Happy Holidays & Original Works in the New Year

The folks at HHG Theatre wish our friends and community a Happy Holidays and the best for the New Year. We’re glad the Mayans got it wrong.

2013 promises to be a busy year for Horseshoes & Hand Grenades. We’ll be bringing you two public readings in April from our new outreach & community engagement series Pull The Pin.

Co-artistic director Sean Devine is continuing to write and workshop Except in the Unlikely Event of War, his new play in partnership with Pi Theatre and set for production in Fall 2013.  This political satire interweaves three distinct stories that bring you from a remote radio station in Canada’s Arctic under threat of a invasion, to an underground research station where a group of academics secretly assess the necessity of war, to a meta-theatrical telling of the rehearsal and production of this very play.

Following that, co-artistic directors Alexa Devine and Mindy Parfitt continue to create and develop The Forgiveness Project, a collective creation set for production in Spring 2014. Using the universal themes of shame and forgiveness as gateways, this intimate and telling story draws on the contributed stories and experiences of a wide group of artists, including the project’s own creators.

And although it’s not a HHG Theatre project (yet), we’re excited to tell you about a new play that Sean Devine will start creating in 2013. Daisy is the final play in a political trilogy (after Re:Union and Except in the Unlikely Event of War) that focuses on social and political events in the American mid-1960s.

Daisy examines a moment of broadcasting history which led to a radical shift in the nature and power of advertising. The play explores the manufacturing of political power and the forces at play on the public’s consciousness in our mediated world, and the impact of that on our democracy. This new play is inspired by life and work of media communications guru Tony Schwartz and his involvement in the creation of “the Daisy ad“, a television commercial from the 1964 U.S. Presidential election campaign, widely accepted as the most devastating political ad of all time.

Through the generous support of the Canada Council (and others hopefully – TBA), Sean will be reuniting with Re:Union director John Langs and designers Jason H. Thompson and Noah Drew to start developing Daisy in Summer 2013, with research trips to Seattle, Washington, DC and New York.