Three Really Nasty Plays

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan, and président de la Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

Ron Chambers teaches at the University of Lethbridge. The three plays in
this anthology have been produced, respectively, at Theatre Network in
Edmonton, The Canadian Stage Company in Toronto, and Actor’s Union in
association with Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. The plays are nasty
indeed: gritty in subject matter and language, and relentless in their
grip on a theme and their focus.

Marg Szkaluba (Pissy’s Wife), a monologue with musical accompaniment,
deals with the devastating effects of physical and verbal abuse, but
ends on a note of positive self-determination. Dirt, a virtual pastiche
of television-style detective interrogation, uses a murder/arson
investigation to depict a derailed society in which one is forced to
explain why one’s life should be spared. Pretty Blue, a savage comedy,
asks what we would be “without that fundamental human
need—intimacy.” None of these texts is for the faint-hearted or the
easily offended.