Calendar at a Glance: 2008

April 25 - May 3

Dancock’sDance

Playwright: Guy Vanderhaeghe

Director: Gayle Heinrich

 Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first foray into historical fiction is a play called "Dancock's Dance" set in the flu epidemic of 1919. At that time, the Department of Public Health was under Public Works. The playwright discovered a Public Works report which noted that due to illness among staff, inmates of the North Battleford Insane Asylum had run the place themselves during the flu epidemic. Thanks to the patients, the North Battleford mental asylum weathered the 1919 flu epidemic. This is the premise for the play

Dancock's Dance is a gripping drama by Guy Vanderhaeghe, who recently won a Governor General's Award for Fiction. Shell-shocked, judged unfit for society and haunted by the sins of war, Lieutenant John Carlyle Dancock finds himself committed to an insane asylum, where he cannot escape the confines of society or his own conscience which visits him in the ghostly apparition of a dead soldier.