Friday, October 30, 2024 at 8 pm

LSPU Hall

Tickets $10/$8 students and seniors

 Media Contact: Andrew Loman (aloman@mun.ca)

 On the occasion of her Platinum Jubilee, the Queen shares petits fours with a certain stateless bear; Trump’s defense lawyer offers opening statements assuring the jury that his client is human; in the depths of the Antarctic, young love kindles over exhumations and Coke; on the run from the Evil Queen, Snow White finds herself in the cottage of the Seven Deadly Sins; a guide to penitence is mistranslated with fateful consequences; a precocious young artist meets the Emperor: in these and other vignettes, Andrew Loman grapples with the banalities of mass culture and the nightmare of history with his usual restraint and discernment. He’s joined by Stella Hui, Lynn Kristmanson, Jane Leibel, and Bernardine Stapleton, who elevate the whole thing.

Content warning: the subject matter is on occasion irritatingly obscure; the language is often on the salty side; the stories routinely resolve themselves in deplorable bursts of violence. It’s implied that Eric Trump hatched from the egg of an echidna. A pastiche of late-phase James wrecks the whole thing.

Andrew Loman is an associate professor in the Department of English at Memorial University, specializing in 19^th-century American Literature, literary theory, and comics. For several years, he’s been using the Facebook status update as a platform for creative experiments: The Real Thing, and Other Impieties assembles some of the results.

Stella Hui is a graduate of Memorial University with a Master of Music degree in piano performance. Her esteemed teachers include Dr. Kristina Szutor and Professor Miranda Wong.

Lynn Kristmanson is the writer-director of the stop-motion animated film Secret Santa, which played at last year’s St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival and at festivals across the continent, including the Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival in Seattle and the Film Maudit 2.0 Festival in LA.

Jane Leibel is Professor of Voice in the School of Music at Memorial University. She’s performed operatic and concert roles with the Vancouver Opera, the Vancouver Symphony, Opera Pacific, the Regina Symphony, the Manitoba Opera, Opera Atelier, Opera in Concert, and The Vancouver Opera and Toledo Opera Young Artists Programs.

Bernardine Stapleton is an actor and playwright whose many plays include Offensive to Some, Woman in a Monkey Cage, and Antidote for Life: Memory, Madness, and Beagles. She was one of four playwrights shortlisted for the Siminovitch Prize in 2023.