National Network for Equitable Library Service

pppeeeaaaccceee, is a vast, imaginative and mesmerizing glide through Life and Power. The play is set in Ephemeral; three people firmly floating chat - in O'Donnell's inimitable rapid-fire style - about the revolution. Which revolution' Good question. A gently aggressive meditation, pppeeeaaaccceee examines our being, asks us what we're doing and reminds us that there are monsters in here. Peace. Say it slow, stretch it out, make it last forever.

Beckett meets Betty Boop in this trilogy of monologues by Canadian cult heroine Pochsy, a nasty, vapid, utterly charming vixen. In Pochsy's Lips, she's in the hospital, convinced she's sick because she's got a squid where her heart should be. In Oh Baby, she's at the Last Resort, on holiday from her job packing mercury. And in Citizen Pochsy, our little minx is in the waiting room at an audit from hell.

Ogres, trolls, demons - monsters, like violence, are always represented as male. Not this time. Celebrated playwright RM Vaughan gives us, in three one-act monologues, three very monstrous women. In A Visitation by St Teresa of Avila upon Constable Margaret Chance, we meet a middle-aged police officer whose world view is determined by her obsession with race, bloodlines and genetic determinism.

Isolated brings together two inventive, disturbing plays by one of Canada's most intriguing dramatic voices. In Recovery, people around the world are addicted to a mysterious substance. Large recovery centres are set up, promising refuge, treatment and healing to millions of addicts. But all is not what it seems. Following three residents of a facility in Antarctica, McArthur delivers a quirky and unsettling play that reveals the fear and isolation of the oppressed individual, and the consequences of a medicalized society.

These four plays — White Mice, Who Shot Jacques Lacan?, Radio Rooster Says That's Bad and Over — written by Darren O'Donnell for his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, will challenge your politics, your ontology and everything you hold to be safe, stable and sacrosanct. Inoculations documents O'Donnell's progress through the past decade, from the first presentation of Over in 1993 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre's Rhubarb! festival to 2000's highly acclaimed, Dora-winning presentation of White Mice at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille.

Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays collects three works by Amiel Gladstone, introducing a wide range of fascinating characters and a formidable new voice in Canadian drama. In The Wedding Pool, three single friends in unsatisfactory jobs decide to place a bet on who will marry first. The friends - waitress and wannabe dancer Sylvia, rock critic Miles and inventory manager Dave - open a joint account to which they each contribute $50 a month, the final sum to be collected by the first to tie the knot.

In the vast, unnamed metropolis of Hello... Hello, art and commerce have finally and completely conjoined; stylish cafEs serve up zebra mussels and the air is thick with a gentle rain of sparrows plummeting down from the mirrored office towers. Everywhere, people are falling for an edgy new fashion accessory: a shiny ball filled with poison that hangs from a delicate chain. In this oddly peaceful world, Cassandra, a salesgirl at a clothing store called the Abyss, meets a charismatic ad man named Ben in the graveyard where she is mourning her lover, the last true artist on earth.

This remarkable autobiographical play by the award-winning author of Building Jerusalem and Martin Sloane, is a Russian-doll-like play: concentric stories enveloping each other. A writer is told, in confidence, a terrible tale of murder and injustice and he promises never to repeat the story. Goodness is the writer breaking his word. Recently divorced, Michael Redhill goes to Poland to get away frm his life and to do some research on the Holocaust.

'This is a record of our version of grassroots theatre. The idea was to take a group of actors out to a farming community and build a play of what we could see and learn. There is no story or "plot" as such... Nevertheless, we hope that you can see many stories woven into the themes of this play and that out of it will emerge a picture of a complex and living community.' - Paul Thompson

Expose yourself to one of the most original new voices in theatre with this collection of two uncompromising plays by Greg MacArthur. Snowman: After years of wandering, Denver and Marjorie find themselves in a remote northern community at the edge of a glacier, chopping wood, renting out stolen videos and doing cocaine with Jude, a young gay man whose parents have abandoned him. When Jude discovers the body of a prehistoric boy frozen in the glacier, everyone finds their lives beginning to shift and thaw in unexpected ways. girls! girls! girls!: Splitz deserved to win.