Dear Friends and Colleagues,

On the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day I had the pleasure of attending the opening night of our Black Hole Theatre production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. It struck me as particularly apt that this production strongly evoked potential female power and the ruthless restriction of it that was both particular to the period of the piece and, unfortunately, that is still resonant today. What is particularly admirable about Director Brenda Maclean’s production is that it finds the necessary and delicate balance between the heavily tragic and poetic tone and the too recognizable everyday lives of the individual women in the Bernarda Alba household. The audience is, therefore, able to both concretely identify with the plights of the characters and abstractly consider the overall oppression that makes the tragedy inevitable, indeed that makes it a tragedy of this repression itself.

Our performance of The House of Bernarda Alba on Tuesday, March 15th at 7:00 PM will be in honour of Irene Anderson and Vic Cowie with a portion of the box office receipts going to support the scholarships in their respective names. We invite you to join us for this performance, one of which I am sure both Vic and Irene would have approved.

Sincerely,

Dr. Bill Kerr

Theatre Program Coordinator

Department of English, Film, and Theatre