Lion in the Streets is a two-act play by award-winning Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

 Judith Thompson

Judith Thompson

Judith Clare Thompson, OC is a Canadian playwright who lives in Toronto, Ontario. Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail once declared that "...in this country, a playwright as good as Judith Thompson is a miracle." She has twice been awarded the Governor General's Award for drama, and is the...

 and was workshopped as the first Public Workshop Project at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, Canada in May of 1990. It was then produced in its now published form one month later at the duMaurier Theatre Centre, also in Toronto, as part of the duMaurier World Stage Theatre Festival. Music for the production was composed and performed by Bill Thompson

William Forde Thompson

William Forde "Bill" Thompson is a Professor of Psychology at Macquarie University, where he conducts research on music, emotion, and performance. He is Director of the .From 2007 to 2009, he was President of the...

.

Its central character is the ghost Isobel, a nine year old Portuguese girl who is searching for her killer by observing and occasionally interacting with her neighbors seventeen years after her murder, revealing their dark, horrific, emotional, and very private experiences.

In 2002, Ed Gass-Donnelly

Ed Gass-Donnelly

Ed Gass-Donnelly is an award-winning Canadian film director and screenwriter. His work often explores themes of death, colliding worlds and the darker sides of human nature. His characters are every-day people who are put in extraordinary situations and left to fend for themselves...

 directed a 6-minute film, Dying Like Ophelia

Dying Like Ophelia

Dying Like Ophelia is a 2002 award winning six-minute drama, directed by Ed Gass-Donnelly, produced by Veni Vidi Vici Motion Pictures and based on an excerpt of the play, Lion In The Streets, by Judith Thompson, two-time winner of the Governor General Award...

, based on a scene between the characters Joanne and Rhonda.

Characters

There are twenty-eight or twenty-nine characters with speaking parts of varying lengths. The original ensemble was composed of four women and two men who roughly split the roles up as follows (there is some confusion in the Playwrights Canada Press printing, as some character names in the initial list do not actually exist in the play, and some characters who do speak are omitted entirely):

Women:

• Isobel
• Nellie, Laura, Elaine, Christine, Sherry
• Rachel (who is also Rose for two pages), Lily, Rhonda, Ellen, Scarlett
• Sue, Jill, Joanne, Joan (an optional character)

Men:

• Scalato, Timmy, George, Maria, David, Rodney, (Edward?), Ben
• Martin, Bill, Isobel's Father, Ron, Father Hayes, Michael, (Edward?)

External links

• Lion in the Streets at the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia