The Weekend Healer

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

This powerful and uncompromising play about incest and abuse features
salty, excoriating exchanges between a mother and her 31-year-old
daughter, who is visiting with her own teenaged son. When the son is
sent out to fetch a package of cigarettes on Friday evening and fails to
return, maternal concerns set the imagination flying while the truth
from the past intrudes with increasingly devastating clarity. Only in
the wake of these disclosures does the boy reappear, bloody and naked.
He says not a word, but the final scene involves a ritual of birth and
reconciliation that raises the play to mythic proportions in a manner
reminiscent of Edward Albee. In short, this play is a profoundly
disturbing masterpiece. MacDonald’s previous play Whale Riding Weather
was a Governor General’s Award nominee in 1994.