Staging Disability: A Playwright's Perspective, with Emil Sher

New Stages Theatre

Join playwright Emil Sher as he shares his journey in adapting Ian Brown's acclaimed book The Boy in the Moon for the stage.

Bagnani Hall

New Stages Theatre presents:Staging Disability: A Playwright's PerspectiveWalker Brown was born with “an impossibly rare genetic mutation,ˮ his father Ian writes on the first page of his beautiful memoir, The Boy in the Moon. “He is globally delayed and canʼt speak.ˮ Years later, when Brown saw his memoir transformed into a stage play, he described it as “an untraditional play that is also a public dialogue about…raising not just a disabled child, but any child. I cried when our stage son finally moved to a group home, leaving our house a cave of stillness.ˮJoin playwright Emil Sher as he shares his journey in adapting The Boy in the Moon for the stage. How do you give voice to an on-stage character who is front-and-centre but never seen? What fueled the decision to extend Walkerʼs world on stage to include his mother and his sister? Does a playwrightʼs toolbox have what is needed to convey unknowable pain? What concerns surfaced in conversations about integrating photographs of Walker into the landscape of the play? Where do disability and dramatic license intersect?Emil Sher has given this unique presentation across the country, but never before in Peterborough. Please join us!

About the PlaywrightEmil Sher’s wide-ranging works for the stage, page and screen and print have been honoured at home and internationally and translated into French, Italian, Hebrew, Slovak, Russian, Japanese, Turkish and Danish.Emil’s stage work for the young and the once-were-young include Mourning Dove, Bluenose, Derailed and Beneath the Banyan Tree. “St. Louis was a better place simply because this play was happening here,” a critic wrote of the U.S. premiere of Hana’s Suitcase, a celebrated adaptation of the beloved Holocaust book by Karen Levine.His stage adaptation of Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon was a Dora Mavor Moore Award finalist for Outstanding New Play. The Toronto premiere at Crow’s Theatre was honoured as one of the Top Ten Productions of 2018 by The Globe and Mail, and selected by former critic Robert Cushman as one of his Personal Bests from a Decade of Theatre (2010-2019).Emil is currently adapting By Chance Alone, Max Eisen’s acclaimed memoir, for Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, where he was playwright in residence. The Book of Ashes, inspired by an Iraqi librarian who saved over 30,000 books from destruction during the Iraq War, was staged in April by Halifax Theatre for Young People. Emil co-wrote, with director Tasha Hubbard, the screenplay for Birth of a Family, a feature film about the Sixties Scoop that will be released this fall.TicketsStaging Disability is a "pay what you can" presentation event, with options ranging from $0 to $20. Please reserve your tickets in advance, only 50 seats are available.2 pm, Sun May 4, 2025 at Bagnani Hall, Traill CollegeApprox 60-70 minsFor questions or more information, contact: info@newstages.ca

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Staging Disability: A Playwright's Perspective, with Emil Sher

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Staging Disability: A Playwright's Perspective, with Emil Sher

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