in 1999. In April 1994, nearly a million Rwandan Tutsis are massacred by the majority Hutu. In July, when the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) gains control of the capital, Kigali, thousands of Hutu are prompted to flee across the border to UN refugee camps. In Borderline, a Canadian aid worker encounters her former student and lover who, as a prominent Hutu, is now in danger of Tutsi reprisal.