Corker

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

Wendy Lill is an award-winning playwright whose works include Glace Bay
Miner’s Museum, All Fall Down, Sisters, Memories of You, and The
Fighting Days. All Fall Down (1994) examined the roots of intolerance
and hysteria and the effects of both on love. Those same themes resonate
in Corker, a skilful, compassionate, and deeply satisfying play in which
the family serves as a microcosm of the nation–state. While this
device often results in theatre that is both stilted and turgid, in
Lill’s hands it produces energy and passion. Her play opens with the
funeral of Serena, an aging 1960s flower child. The extended-family
members in attendance include a power couple whose scheme to replace
their government’s social services with a privatized human warehousing
system will make victims of other attendees, including Serena’s
developmentally challenged friend Corker and the family’s octogenarian
mother. Lill has written a play that appeals to both heart and mind.