CANTATA & THE EXTINCTION THERAPIST
Two Plays by Clem Martini
BY Clem Martini
Forewords by Naheed K. Nenshi
& Christine Brubaker
ORDER FROM: Local indie shops or Amazon, Indigo/Chapters
MEDIA: The Calgary Herald | The Hamilton Spectator
Cantata:
"It is a testament to Martini’s skill as a writer that Cantata holds its audience spellbound for two hours and but also with the humour he finds in this family tragedy." —The Calgary Herald
Clem Martini’s award-winning play, Cantata: Rumours of My Crazy, Useless Life provides a window into the experience of people going through the hidden, high-stakes struggles of elder care and mental illness. In Cantata, Martin Bussinger discovers his elderly mother’s health and mental acuity is deteriorating, facing him with emotional and medical problems that feel almost unsolvable. He realizes that negotiating the delicate network of caregiving, strung together with the further challenge of supporting a brother living with a mental illness, places him in a situation that is simultaneously heartrending and darkly comic. Cantata was named Most Outstanding New Play in the Calgary Theatre Critics’ Awards.
The Extinction Therapist:
"The Extinction Therapist, rapturously well written by Calgary playwright Clem Martini, places these characters together in a group-therapy session run by Dr. Dennis Marshall. Periodically through the action, the scene cuts away from the therapy to Dennis’s homelife with partner Joan to reveal he has struggles of his own. The fabulist “otherness” of the zoological characters falls away quickly as their compellingly relatable feelings and fears, their specific complexities, emerge." —The Hamilton Spectator
Dr. Marshall’s therapeutic practice offers group support to those threatened with extinction. A libidinous woolly mammoth, a testy short-eared shrew, the uncompromising smallpox virus, an insecure tyrannosaurus rex and the hapless Minister for the Environment convene to receive therapy, in an attempt to come to terms with the complicated, volatile feelings associated with their precarious life-and-death circumstances. Then things get complicated.