We are thrilled to partner with Pi Theatre to make this performance more accessible for audience members with vision loss as part of the Push International Performing Arts Festival. Tickets are half price for VocalEye users and up to one companion (regular price $29 – $34). Please call Shayna at 604-872-1861 to purchase.
Running time is 80 minutes, no intermission.
Described by Eileen Barrett
Written by David Greig
Directed by Richard Wolfe
When Claire (a small town priest and choir leader) survives a mass shooting, she sets out on a quest to answer the most difficult question of all: ‘Why?’ It’s a journey that takes her to the edge of reason, science, politics and faith. This daring new play explores our destructive desire to fathom the unfathomable and asks how far forgiveness can stretch in the face of brutality.
Each performance will feature a different community choir from the Metro Vancouver area.
PREVIEW
“Music also plays a significant role in The Events. By the end of this production’s run, more than 220 singers from 12 different local choirs will have performed on-stage alongside Jojic and Ennenberg. One of the reasons that so many choirs are involved is that almost every choir will come in cold, never having seen the show before. The actors will not have a run-through with a choir until the dress rehearsal. Each performance will therefore create a new community, night after night, effectively modelling possible ways for our culture to process trauma together.” –The Georgia Straight
REVIEWS
“Sensitively directed by Richard Wolfe, produced by Pi Theatre and part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, this profound and profoundly moving show is not to be missed. The Events just might be the event of the 2018 season.” –Jo Ledingham
“Anyone who has experienced loss can attest to its power. In David Greig’s The Events, for one survivor following a horrific mass-shooting, it manifests in soul-crushing grief, and an all-consuming desire for answers.” –VancouverPresents
“Greig wrote The Events in response to the 2011 Norwegian massacre of 77 people by right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik. Instead of a docudrama, Greig creates a fictional event in which a young man much like Breivik has murdered the members of a church choir made up of immigrants and refugees. Priest and choir leader Claire, one of the few survivors, is on a desperate quest to make sense of it all.” –Vancouver Sun
“In a stroke of brilliance, Greig has also written a community choir into the play. In every performance, a different local group joins the players on-stage. Theatrically, these singers become the ghosts of the murdered choir members. They also form a kind of Greek chorus. Having been instructed not to read the play beforehand, they are both participants and witnesses. They speak for us and to us as the script deliberately—and, in a manner that’s also very Greek—struggles with issues of public concern.” –Colin Thomas
“How do you heal from horror? The answer, in The Events, is communion…
Greig’s script is lyrical, nuanced, and expansive in its exploration of the issues of terror, trauma, and grief. But the genius of The Events is its incorporation of a chorus. Each night of the run, a different community choir—whose members have neither read the script nor met the cast until just before showtime—joins the performance. The choir members not only stand in for the tragedy’s victims; they amplify the emotional impact of the loss through strategically placed songs and by their undeniably human presence on-stage.” –The Georgia Straight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iN0gexom3M
