Action thriller starring Steven Seagal. After serving a 15-year sentence for a crime that he did not commit, Shane Daniels (Seagal) is released from jail with a formal pardon from the State of Arizona. But within hours of claiming his freedom, he becomes witness to a botched illegal diamond deal in which members of both the Mexican Mafia and the State Troopers are killed, leaving behind them a terrified girl and a bag of money. Shane must now fight his way through a corrupt town and get the girl to safety in the only way he knows how...

"I don't see how a play can be Canadian. I don't think there are any plays that you could call strictly Canadian ... What does that phrase mean?"
Now, thirty-three years after Canadian directors spoke their minds, or rather shrugged their shoulders at the seeming hopelessness of de-colonizing Canadian theatre, this fourth edition of the "classic" "Modern Canadian Plays" sets out for us an even broader range of plays than previous editions, outlining a Canadian drama-scene that is far from colonial, inert, middle-class, or middle-aged. Spanning the years from 1967 to 1997, this anthology will likely continue to be the standard anthology for Canadian drama--and not without good reason.
Edited by Jerry Wasserman--professor at the University of British Columbia, theatre critic for CBC, and one of Vancouver's most recurring (and memorable) faces on television-- Volume I still contains plays such as George Ryga's seminal and highly political "The Ecstasy of Rita Joe" (first performed in 1967, it was described as a "cicatrice" of Canadian society that "showed the bleeding flesh beneath"), as well as Michel Tremblay's "Les Belles-Soeurs" (one of the most critically acclaimed plays in Canada, translated from the original, controversial, joual). But more to the point, this edition of Volume I carries with it an even more distinct flavour of adventurousness in its juxtaposition of plays that are strikingly, even wildly, various--plays that can only be said to cohere around the difficulty of amorphous notions such as social justice, cultural belonging, and the existence of a collective past.
The plays in this fourth edition of "Modern Canadian Plays: Volume I" date from 1967 to 1986.

Special effects-laden sci-fi action thriller starring Will Smith, set in a near-future in which robots have become a vital component of human beings' everyday lives. Although the technology of the robots has become more and more advanced, they are all pre-programmed to always obey humans and under no circumstances to harm them. So when robot scientist Dr Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) is murdered and a humanoid robot is implicated, the authorities are extremely worried: if the robots can overcome the basic moral principle of their existence, what's to stop them taking over the world? Robot-hating Chicago Police Detective John Spooner (Smith) is assigned to investigate this alarming case...

Fast-paced action movie in which a series of fearsome tornadoes begin striking New York City. Young fireman Brian Flynn (Colby Johannson) is one of the unfortunate victims of the tornadoes, finding himself trapped in an underground sewage system after getting caught out by the extreme weather. As he desperately tries to find a way to the surface, a group that includes the Mayor (Jerry Wasserman), Deputy Major (Sebastian Spence) and a climatologist, Dr Cassie Lawrence (Nicole De Boer), attempts to deal with the wider threat posed by the tornado outbreak.

Vancouver's New Play Centre led the way in developing and producing the work of playwrights from Western Canada for the emergent Canadian theatre in the 1970s. The New Play Centre has been a major force in Canadian cultural life for two decades; it retains its dual role as playwrighting workshop and production company and remains an important facility for dramatists to reach national and international audiences.
To mark the New Play Centre's twentieth year, Talonbooks presents a collection of eight of the finest plays produced by the company from 1975 to 1989: "Herringbone" by Tom Cone; "Ned and Jack" by Sheldon Rosen; "Something Red" by Tom Walmsley; "Dreaming and Duelling" by John Lazarus and Joa Lazarus; "War Babies" by Margaret Hollingsworth; "Under the Skin" by Betty Lambert; "The Idler" by Ian Weir; and "The Wolf Within" by Alex Brown. All of these plays have been produced throughout Canada, and often abroad, and remain in active production today. Each script appears in its most current form, with the playwright's latest revisions, along with biographical and production data and photos.

