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Playwright in the Fringe

Tsawwassen’s Cathy Collis has co-written OBIT: a deathly serious comedy
obit
Cathy Collis is the co-writer of a dark comedy that is part of this year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival lineup.

Tsawwassen’s Cathy Collis will see the play she’s co-written come to life on the Vancouver Fringe Festival stage.

OBIT: a deathly serious comedy debuts tomorrow night and contains three intertwined stories about three different obituaries, Collis explains.

The play is basically about “how obituaries don’t tell the whole story of a person,” she says.

Collis and co-writer Simon Roberts are also directing and producing the dark comedy.

“We’re doing everything together,” says Collis.

She notes they worked on writing the play for about two years.

“In three, wryly funny, character-rich scenes, Collis and Roberts peel back the public face of the tributes to soccer coach and divorcing dad Derek, suburban mom Shirley and pillar-of-society businessman Richard now battling Alzheimer’s, to reveal their real lives and their, sometimes, buried pasts,” a press release notes.

The playwrights met while acting together in a Sidekick Players Club production a few years ago. Collis, a college instructor, says she decided to audition for the role on a whim the day after her dad’s celebration of life and was surprised to get it.

Collis wanted to write a play that passed the Bechdel test (where at least two female characters talk to each other about something other than a man).
It’s important to tell women’s stories, she says.

OBIT: a deathly serious comedy opens tomorrow at 7:35 p.m. at the Cultch Historic Theatre, 1895 Venables St., Vancouver. Dates also include Sept. 11, 12, 14, 16 and 17 with various show times. Tickets are $14 and available online through https://tickets.vancouverfringe.com. The Sept. 14 performance is half price.

• Ladner’s Emma Davis is acting in Twenty Feet Away at the Fringe Festival.

It’s a two-person play and is described as “a site-specific theatrical adventure based on the bank of Vancouver’s False Creek” where a pair of entrepreneurs “attempt to bottle themselves a new life while facing difficult ethical questions.”

Davis plays the character Hudson and the show runs tonight and Sunday as well as next Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday at 6 p.m.