These two plays by renowned playwright Catherine Banks explore the stories of strong women as they work through their pasts. In Bitter Rose, after a morning of racing around the small liberal arts town where she lives in her bloodied wedding dress, Rose barricades herself in the basement family room to examine her life. For sixteen years she has made small choices (she thought), but on the morning her husband leaves to meet with his female graduate student, she realizes the betrayal destroying her is that of the girl artist inside of her.
In Three Storey, Ocean View, Peg has brought her ailing mother, Ruth, to Nova Scotia. Peg sees the old three storey house by the sea as refuge, a place of safety for her mother and a place to begin again with her own angry daughter, 14-year-old Zoe. However, when Ruth enters the house she is drawn to the lives of the women who once inhabited it. As the women of the house play out their stories Ruth gathers the courage to tell her own story.
About the Author
Plays by Catherine Banks include It is Solved by Walking, Bone Cage, Three-Storey Ocean View, Bitter Rose, Miss ‘n Me, and The Summer of the Piping Plover. Catherine is a two-time Governor General’s Literary Award winner. Banks’s plays are characterized by black humour and compelling dramatic metaphor. She lives in Sambro, Nova Scotia.
