THEATRE + COMEDY

Black Box Productions at the Country Playhouse (voted through Houston Community Newspapers as Best Community Theatre of 2010) present The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey, running from May 13 to 28, 2011 with Karen Daugherty directing.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, The Drawer Boy will now open on Friday, May 20 and run Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm to June 4, with a Sunday matinee May 29 at 2pm, and Thursday June 2 at 7.30pm.

Written in 1999, The Drawer Boy revisits the origins of an alternative Canadian theatre – the collective creation of The Farm Show in 1972 by Theatre Passe Muraille.

As the Toronto National Arts Centre program for The Drawer Boy explains, “In the 1970s a group of actors headed into the rural heartland of southern Ontario and, after interviewing local farmers and their families, created a landmark Canadian theatrical event: The Farm Show. Almost two and a half decades later, Michael Healey went to work as an actor at the Blyth Festival and came into contact with many of the farmers and members of the local community whose stories had served as inspiration for The Farm Show. The longevity of the impact of that experience, in turn, inspired him to write his tribute to the power of art, The Drawer Boy.”

The Drawer Boy is set in the early 1970s and recounts the adventures of a young man named Miles, an actor from a Toronto theatre group, who visits the Ontario home of two elderly bachelor farmers in order to research farm life for a new play. As Miles begins his investigation of these two men, Morgan and Angus, he learns that they’ve lived together on the farm since their “demob” as enlisted men after World War II. Angus still bears the scars of a brain injury he suffered during the London blitz and his memory has practically all gone. While he can still carry out simple tasks, and has developed an amazing aptitude for arithmetic, his short-term memory is non-existent. He is though initially identified as “the drawer boy” because of his talent for drawing buildings.

Both Morgan and Miles tell Angus stories that provide an alternative reality for him.

The Drawer Boy is fundamentally about the power of storytelling in creating and interpreting reality, and how it can transform lives. It is a powerful, uplifting tale of love, friendship and endurance as the three characters follow the path, with its emotional highs and lows, towards the truth of the relationship between the two old men.