Bone Cage

Jamie is twenty-two years old and works twelve-hour shifts operating a wood processor, clear-cutting for pulp. At the end of each shift, he walks through the destruction he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those he can. Jamie’s desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear of leaving the place where he has some status.

Bone Cage examines how young people in rural communities, employed in the destruction of the environment they love, treat the people they love at the end of their shift. Bone Cage is about the difficulty in growing and hanging on to dreams in a world where dreams are seen as impractical or weak. It is funny. It is tragic. It is about different kinds of escaping. It is about a soul trapped in its own rib cage, a cage of bone, a Bone Cage.

AUTHOR

Catherine Banks

Catherine Banks’ plays include It is Solved by Walking, Bone Cage, Three Storey Ocean View, Bitter Rose and The Summer of the Piping Plover. Bitter Rose aired on Bravo! Canada. Bone Cage, won the Governor General’s Award in 2008 and It is Solved by Walking won the GG in 2012. Banks’ plays are characterized by black humour, and compelling dramatic metaphor. It is Solved by Walking has been translated into Catalan by Tant per Tant and was one of three Canadian plays that toured Catalonia in November, 2012.

Reviews

“Wildly ambitious, urgently contemporary, and savagely frank, it dares to examine a rural Nova Scotia way of life with all its warts and joy. ‘courageous, poetic, powerful’ Banks provides enough late adolescent and early adult joy to remind us all that these are tough, real characters who take their enjoyment when they can get it.”

“Bone Cage is a bold and satisfying new play about a young man trapped in a soul-killing industry in rural Nova Scotia. This drama is like a David Adams Richards novel in its bleak, unflinching look at rural life’. Where Adams Richards is grimly poetic’ Banks goes for a black humour and a touch of the surreal.”