The following is from the publisher’s website. We congratulate our friend Elaine Ávila.Overview
Two epic labor plays based on actual events by the acclaimed author of Fado: The Saddest Music in the World.
In The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin, discover how Canada got the eight-hour day – and in Kitimat, visit the fastest declining town in Canada, whose residents are suddenly offered a deal by Big Oil. The plays, performed from Los Angeles, California, to Lisbon, Portugal, are the recipient of many awards, including the Mellon Foundation Environment Arts Commission, and Best New Play, Audience Favourite, Best Production Awards from the Victoria Fringe and Victoria Critics Circle.
The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin
With a cast playing everyone from a radical socialist to an Italian laundress to a scientist-industrialist, The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin is about the dreams of immigrants, coal and smelter workers in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, and the battle for workers’ rights. Featuring music of the period, including a new ballad by composer/activist Earle Peach, the play recreates the events surrounding the mysterious death of Albert “Ginger” Goodwin, who, through a strike at a Canadian zinc smelter in Trail, BC, brought the WWI British war machine to a halt.
Kitimat
Kitimat, British Columbia: an industrial town in the glorious wilderness, finds itself at the center of international controversy when asked to vote no or yes on an upcoming oil pipeline project. As election day approaches, the residents of Kitimat struggle to decide whether to choose economic prosperity or protection of the natural world.
The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin: Cast of 2 women and 3 men
Kitimat: Flexible, between 6 and 16 actors
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Author
Elaine Ávila’s plays are produced in Central America, Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Her Best New Play Awards include Jane Austen, Action Figure (Festival de los Cocos, Panamá City), Lieutenant Nun (Victoria Critics Circle), and Café a Brasileira (Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon). Her most recent play, Fado, won the award for Favourite Musical in Victoria, BC. She has taught in universities from Portugal to Tasmania (lutruwita), China to Panama. She co-founded the International Climate Change Theatre Action, involving fifty playwrights, two hundred venues, and twelve thousand audience members worldwide. A 2019 Fulbright Scholar at the University of the Azores, Ávila now lives in New Westminster, British Columbia.
Editorial reviews
On Kitimat: “It’s a story as familiar to people in the US as in Canada – a large corporation comes to a town where they want to develop or deliver resources and they promise work and money, a boom if the citizens will let the corporation have its way.”
—National Observer
Fado
The Saddest Music in the World
By Elaine Ávila
Acclaimed Portuguese Canadian playwright Elaine Ávila’s new play, Fado: The Saddest Music in the World, is a tale of love and ghosts set in the back alleys and brothels of old Lisbon. Part concert, part theatre, the story of a young woman confronting her country’s fascist past and her own identity is interwoven with the heartbreaking national music of Portugal known as fado, which means “fate.”
Playing sold-out crowds in Vancouver and Victoria in 2018 and 2019, Fado was honored on the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Sure Fire List (the Top Twenty-Three Most Producible Plays in Canada by Women) and selected as one of the Top Unproduced Latinx Plays in the U.S. by Fifty Playwrights. Fado won the Award for Favourite Musical in Victoria with B.C.’s beloved Sara Marreiros playing the ghost of Amália Rodrigues, the Queen of Fado.
Cast of three women and three men.
Filamentos (artes e letras) 