Maiden Voyage: Ship's Company Theatre Premieres

David E. Kemp, a former professor of drama at Queen’s University, is
the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

The publication of this trio of plays coincides with the 20th-season
celebration of the Ships Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. The
Ships Company Theatre has earned a reputation for the innovative and
original staging of its plays (i.e., under a bright blue tent aboard the
M.V. Kipawo, last of the Minas Basin ferries).

Triumph over adversity is celebrated in all three plays. Chairmaker is
a magical and uplifting musical about Edgar Fisher, a blind chairmaker
who works in Bass River for 60 years; an unlikely hero, he codifies the
working man’s life in simple rhymes and songs that he dictates to his
wife as he sits on the kitchen floor of his modest home. Mile From Home
tells the story of Nova Scotia’s Johnny Miles, a child miner and
delivery boy who won the Boston Marathon twice and rose to the heights
of an all-time sports hero. Sole Survivors gives dramatic expression to
poet Elizabeth Bishop’s struggles with adversity, the conflict between
her public and private lives, her passion for beauty and truth, and her
search for a way to distil her experiences into art; this play is
essentially a retrospective in the form of a journey, with the poet as a
questing hero who enlists the aid of Charles Darwin in her search for
truth.

All three plays manage to glean universal truths from the very
particular lives of their protagonists.