Kirjahaku

When an image of Jesus appears on the side of a Tim Hortons restaurant in Nately, Nova Scotia, life is forever changed. The town's inhabitants are challenged to ask difficult questions about faith, life and love with sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious results. Complicating the matter, of course, are the more mundane questions of whether this appearance is a miracle, an accident or quite possibly even a hoax. At the centre of this wickedly entertaining play resides the more existential and personal question of what has happened to our notion of meaning and ethics in the strip-mall culture of concrete and crass competition which has replaced a more pastoral and rural life of care for the earth, the cycle of the seasons and its festivals, and the blessings of renewal in the family. Has religion lost the ability to mediate these two conditions, or did it ever really have that power? Halo is a brilliant examination of the need to believe and the power of forgiveness. Cast of three women and four men.

According to Newfoundland's first premier, Joey Smallwood, the province was dragged "kicking and screaming into the twentieth century" by ambitious government -resettlement plans to depopulate small fishing outports. Through a kind of carrot-and-stick approach, communities were -encouraged to abandon themselves in -exchange for financial aid and the promise of -better services in centralized "growth towns." More than thirty thousand Newfoundlanders relocated under this plan -between 1954 and 1975. Set in a one-room schoolhouse during the -decisive evening of a -community's vote on whether to stay or leave, Whereverville is an intriguing reversal of and -homage to Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk -Circle. Whereas in Brecht's play the conclusion of the conflict over a community is that "those best able to take care of the land should possess it," in -MacDonald's play, it is that "those no longer able to take care of the land should leave it." In both plays, it is the heart and mind of a young woman bereft of her future on which the action turns.It is Loam Bay's schoolteacher, Abby Shea, herself "from away," who holds the deciding vote as she struggles with her own phantom attachment to the community, its citizens, and its ghosts of times past, and it is she who must learn that sometimes, in order to keep what we hold most dear, we must give it away--that "nothing lasts."

Everyone has an idea that they think is the next big thing. The problem is, it’s probably an app or software idea and most people probably don’t know how to code and their record for managing programmers is little to none. Even if they do know how to code, they’re not quite sure how to get their first one thousand customers. The Non-Technical Founder walks readers through the stages of validating whether their next big thing is good, bringing the idea to life, and getting those first customers.

The Mystery Play is a detective story, a ghost story, and a memory play: a theatrical blending of Wit and The Woman In Black. Though fully self-contained, The Mystery Play is also the Second in a trilogy about crime-solving Sister Vivian Salter, a flinty, fifty-ish Catholic nun forced into the role of amateur sleuth. Each story in her trilogy was penned by a different playwright and commissioned by Ship's Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. In The Mystery Play, Salter recounts her late-stage struggles with her own beliefs while also detailing her father George's descent into Alzheimer's. In his seventies, George is becoming prone to semi-violent outbursts, to speaking with phantoms in the middle of the night, and to eerie sleepwalking - all of which leave Salter exhausted and questioning the existence of God's love. Then, into the adjoining suite next door moves a young schoolteacher, Jennifer Craig, and her husband, Peter. This newlywed couple seems perfect, and very much in love ... until they don't. By creeping attrition, Salter begins to suspect that terrible spousal abuse is taking place next door, and, despite herself, she gets drawn into mystery once more. But this time it's a fearsome mystery that sneaks increasingly closer and closer to home.The Mystery Play, a supernatural chiller of rattling cupboards, overnight s ances, and spectral possessions, reveals a new definition of "mystery" - one derived from the Mystery Plays of sister Salter's dwindling faith - in which the word can also mean a miracle beyond all logic.