Set in Montreal’s Jewish neighbourhood on the Main (Saint Lawrence Blvd.) in 1942, during the Conscription crisis, Strange Land is about how the three women of a struggling Jewish immigrant family attempt to forge a place in the New World after the death of the pater familias, each in her own way, only to be thwarted by conflicting aims and the narratives of identity imported from the Old World. At a time of war, rampant paranoia and virulent prejudice, Dinah risks everything to pull out hatred by its roots and rewrite the story of the New World.
Dinah Reisberg: twenty-two years old
Channah Reisberg: nineteen, Dinah’s sister
Sima Reisberg: forty-something years old, the girls’ mother
Ben Gratstein: twenty-two years old, Channah’s paramour
Anne-Marie Tremblay: eighteen years old, Channah’s friend and fellow factory worker
David Tenenbaum: twenty-six years old, a cousin of Ben’s
Strange Land received a public reading at the PMW Studio in December 2015, directed by Emma Tibaldo, with Talya Rubin, RosaRuby Kagan, Felicia Shulman, Karl Graboshas and J. T. Silver.
Strange Land is available through the Canadian Play Outlet.
To view other works by this playwright, click here.
The playwright wishes to thank Emma Tibaldo, Executive and Artistic Director of Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal, for her dramaturgical support in the development of this work.
