I OWN ALL THE HOUSING! ME!
so shut up
THE STRONG MAN
(and SOUL AND BODY)
We open The Strong Man at the Oxford Renaissance Faire, with multiple performances on Sat 27 Sept and Sun 28 Sept.
Then we run The Strong Man/Soul and Body in Toronto,
with all shows free, unticketed, and open to the public:
Tues 30 Sept, 7:30pm, Social Capital Theatre
Thurs 2 Oct, 8pm, Jackman Humanities Building
(followed by a Q&A/short talk by Morgan Moore)
Fri 3 Oct, 8pm, Jackman Humanities Building
(followed by a Q&A/short talk by Morgan Moore)
Sat 4 Oct, 2pm EDT, feast-streamed on Zoom (click here to log in,
please get food and drink to enjoy while you watch)
hosted by the JHI Medieval World Drama Working Group
and the University of Toronto Department of English
Sat 4 Oct, 7:30pm, Victoria College’s Alumni Hall
(followed by a Q&A/short talk by Morgan Moore)
Wed 8 Oct, 7:30pm, Social Capital Theatre
(followed by a Q&A/short talk by Morgan Moore)
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The Strong Man is a 15th-/16th-century Welsh morality play, with a lot of surprising resonances with our growing culture of materialism and celebrity billionaires -- the main character is kind of like a camp-tyrant Elon -- which then, in medieval style, unexpectedly turns into something amusingly different at the end. Also in medieval style, we’re weaving live music (mostly set to tunes from the Ap Huw manuscript, drawing particularly on Peter Greenhill’s arrangements) into and throughout the play — and in the long version, there may be some puppetry.
We’ll run a shortened version of it (30 minutes) at the Oxford Faire, then, for the Toronto run, we will append to it a complementary but more overtly religious piece, Soul and Body, which will extend the run to about an hour. The Strong Man/Soul and Body is a portable medieval play, so our actors will be ready to drop in and play at a variety of locations — outdoors, indoors, at a fair, a university, a theatre, a lounge, a living room — always building the game around what (and who) happens to be there. Expect a visibly different show every time!
featuring
Lochlan Moorlag as The Cleric in The Strong Man and Michael/Jesus in Soul and Body
Morgan Moore as The Reader/The Wife in The Strong Man and Soul/Angel in Soul and Body
Deval Soni as The Strong Man in The Strong Man and Body in Soul and Body
Tallulah Valliere-Paul as The Clown/The Manservant in The Strong Man and Devil/Strong Man in Soul and Body
directed by Matt Sergi
assistant directed by Dylan Coley
in a new translation by Morgan Moore
costumes by Linda Phillips
banners by Angie Lo and Kurt Jiang
with new music in medieval style arranged for Soul and Body by Andrew Albin
The Strong Man, at the Faire only, will run 30 minutes.
At all other venues, The Strong Man/Soul and Body will run for about 60-70 minutes (not counting Q&A and talks).
PLS is a Canadian non-profit company that sponsors performance-led scholarship into early plays, from the beginnings of medieval drama to as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. For sixty years, PLS has been associated with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS), and currently operates as an affiliate of the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. We offer a regular schedule of plays every year, sometimes touring across North America and Europe.
The Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) at the University of Toronto advances humanities scholarship, generates interdisciplinary ways to understand human experience, and provides opportunities for scholars to learn from each other by creating new research and study networks (both virtual and physical) that complement and go beyond the mandates of individual disciplines, providing funding to faculty members to bring arts and humanities out of the classroom and into the public domain through events and exhibitions, and offering scholarships to students and faculty at all career stages from all three University of Toronto campuses and other universities. We enable humanities research to reach outside the university walls and engage with the wider public.
The CRRS (Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies), at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, is a research and teaching centre with a library devoted to the study of the period from approximately 1350 to 1700. It supervises an undergraduate program in Renaissance Studies, organizes lectures and seminars, and maintains an active series of publications, encouraging contact with professors and graduate students through a yearly series of workshops, distinguished visiting speakers, and international conferences.