Trina Davies will be part of the Talk-Back night for Shatter following the performance on Wednesday, December 15th. Trina’s work is being seen around Edmonton quite a bit this season. In addition to Shatter here at Walterdale Theatre, Waxworks was recently presented by Concordia University at Theatre at CUE and The Romeo Initiative will be presented in March 2018 as part of the Skirts AFire Festival.
Trina Davies
Formerly of Edmonton, Trina is a playwright based in Vancouver Canada. Her award-winning plays include Multi User Dungeon, Shatter, The Bone Bridge, The Auction and Waxworks. Her last published play The Romeo Initiative was a finalist for Canada’s top literary prize, the Governor General’s Award for Dramatic Literature, and won the National Enbridge Award for Established Artist. Her plays have been performed across Canada and in a number of other countries including the United States, Germany, Italy, and India. Shatter premiered Off-Broadway in 2014 to audience and critical acclaim. Her play The Bone Bridge, developed by the Citadel Theatre and with support from the BC Arts Council, recently won the 2017 Woodward International Playwriting Prize in the U.S.
She has participated in artist residencies at the Stratford Festival, the Banff International Centre for the Arts, the Playwrights Theatre Centre, the Citadel Playwright’s Forum, and the Bella Vita Playwrights Retreat in Tuscany, Italy. Trina is a member of the Alberta Playwrights Network, the Playwrights Theatre Centre and the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
She is currently working Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell, a love story exploring what constitutes real communication. Silence will receive its world premiere directed by Peter Hinton at The Grand Theatre, London Ontario in January 2018. Also watch for The Romeo Initiative, coming to the Edmonton Skirts Afire Festival in March 2018.
For more information on Trina and her work, visit www.trinadavies.com
Shatter: Playwright’ s Notes
Shatter began with an image: an unbroken pane of glass after the largest man-made explosion of the world. That image led me to several years of research. During that research something else happened. 9/11. I watched, as the rest of the world did, in terror and fascination as I waited to find out what this event meant for all of us. I sat glued to the images that are now iconic, fearful of what action would be taken next. I listened to the interviews that day as various news-worthy individuals trotted out competing theories about who was responsible. In the weeks following I heard whispers of backlash attacks in the U.S. and elsewhere; and accessed reports from human rights organizations detailing the hate crimes that were being committed. The same thing happened after the Oklahoma City bombing. The same thing happened after the 1923 earthquake in Japan. The same thing happened after the Halifax Explosion. As I was processing the events of our current world, I came across a reference to hate crimes against Germans living in Halifax. The official history books say little. Digging into the actual newspapers of the day I came across a much different story. Shatter is the story of a family and of a community, both living through an unimaginable tragedy and trying to come out whole on the other side. Fear is the enemy.
Historical Notes
The Halifax Explosion of 1917 was the largest man-made explosion in the world prior to Hiroshima. The 1917 Explosion was studied by makers of the Hiroshima bomb. In a booming war-time city of 50,000, 2,000 people were killed, 9,000 were wounded and many were homeless. At least 300 people were blinded in one or both eyes. The Explosion happened because two ships – one a Belgian Relief ship known as the Imo, and the other a French munitions ship known as the Mont Blanc – collided in the narrows of the Halifax Harbour. The collision caused sparks that ignited flammables on the deck of the Mont Blanc. Not understanding that the Mont Blanc was carrying munitions, many Haligonians ran down to the docks to see the excitement of the fire. Those closest to the blast were incinerated. The Explosion was officially ruled an accident after many legal hearings, but that did not stop the community from trying to affix blame. The newspapers fired the flames of wartime hatred, and incited the locals to target those in the community of German birth.