The Last Journey of Captain Harte

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

Dianna Warren is a Regina playwright and fiction writer. Her Serpent in
the Night Sky was a Governor General’s Drama Award finalist in 1992,
and her Club Chernobyl won the City of Regina Book Award in 1995.

The Last Journey of Captain Harte is a comic and complex family drama
that takes Marguerite, a middle-aged widow, from her small prairie world
into a surreal and sometimes Kafkaesque realm of expectancy. While
recovering from the recent death of one of her sons, Marguerite receives
a phone call from the nomadic Captain Harte, an old friend of her late
husband. Her imagination is awakened by this romantic figure. What she
does not realize is that the world-weary Harte romanticizes her
stability and strength just as she romanticizes his life of travel and
adventure. By the end of the play, both have realized their dreams,
though not in ways either of them would have expected.

In Marguerite, Warren has created an archetypal prairie matriarch who
rings with truth and conviction. Harte is the perfect foil. This
cleverly constructed piece holds our attention throughout with its blend
of humor and poignancy.