A play in two acts, Healey introduces two sets of characters. In the first, a lawyer and his partner seek a civil ceremony, but are stopped when the officiant won’t perform a homosexual marriage because tenets of his religious beliefs won’t allow it. But tensions only mount when they learn that the officiant himself is openly gay. In the second act, a young couple decide to marry to secure a family for their unborn child, despite their poor financial situation. Facing eviction, the husband—a young Aboriginal man—meets his new neighbour, a refugee from Somalia, and they become fast friends. As the young couple finds happiness, prosperity, and friendship, their competing civil rights tears that friendship apart.Nominated for the 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama
Michael Healey performed in his first one-act play in 1996 as part of the Fringe Festival of Toronto. Since then, he has become an exceptional voice in Canadian theatre. With an outstanding breadth of work, Healey has won a number of awards as a playwright, including a Dora Mavor Moore Award, a Governor General's Literary Award, and a Chalmers Canadian Play Award. Healey is currently a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre.
"Healey's dialogue is sushi-knife sharp, his dialectic banter is both ideologically solid and theatrically fascinating and you start to think that if Tom Stoppard were to have been Canadian, he would have written like this."