From press release
Gas Girls closes the gap for the global village
New Harlem Productions starts off strong this season with Artistic Director Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s award-winning new play, Gas Girls, a look at the lives of two sex trade workers in an economically depressed region.
Plying her trade with the truckers at the Zimbabwean border, Gigi works for gas. Her young protégé, Lola, wants to learn and can’t figure out why it isn’t love she is finding.
Director/dramaturge Philip Adams elaborates, “Although it might appear that these young women who sell sex for gasoline are at a great distance from Toronto, I believe they live next door to us. These women are strong, imaginative, creative, have families they care for, but they’re still lost. This doesn’t make them different from, say, Aboriginal women on the lower east side of Vancouver, or any number of women facing poverty. In June, a Virginian woman was charged with prostitution for accepting a $100 gas card.”
Gas Girls was honoured with Alberta Theatre Projects’ Enbridge Emerging PlayRites Award in March and placed second in Queen’s University’s Herman Voaden Playwriting Competition in April. An excerpt was presented at Theatre Passe Muraille’s Buzz Festival in May. Through the Voaden prize, the play enefited from a development workshop at Thousand Islands Playhouse in Ganonoque before returning to Theatre Passe Muraille in November for a ten show run. This production builds on the momentum of NHP’s Summerworks success with Job’s Wife by Yvette Nolan.
New Harlem Productions is an artist centred company whose directive is to develop new works by artists of colour, to contribute to vital dialogues through artistic expression, to create a platform for necessary stories to be told. In 2008 NHP presented works in development including the Dis Place reading series at Summerworks 2008 (featuring Scattering Jake by Yvette Nolan, Future Folk by the Sulong Theatre Collective and Gas Girls by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard), The First Stone at bcurrent’s rock.paper.sistahs festival 2008 and Nalo Hopkins’s The Money Tree at Factory Theatre’s CrossCurrents Festival 2008.
PLEASE ADD TO LISTINGS:
Playwright: Donna-Michelle St. Bernard
Director/Dramaturge: Philip Adams
Featuring: Peter Bailey, Nawa Nicole Simon, Jamie Robinson, Dienye Waboso
Set and Costume Designer: Jackie Chau
Lighting Designer: Michelle Ramsay
Sound Designer: Nick Murray
November 5-14, 2009
Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave Toronto
Box office: 416.504.7529
Info: 416-804-1702 or visit newharlemproductions.wordpress.com