Carol Cece Anderson and Andrew Moodie.  Photo. permission NAC.

Dionne Brand is one of Canada’s most distinguished English language poets. Toronto Poete Laureate since 2009, she is the winner of the Harbourfront Writers’ Award and the Toronto Book Award. She has also won the Governor General’s Award  for Poetry and the Trillium Award  for literature. Theatre, however, is a new step in her literary career and somehow this production of thirsty leaves one with a feeling of incompleteness, in spite of a dream team of collaborators. Dramaturg Paula Danckert also worked on George Elliot Clarke’s oratorio of multiple voices for Whylah Falls; former director of the NAC English theatre Peter Hinton who also created Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey at Stratford several years ago worked on the stage adaptation and directed the play.

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Photo: Andree Lanthier   showing Jackie Robinson and Andrew Moodie

The world premiere of “thirsty,” adapted from her book of poetry of the same title by award-winning poet and novelist Dionne Brand, is a powerful statement of love and loss. Based on a 1978 incident in Toronto when a Jamaican man was shot and killed by police in his apartment, it explores Alan’s life and death and its effect on his wife Julia, his daughter Girl and his mother Chloe. Both a poem and a play, the structure is circular rather than linear. Each time the shooting recurs we’ve learned more about the characters and Alan’s mental deterioration in the face of cultural confrontation.

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Andrew Moodie, playing Alan, with Audrey Dwyer, left, and Carol Cece Anderson.

Photograph by: Julie Oliver , Ottawa Citizen

Andrew Moodie wasn’t smiling during the rousing applause that greeted curtain call on opening night of thirsty. How could he? He’d just played Alan in the world premiere of the play, and Alan never found the only thing he desperately wanted: “a calming, loving spot,” in the words of his mother, the very thing we “all want.”

In other words thirsty, adapted by Toronto writer Dionne Brand from her book of poetry by the same name, does not end well. Again, how could it?

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