Most Popular Books by George F. Walker

People Live Here is a collection of three exciting new plays by George F. Walker, Canada''s king of black comedy and a winner of two Governor General''s Literary Awards for Drama. The Chance, Her Inside Life, and Kill the Poor complete the the author''s Parkdale Palace trilogy of plays that deal with issues of social justice and ally heart, humour, and a contemporary reflection on human inequalities.

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.

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.