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list price: $16.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
category: Drama
published: Aug 2010
ISBN:9780887549304
publisher: Playwrights Canada Press

Courageous

by Michael Healey

tagged: canadian, gay & lesbian
Description

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.

About the Author

Michael Healey trained as an actor at Toronto’s Ryerson Theatre School in the mid-eighties. He began writing for the stage in the early nineties and his first play, a solo one-act called Kicked, was produced at the Fringe of Toronto Festival in 1996. He subsequently toured the play across Canada and internationally, winning the Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play. The Drawer Boy, his first full-length play, premiered in Toronto in 1999, winning the Dora Award for best new play, the Chalmers Canadian Playwriting Award, and the Governor General’s Literary Award (Canada’s highest literary honour). It has been translated into multiple languages and continues to be produced regularly across North America and internationally. Healey’s other works include The Road to Hell (co-authored with Kate Lynch), Plan B, Rune Arlidge, The Innocent Eye Test, The Nuttalls, Are You Okay, and 1979. His trilogy focusing on Canadian values and politics—Generous, Courageous, and Proud—met with great critical success and have had multiple productions. In all, his plays have won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play five times. He has also adapted works by Chekhov, Molnar, Hecht and MacArthur, Dürrenmatt, and Shaw for the Stratford Festival, the Shaw Festival, and Soulpepper. He continues to find work as an actor occasionally.

Awards
  • Winner, Dora Mavor Moore Award- Best New Play
  • , Governor General's Literary Award
Editorial Reviews

"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." —Toronto Star


"Healey combines a keen observational eye and a finely honed wit with a love of the English language that is as dazzling as it is rare." —Toronto Sun


"Healey writes plays for Canada like nobody else does." —National Post


"The combination of humour, witty dialogue and ideas that link the private and the social is a rare thing in a play. Healey delivers." —Edmonton Journal


"It's great to see a playwright grapple with contemporary issues without fear and with a genuinely questioning mind." —Globe & Mail

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