Best Selling Books by George F. Walker

Recognizable characters play out their coincidental relationships in a city park. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.

First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Playscontain Gossip(1977), Filthy Rich(1979), and The Art of War(1983). Completely revised and updated for this new Talonbooks edition, these three plays showcase both the development and the culmination of Walker''s engagement with the film noir style.

Contains Walker''s own selection of his early plays: Beyond Mozambique, Zastrozzi, Theatre of the Film Noir and Nothing Sacred.

"[A] group of plays, all set in the same slightly rundown motel room, each play made to stand on its own."--Table of contents page.

Includes "Beautiful City," "Love and Anger" and "Tough."

Escape from Happiness takes place in the kitchen of an old, slightly rundown house in a not-so-classy section of a large city. It''s home to Nora, a good-natured, slow-moving, fairly batty middle-aged woman; her daughter Gail, who is tough, sensible, and a little high-strung; Gail''s husband Junior, an affable but rather dim fellow. Also living here is Tom, who is dying of some unspecified disease; Tom is, according to Nora, a stranger who looks exactly like (and coincidentally has the same name as) her husband, who deserted the family ten years ago after trying to burn down the house.

It is 1859, and under the leadership of progressive Czar Alexander II, Russia is rushing pell-mell from the 11th century to the 19th. Serfdom has been abolished, and something approaching parliamentary democracy has been installed. Arkady, a fresh college graduate, proceeds with his friend Bazarov, a charismatic nihilist, to the estate of his father, a down-at-the-heels gentleman farmer. It appears as though dad and the housekeeper have just had a child, and dad is deeply in love - although their difference in class makes marriage impossible to contemplate. Arkady, enraptured with the new thought he learned at college, is eager to impact the New Russia, though he has no idea how. Bazarov, who has burnished his fashionable cynicism to a near-blinding sheen, has resolved to say or think nothing which is not ''useful.'' It is surprising, still, how talkative he is. As we learn only at the end of the first Act, Arkady''s uncle Pavel, a Europeanized dandy, has begun to stalk Bazarov''s mistress, Anna - because he was in love with Anna''s late mother.

Zastrozzi, the master criminal of Europe, seeks to kill Verezzi, the saintly artist, for a murder he committed years ago and has blotted from his memory. The aristocratic Zastrozzi wants to destroy culture and morality itself as well as the new middle class and its ideas of enlightenment as well as its mediocrity.

Canada''s top playwright sears the page with three new works that excoriate political culture, individualism and the accompanying moral depravity.

Orphans for the Czar ruefully exposes the duplicity, revenge, and self-interest at the core of a culture about to go up in flames. Suggested by Gorsky''s novel The Life of a Useless Man and set shortly before Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, the play focuses on a hapless double agent as he tries to stay on the right side of both the revolutionaries and the czarists. The orphaned fool Vasley leaves his impoverished village to work in his uncle''s bookstore in the city, and becomes engrossed by the women, the intelligentsia, the spies, and all their conflicting ideologies. A comedy of pathos about the fragility of people in unstable times, Orphans for the Czar is also a plea for the possibility of decency.

An allegory of our post-9/11 lives, but also a paean to the will that carries us through our darkest hours.

Slink through 1920s NYC with master criminals and corrupt bankers. Cast of 13 men and 5 women.

Canada''s master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism. We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed. We the Family ''s list of characters reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed, it is, at least in part: the son of the main characters, David and Lizzie Kaplan, a Jewish-Irish Catholic mixed marriage, marries the daughter of Jenny Lee, a Chinese Canadian widow. There''s also a Russian mistress, a Palestinian lover, and a glamorous, possibly fraudulent Italian psychologist, while offstage Pakistani terrorists kidnap the also-offstage honeymooning couple, then sell them to Sicilian gangsters who sell them to Russian gangsters, one of whom turns out to be the father of the Russian mistress (another family). By the end of the play, Walker has deconstructed the dysfunctional Kaplan and Lee families and family love as well. Through the play''s pervading treachery, with family members and lovers betraying each other in horrifying ways, he satirizes the hypocrisy of expounding family values while behaving in viciously selfish and self-centred ways. These hyphenated Canadians certainly aren''t "nice," and no amount of "sweet-and-sour matzah balls" (which the Kaplan matriarch serves at the multicultural wedding reception) can hide the nasty taste.

George F. Walker has been one of Canada''s most prolific and popular playwrights since his career in theatre began in the early 1970s. Since that time, he has written more than twenty plays and has created screenplays for several award-winning Canadian television series, including Due South, The Newsroom, This Is Wonderland, and The Line, as well as for the film Niagara Motel (based on three plays from his Suburban Motel series). Part Kafka, part Lewis Carroll, Walker''s distinctive, gritty, fast-paced comedies satirize the selfishness, greed, and aggression of contemporary urban culture. Awards and honours include appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada (2005); National Theatre School Gascon-Thomas Award (2002); two Governor General''s Literary Awards for Drama (for Criminals in Love and Nothing Sacred); five Dora Mavor Moore Awards; and eight Chalmers Canadian Play Awards. Patrick McDonald is artistic director of Green Thumb Theatre, where he has directed more than seventy-five productions and overseen the commissioning and development of more than fifty new plays for children, teens, and young adults.

Set in Europe in the late 19th century, Zastrozzi is a melodrama focused on the efforts of the hypnotic Zastrozzi to vanquish a mysterious Italian named Verezzi whom Zastrozzi believes poses an ominous threat to him.For his part, Zastrozzi is a ruthless killer, an atheist who believes only in his own powers to master or destroy anyone who gets in his way. He is warily admired by his student Bernardo and he spars physically, intellectually and emotionally with the steely, arrogant Mathilda, a woman who disdains the bourgeoisie but is intrigued by Zastrozzi, despite the inherent dangers.Zastrozzi spends much of his time pontificating about the vagaries of life. Despite his seemingly superior intelligence he has been thwarted for three years in his attempts to track down the dreamy Verezzi, who in actuality is a deranged painter with little grasp on reality. Verezzi''s survival has actually been orchestrated by Victor, a disarmingly normal little man who may be a master puppeteer in disguise.