End of the world play finds a new life online
Calgarians will finally get the opportunity to see local playwright Michaela Jeffery's darkly comic, apocalyptic thriller Without Rule of Law ( W.R.O.L.)
The play was workshopped at Alberta Theatre Projects for two years and was scheduled to close the company's 2018 season that Darcy Evans inherited when he was named ATP'S new artistic producer.
Evans replaced W.R.O.L. with Ontario playwright Mark Crawford's The New Canadian Curling Club because he felt W.R.O.L. was too dark to close a season.
The play received a staged reading in One Yellow Rabbit's Big Secret Theatre which led to its professional world premiere at Saskatoon's Persephone Theatre in the fall of 2019.
British Columbia's Trinity Western University has filmed its theatre department's student version of W.R.O.L. which will begin streaming at 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 1.
Tickets for this showing include a behind-the-scenes featurette and a Zoom talkback with the cast and their director Angela Konrad.
Konrad says Jeffery's play “is absolutely perfect for the pandemic time.”
W.R.O.L. looks at how a group of Grade 8 students who call themselves Doomers are preparing for the end of the world. Jeffery wrote the play years before Swedish student activist Greta Thunberg became an international phenomenon but her young female characters pontificate many of the same views about climate change.
Konrad says “hearing the voices of these young people who are paying attention to the world around them in a way grown-ups aren't, is inspiring.”