Theater Erindales hit production THIRTEEN HANDS Returns!

Thirteen Hands Returns!

The Theatre Erindale production of Carol Shields' most popular play, Thirteen Hands, was the company's most ambitious mainstage play-with-music ever. Originally seen in January 2006, it broke all box office records for its time period. Now the show is being remounted - with most of the original cast and production team intact - for the Hart House Theatre Season on the downtown St. George campus of the University of Toronto. Two preview performances will be presented in the Multi-media Studio Theatre (CCT Building) at UTM February 23 and 24. The production will then open for just four performances at Hart House Theatre March 8 through 10.

Carol Shields (1935-2003) was and still is one of Canada's most beloved authors. Among her many awards were the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Governor General's Award, shortlistings for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (all for The Stone Diaries, 1993), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Clara and her friends live in the decades before the double income family became the prevailing standard. They are full-time mothers and homemakers - objects of curiosity to The Children of the '80s and '90s! And their one respite from the cycle of birth and death and husbands and heartache is the one afternoon or evening each week when they get together to play Bridge as members of the "Martha Circle" or the "Edge of Night Gang", and let their hair down.

Thirteen Hands takes ordinary women's lives from the 1920s to the 1990s and turns them into an ever-changing theatrical kaleidoscope of shifting themes and styles and generations. The gear-changes and unconventional styles are more than highly entertaining: they startle us into recognizing the extraordinary in the lives of our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.

This was Shields' special gift. She was deeply committed in her writing to what one friend characterized as "redeeming the lives of lost or vanished women." Her work, wrote the New York Times Book Review, "reminds us again why literature matters." Audience members agreed. They wrote to us, "Neither of us can remember the last time we gave a production a standing ovation!... We left with lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes - in short, we LOVED it!"

Thirteen Hands is directed by Sheridan's Ron Cameron-Lewis, Acting-teacher and international adjudicator (as well as a Bridge expert from childhood!), whose previous shows for Theatre Erindale include The Golden Ass, The Comedy of Errors, Six War Years, and Canadian Kings of Repertoire. Christopher Dawes composed the original music for the extended sung sequences; his work has been heard previously in Love's Labour's Lost, Unity (1918), and The Maid's Tragedy. The ensemble cast of eight women are now graduates from the UTM-Sheridan Theatre and Drama Studies Program in the Early Stages of successful acting careers.

Early booking is recommended, as weekend shows often sell out. Please note that sales at the door for Preview Performances February 23-24 at the MiST Theatre in the UTM CCT Building will be cash only, and parking is $5.00; for advance tickets, visit www.theatreerindale.com or call 905-569-4369. For advance reservations at Hart House Theatre March 8-10, visit www.UofTTix.ca or call 416-978-8849.

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