Sometime after the cultural, economic and political collapse of the 21st century, the future is imagined by piecing together fragments of the past. Are we in a desert or on the set of a 1960s Hollywood western? In an expressionist cabaret or a decrepit motel room? On stage stands an empty billboard, a transmission radio, and four solitudes whose broken love stories bring back memories that haunt us all and, in part, define who we are.  In Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere the future becomes a retrospective.

SOMETIME BETWEEN NOW AND WHEN THE SUN GOES SUPERNOVA is a multi-disciplinary creation based on the subject of hybrid identities resulting from new modes of communication in an accelerated world. First of all this project is an inquest, one that examines the increasing use of technology in our society and the changes this techno-relationship implies. This piece breaks open the idea of the interaction between the human being and his cyber-deterritorialization, and the unprecedented acceleration of the space-time continuum.

‘No one will have directly experienced the actual cause of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them’ – Jean Baudrillard

A group of artists attempt to tell a fragmented story for our time through the dismembered character,  'Anne', who exists in a state of seventeen identities. Like the Baudrillard quote with which Crimp prefaces the play, we only receive the 'image' of Anne and never the ‘real’ thing, in a representation of identity that acknowledges the ever-increasing complexity of the world. Like Anne, the contemporary identity is fractured, transient in both time and space.

The Country shows us the plight of modern urbanites who think the countryside can offer them the refuge from their lives that they seek – but in Crimpland, all attempts to escape are compromised – they carry their emptiness and their lies with them.

Crimp’s body of work speaks about violence, cruelty and sexual competition.  He has criticized media manipulation and the War on Terror. He explores the meaning of love in a society which is inherently driven to selfishness by its own institutions of capitalism and consumerism. His plays subtly de-construct traditions such as marriage and family and questions whether genuine love is possible given the nature of our social fabric and eternal struggle between the self and the other.

Lucy Lost Her Heart speaks of the alienation inherent in colonized societies. It addresses the violence of the past, a violence that remains embedded in the collective memory and plays an essential part in imagining possibilities for the future.  Lucy Lost Her Heart exploits theatre’s most fundamental resource – the powerful and vital imagining of how things could be and the refusal of accepting the world as it is.

ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD is a reflection on the becoming of identities in the context of immigrations.  It is inspired by Lac La Biche, a town in Northern Alberta: a cultural crossroads where dozens of different communities make their homes—a microcosm of the Canadian cultural mosaic. A series of chance events and circumstances affect the characters as they approach the lake. They are agitated by an essential question: the search for a possible intersection between laws, borders, their desire for freedom, their dreams and their personal pain. If the image of the self is always governed by a social context, what happens to that image when the context changes? How do we live together when our identities are so disparate? On The Side Of The Road addresses our imperfections and our apprehensions, but also the beauty made manifest in the pursuit of our desires.

LITTLE RED RIVER is a reflection on the complexities of memory.  The work represents the scenic landscape of the memory of Harry Smith.  Each time we remember an event, we create a new memory.  Our memory is always changing. LITTLE RED RIVER seeks out the connections between the experience of the real and the point of view. The trinity of the real, the image, and the fantasy are inextricably linked and superimposed. These three notions question truth. What happened? When did it happen? Did it really happen? The truth is the “lie of acted reality”.