In 2004, Newfoundland playwright Robert Chafe's Tempting Providence and Butler's Marsh were shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Drama (English). Last week, Chafe won the prestigious literary award for his stage adaptation of noted Canadian poet, short story writer and novelist Michael Crummey's short story Afterimage.Chafe says Afterimage is an "amazing kind of spare, sad, beautiful, story about this family of outcasts who have, at their core, a little boy who is . . . not an outcast." The mother of the family, Lise Lacoeur, a nurse, has psychic powers, for which her community shuns her. The father is a burn victim, who fell in love his fortune-telling nurse. Two of their three children are also psychic. One can predict the weather and the other can see the future. One child has no powers.
Read the Montreal Gazette's interview with Robert Chafe about his GG win.
Watch this video of Artistic Fraud's performance of Afterimage, in which the actors are all wired. (For electricity, that is.)
*************
Listen to an excerpt from Rattling Books' audio version of Michael Crummey's Hard Light: 32 Little Stories, a selection of poems based on stories told to Crummey by his father and other family members. Narrated by Crummey, Ron Hynes and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, Hard Light is available as an audio book CD or an MP3 audio book download.