That both autobiography and biography have acquired a position of unprecedented importance over the past 30 years is now obvious. Less obvious are the reasons for this phenomenon. Theorists and students of AutoBiography, a research subject now viewed as respectable in academic circles, have recently mapped the contours and shifting parameters of the autobiographical and the biographical processes, thereby contributing to the profile and stature of both.This collection brings theatre practitioners together with academics from three continents in a groundbreaking exploration of the interdisciplinary realm of Theatre and AutoBiography. On the theoretical side, the contributors draw on a range of contemporary theorists: from Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Emmanuel Levinas to Judith Butler, Mieke Bal and Homi Bhabha; from Elin Diamond and Jill Dolan to Leigh Gilmore, Paul John Eakin and Philippe Lejeune.In general terms, auto/biographical performances have become hugely popular forms in Europe and North America because we live in a culture of me or I at a time when access to cultural production is easy. AutoBiographies satisfy our desire for story at the same time as they promise to give us truths (if not Truth). With the post-postmodern return of the author and the waning of a deep-seated antihumanism associated with modernist ideology and aesthetics, a desire for agency, voice, visibility and subjectivity has resurfaced with a renewed passion.The playwrights discussed here could scarcely be more broadly representative of British and North American drama in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: from W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett to Michel Tremblay, Sharon Pollock and David Mamet; from Spalding Gray and Karen Finley to Linda Griffiths; and from Orlan to Sally Clark, R. H. Thomson, Monique Mojica and George Seremba, the range of styles performances and subjectivities is extraordinary.

2006 marked the 400th anniversary of a major theatrical event in the history of North American drama. The Theatre of Neptune in New France by lawyer, poet and historian Marc Lescarbot was a masque of welcome performed on the Bay of Fundy by members of the tiny French colony of Port Royal on November 14, 1606. It celebrated the return of the ship bearing the Sieur de Poutrincourt and navigator-explorer Samuel de Champlain from their travels along the coastline as far south as Cape Cod in search of a more temperate site for the colony.It is a paean to empire, a thanksgiving for survival and an extraordinary theatrical spectacle in a  new" world peopled by Native inhabitants who are represented in it as both characters and audience. Arguably the first American play, it has also been called  a significant entry-point of Western cultural hegemony," sparking political activists to disrupt the re-enactment planned for its four hundredth anniversary celebration.This new edition includes the original French script along with its long out-of-print English translations by American historical preservationist Harriette Taber Richardson and Canadian scholars Eugene and Renate Benson, as well as Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness (1605), an illustrative contemporary English imperial spectacle. The extensive historical and critical introduction and bibliography are provided by Jerry Wasserman, Professor of Theatre at the University of British Columbia.

"Modern Canadian Plays" is "the" core text for university-level Canadian drama courses around the world.

Now in its fifth edition, the two-volume Modern Canadian Plays drama series anthologizes major Canadian plays written and performed since 1967. Volume two presents Canadian plays written over the past twenty-five years. These plays respond directly or indirectly to the events of our time; work effectively on the stage, on the page, and in the classroom; and are contextualized with accompanying history, biography, and criticism--all in one place for a reasonable price

"Polygraph" (1988) by Robert Lepage and Marie Brassard
"7 Stories" (1989) by Morris Panych
"Never Swim Alone" (1991) by Daniel MacIvor
"The Glace Bay Miners' Museum" (1995) by Wendy Lill
"Counter Offence" (1996) by Rahul Varma
"Problem Child" (1997) by George Walker
"Harlem Duet" (1997) by Djanet Sears
"Street of Blood" (1998) by Ronnie Burkett
"The Shape of a Girl" (2001) by Joan MacLeod
"Tempting Providence" (2002) by Robert Chafe
"Scorched" (2003) by Wajdi Mouawad
"The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil" (2005) by Marcus Youssef, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Camyar Chai
"Age of Arousal" (2007) by Linda Griffiths
"BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience" (2007) by Theatre Replacement
"The Edward Curtis Project" (2010) by Marie Clements
"Kim's Convenience" (2011) by Ins Choi

Professor of English and theater at the University of British Columbia, Jerry Wasserman has written and lectured widely on Canadian theater and theater history, modern fiction, and blues music.

Empire of the Son ranked within Top 10 for Georgia Straight, #3 in Vancouver Presents, and #1 in Vancouver Sun Best of 2015 lists.Nominated for Outstanding Original Script, 2016 Jessie Richardson Theatre AwardsCross-cultural perspective