New theatre company to present next George F. Walker play cycle

Playwright and screenwriter George F. Walker used to joke that his kids complained vociferously every time he turned his attention from television scripts to plays: How was he going to feed the family?

His family must really be worried now because Walker is poised to start another cycle of his frenetic black comedies. Crazy Lady, a new Toronto theatre company, announced Thursday that it will produce two new Walker plays this spring, part of a cycle set in the classroom.

Next April, the company will perform the Toronto premiere of Parents Night, a comedy about the social tensions between two parents of different children and an overworked teacher. Simultaneously, it will offer the world premiere of the next script in a series Walker is calling The Classroom Plays: The Bigger Issue takes place in a junior high school where a teacher and a principal have to confront the parents of a troubled student. The play, about poverty, violence and mental health, returns to some of the themes Walker treated in his 2004-2006 CBC television series This is Wonderland, which was a dark comedy about the legal system.

Walker, one of Canada's most regularly produced playwrights, is acting as artistic consultant to Crazy Lady, a company formed by theatre artists Wes Berger and Sarah Murphy-Dyson, who first mounted Parents Night in Hamilton in October. Murphy-Dyson will also perform alongside Matthew Olver and Dana Puddicombe in Parents Night. Julia Heximer will join that trio for The Bigger Issue. Berger directs.

The project, which opens at Theatre Passe Muraille April 23, 2015, reprises a highly successful formula that Walker used in the 1990s with his Suburban Motel series at Factory Theatre in which he placed a string of short plays with small overlapping casts and some recurring characters in a single contained setting. This cycle will contain four plays, all set in a classroom, and all performed in real time.