When the curtain falls on the life of a bitter, self-absorbed actor, he leaves behind two resentful children—Sophie and Ambrose—and one final act of cruelty: his entire estate bequeathed not to them but to his office geranium, Henrietta. Under the dutiful care of his accountant and executor, Martin, the plant thrives while his heirs plot to destroy it and claim what they believe is rightfully theirs.But for the narrator, at least, death is only an intermission. What follows is a su...

In this fast-paced, sophisticated and hilarious play, a man contemplating suicide on a seventh-storey building ledge confronts the stories of the people who live inside the building. These “seven stories” lead to a charming and surprising ending.Cast of 2 women and 3 men

In this fast-paced, sophisticated and hilarious play, a man contemplating suicide on a seventh-storey building ledge confronts the stories of the people who live inside the building. These “seven stories” lead to a charming and surprising ending.Cast of 2 women and 3 men

Since Morris Panych’s classic black comedy, Vigil, premiered in 1996, it has been produced throughout North America, the United Kingdom and Europe, including a 2009 Off-Broadway production, which opened to rave reviews, a run as Auntie & Me in London and, most recently, shows at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where Panych directed Academy Award–winner Olympia Dukakis opposite Marco Barricelli in the lead role.

Edgerton Foundation New Play Award: Morris Panych, The Shoplifters (Winner)In this riotously funny new comedy from Morris Panych, we meet Alma, a seasoned career shoplifter who prefers the five-finger discount over some lousy seniors’ day deal. But it’s not just an empty wallet that leads Alma to a life of petty crime – it’s also her strong convictions about social justice and economic inequality.Along for the ride is Phyllis, Alma’s frazzled accomplice who...

Three people gaze out their living room window as the days pass. Across the street in Withrow Park, life goes on – or is it a dream?Then comes a knock at the door. Time has found them, hiding in plain sight. Or possibly it’s just a man in a wrinkled suit. But Janet, Marion, and Arthur must act now or forever be devoured by their own indifference. They can no longer live on the periphery of their own lives. They must invite the young man to dinner.As the audience peers into ...

Of all our contemporary urban myths none is more absurd than the fiction of the “classless society,” and Morris Panych’s latest comedy penetrates ruthlessly to the shock and horror of the residue of hardened pesto soiling its porcelain heart.Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler presides over the steam-choked basement of an up-scale restaurant, a place of seamless existential drudgery so utterly remote from the light of day t...

As Morris Panych’s latest comedy opens, we hear Iris, a precocious girl of ten, saying: “These are the last few days of my childhood.” The death of her goldfish, Amal, she is sure, has been announced by the air-raid sirens during the day’s school drill. For Iris, there remain a few more days of life in a universe that is inherently ordered, where the spirit of her departed and ritually interred goldfish can, of course, be re-incarnated in a lost and amnesiac drifter given to rhetorical que...

Fastidious and fussy shoe salesman by day and secretive aspiring film screenwriter by night, Oswald Eichersen’s dreams of success are as grandly inflated as his self-esteem is hopelessly deficient. Just outside Eichersen’s place of work, street person Terence Lomy has sat encamped for two years—an indelible fixture on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign round his neck with the word “hungry” scribbled on it in a hapless hand. One day, on an irrational impulse, having ignored the beggar for y...

The Trespassers unfolds over the course of a few weeks in a town in the middle of nowhere—not small enough to be a quaint place or large enough to be in any way an interesting one. They once had a sawmill here, which was a going concern before it was shut down in a labour dispute, and it now crowns a sort of half-town, gutted of its reason for being.Fifteen-year-old Lowell is no average teenager—and his grandfather, Hardy, is no conventional role model. Whether urging the ...

Four seasons after her husband Tom’s disappearance, Colette remains emotionally paralyzed, isolated in a country cottage. She waits in anguish, not knowing whether he is dead or alive, but clinging to hope. A young stranger in a jean jacket waves to her from the frozen lake – a sign? She emerges to give him her husband’s parka – strangely, the boy has a likeness to Tom.What is the stranger’s connection to her geologist husband, kidnapped more than a year before by leftist guerrilla...

Music has long been considered beneficial in enhancing cognitive skills, and some have even suggested that music constitutes its own category of brain function; that it is, in fact, a separate and distinct type of thought. As is sex, which can produce, aside from children, complete dysfunction, confused mental activity – even, quite possibly, a compromised immune system, and certainly, in many cases, complete and utter memory loss – both before and after. It seemed only natural, then, for ...