Bios:
Stevie: Louise Amuir
Louise Amuir has participated in many Theatre Centre readings on Gabriola and worked with Emerging Voices for TheatreOne in Nanaimo. She was a founding member of SoulFire Theatre, performing in Four to Four and Bed Amongst the Lentils. For Gabriola Musical Theatre, she appeared in Noye's Fludde and Midsummer Night's Dream. She has also performed in Poetry Gabriola's Poetry Festival as a spoken word artist. Louise graduated from UBC with a double major in Theatre and Creative Writing.
Martin: Neil Gallagher
Neil studied acting at UBC, and graduated with a BFA. He worked in B.C. and Alberta for three years before leaving to join the International Theatre Laboratory, to work with Oleg Kisselev. Afer two years of developing and touring absurdist, improvisational theatre, Neil returned home to BC, where he met his wife, Angela. He has appeared in See How they Run, Pet the Fish, The Wizard of Oz, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Mr. Pim Passes BY at The Chemainus Theatre Festival, and in Talker's Town, How I Learned to Drive, Screen Play, Night of Shooting Stars, and The Odd Couple at Western Edge.
Ross: Brian March
As an actor Brian March has appeared at Western Edge in the world premiere of Brad Poulsen's The Engineers, which he also directed, and with the Nanaimo Theatre Group in Blood Brothers and Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Other directing credits include The Kitchen Sink, How I Learned to Drive, and Night of Shooting Stars at Western Edge, as well as Fortinbras for the Nanaimo Theatre Group, and Ten Little Indians for the Yellow Point Drama Group. His play Parlour Games was recently seen at the One Act Play Festival in Qualicum, and Western Edge will produce his new play Fireweed in January. He is also owner of the dinner theatre company Mystery Unlimited, based in London, Ontario.
Billy: Ricky Flatla
Alberta-born and Gabriola-raised, Ricky appeared in the Laramie Project and In the Desert of My Soul at Gabriola Theatre Centre, as well as island theatre productions of Cinderella and Noah's Ark. The Goat marks his first appearance with Western Edge. Ricky is recently returned from a year away, working as a volunteer in various Canadian communities as part of the Katimavik program. He loves traveling, and really enjoys cookies!
Director: Frank Moher
Frank is the Artistic Producer of Western Edge Theatre. Previous productions for the company include Supreme Dream, The Mercy Seat, Some Random City, Tuesdays With Morrie, Boston Marriage, John and Jen, Sugar Daddies, Screen Play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, The Odd Couple, and numerous staged readings for the New Waves Festival. Other theatres at which he has directed include the National Arts Centre, The Banff Centre, and TheatreOne. Also a playwright, his plays have been seen across North America and abroad. Frank teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Journalism at Vancouver Island University, and is editor of the online magazine backofthebook.ca
Playwright: Edward Albee
Edward F. Albee was born in Virginia on March 12th 1928, adopted by Reed and Frances Albee. His father was part owner of the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit. Edward was raised in luxury, in the family's Larchmont mansion, also occupied by Mrs. Albee's mother to whom he became very attached. Grandma Cotter, to whom he dedicated his 1960 play The Sandbox, left him a trust fund that enabled him to strike out on his own.
Since his parents spent winters in Florida and Arizona, Edward's grade school education was frequently interrupted, and at age 11 he was sent to the first of several boarding schools (one of which was a military academy he hated and likened to a concentration camp). He ended his formal education after a year and a half (1946-47) at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Albee held a variety of jobs after leaving his parents' home to settle in Greenwich Village, including three years as a Western Union messenger. They supplemented his trust and were chosen because they were dead ends and would not interfere with his primary vocation: writing. His early artistic endeavors, howver, were filled with frustration. He lived for nearly half a year in Italy where he wrote a novel which has never been published. W. H. Auden, whom he met in New York, read some of his poetry and suggested that he write pornographic verse as an exercise to improve his style. In New Hampshire he met Thornton Wilder who advised him to turn his efforts toward drama.
On his 30th birthday in 1958 he quit his job with Western Union and wrote The Zoo Story in three weeks. After being rejected by several New York producers, the play had its premiere at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt in Berlin on September 28, 1959. Four months later it was paired with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. In 1960 it won the Vernon Rice Memorial Award.
Albee's first major hit was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which opened at Broadway's Billy Rose Theater on October 3, 1963, starring Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill as the battling George and Martha. It ran for 664 performances and was made into a popular film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Like Euguene O'Neill, Albee subsequently nabbed three Pulitzers, for A Delicate Balance in 1966, Seascape in 1975 and Three Tall Women in 1991.
Today Albee remains active, writing, producing and directing his plays, as well as teaching at the School of Theatre of the University of Houston and giving lectures on his work at colleges around the country. He was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980, and in 1996 he received both the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts. Albee describes his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."