Tripping Through Time

Ann Monti Di Oro and John Jarvis (photo: Ken Chubb)(Cast: Minimum 11)

A 50 minute outdoor show during which the members of the audience become inmates at an asylum, students at a lecture, get drawn in by a carnival barker to a sideshow of “heroic treatments” and become fans at a political football game. In the process they experience a taste of the psychological movements and political interference which have characterized mental health treatment over the last 150 years.

First produced by Workman Theatre Project on the grounds of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, Toronto as part of The City and the Asylum Festival, 1993. Director: Lloy Coutts.

See “Quipping Against the Pricks,” by Kym Bird and Ed Nyman in Canadian Theatre Review 77, Winter, 1993 for a discussion of laughter as a political tool in two popular theatre productions. Also see “Performing an Asylum,” by Kirsty Johnston in Theatre Topics, Vol 18, No 1, March, 2008 for a discussion of Tripping Through Time and La Pazzia.

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