Freeze

Freeze is an allegorical comedy that dramatizes the Great Ice Storm of ’98 as a metaphor for “cooler”, more tolerant times in Quebec compared to the separatist “heat” of earlier decades. Five Montrealers find themselves trapped inside the power-outed duplex of Nicole, a pur-laine pro-sovereignty journalist. Her boyfriend Curtis, a Black Anglo jazz musician, arrives with a shocking marriage proposal. Mickey, an Irish gambling-addicted handyman, exploits the storm by selling firewood at exorbitant prices. And Hydro Quebec lineman Réjean tries to do his job, while Claire, the horny elderly neighbor, struggles to mediate. This dysfunctional quintet butt heads over politics and love, provoking us to ponder whether Montreal’s “two solitudes” has become a stereotype in this new Century.

AUTHOR

Stephen Orlov

Stephen Orlov is an award-winning dramatist whose plays have been showcased in such major theatre centres as London, Chicago, and Montreal. Stephen co-edited with Samah Sabawi Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas, the first English anthology worldwide in any genre of drama, prose, or poetry by Jewish and Palestinian writers, which won the Patrick O’Neill Award for best Canadian play anthology of 2016 and 2017. His plays include the box-office hits Freeze, Birthmark, Isolated Incident (with Rahul Varma), and his highly acclaimed Sperm Count, Salaam-Shalom, and Bow Ties (with cellist Karen Kaderavek). Stephen has served on the boards of the Playwrights Guild of Canada and Playwrights Canada Press, was President of Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal and resident playwright at the Centaur Theatre. He is currently writing Engagement, the third in his Dual-Diaspora Trilogy.

Reviews

For those of us who lived through the Montreal Ice Storm of ’98, we … shared an unexpected rite of passage and nothing after would be as it was before. With Freeze, Stephen Orlov has captured that time and place with remarkable insight and great humour in a play that will tickle your funny bone on the way to your heart. Everything in the given circumstances of this play is accurate and insightful. And, as with all good plays, the specific speaks to the universal and therefore, to audiences everywhere. — Gordon McCall, former Artistic/Executive Director of Centaur Theatre, Montreal.