“ The play deals with poverty, both physical and emotional. With the pain of loss, the search for love and warmth. And most of all, it’s an extended meditation—a very poetic meditation at times—on the nature of madness. It’s not about what you might expect, especially when you remember that the playwright, Maureen Hunter, used to be a journalist. I admired very much her first two plays— Poor Uncle Ernie in His Covered Cage and Footprints on the Moon. There was some poetry there in the writing and a lot of feeling, but both were resolutely rooted in the naturalistic tradition. They told their stories in straightforward, traditional ways. Bertha Rand’s story could have been told that way, it could have been really a staged documentary. But instead, Maureen Hunter did something much more difficult: she’s found a way to get inside the mind of a woman who was almost certainly mad. She begins with Bertha in the Selkirk Mental Hospital in 1968. She shows us the nutty old lady of the legend, the one it’s pretty easy to stay distanced from. Then she introduces Alison, a young woman inmate who has attempted suicide and who won’t talk to anyone. She’s fascinated by Bertha and her unwillingness to give in. She begins to experience Bertha’s life herself. And so we see not the crotchety old woman, but a fresh young girl. It’s quite a revelation. We see her in Crystal City, Manitoba, playing with her invalid sister. She collects her first cat. But gradually, this Alison/Bertha becomes more and more detached from reality. She also ages almost imperceptibly—and we age with her. We share her confusion and her loneliness. We understand at the most basic level how a cat could fill the holes in a life.” —CBC Radio