She has directed more than 25 world premieres and written four original works. The woolly mammoth, played by Rebecca Northan, is not insecure, but she’s very randy, insatiably so, yet frustrated because you don’t meet a lot of woolly mammoths anymore, says Brubaker, the director, who is in Hamilton from Calgary for the show. Let’s just say, Stanton is not exactly wearing a Barney costume.īut the character is nonetheless a T-Rex, an insecure one, strangely given that T-Rex was an apex predator, but extinction looms and it’s that kind of play. “It’s like what a colleague called ‘stretched reality,’” says director Christine Brubaker, of the strange, part-fantastical, part-very-real world that the play inhabits. Dennis Marshall, who has issues of his own. The aforementioned characters in this play include a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a woolly mammoth, a short-eared shrew, smallpox virus and a human minister of the environment, all being counselled through their shock and grief by an “extinction therapist,” Dr. So it’s promising, despite the subject matter which, well, isn’t. People who saw the dress rehearsal recently were gasping for breath through their laughter, I’m told. What could be the good news after that? Well, they’re the stars of “The Extinction Therapist,” which will enjoy its world premiere in Hamilton on Jan. The bad news is they’re going to die (not necessarily during the action of the play) and, worse, they’re the very last of their kind, as in extinction. Shot through with wry humour and unapologetic in its politics, Bitter Medicine is the story of the Martini family, a polemical and poetic portrait of illness, and a vital and timely call for action.It’s a bad news/more bad news/good news situation for the characters you’ll meet in Clem Martini’s new play at Theatre Aquarius. The result is a layered family memoir that faces head-on the stigma attached to mental illness.

In Bitter Medicine, Olivier's poignant graphic narrative runs alongside and communicates with a written account of the past three decades by his younger brother, award-winning author and playwright Clem Martini.

His sketches, comic strips, and portraits document his experience with, and capture the essence of, this all too frequently misunderstood disease. Throughout it all, Olivier, an accomplished visual artist, drew. For the past thirty years the Martini family has struggled to comprehend and cope with a devastating illness, frustrated by a health care system lacking in resources and empathy, the imperfect science of medication, and the strain of mental illness on familial relationships. A decade later, his brother Olivier was told he had the same disease. In 1976, Ben Martini was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

A Revolta by Clem Martini