Norwegian Rabbit by Gary Geddes

HOW TO ATTEND Click the link below at showtime: https://zoom.us/webinar/83418700584 Doors 5 minutes prior. Latecomers welcome - audience does not appear on screen. 

ABOUT THE PLAY After being exiled by Stalin, Leon Trotsky’s final days were spent in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, where he and his wife Natalia Sedova and their entourage were guests at the infamous ‘Blue House’ of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. After two years, the Trotskys moved a short distance away to 19 Avenida Viena, where he carried on his writing and political activities against a background of hostility from the pro-Stalin Mexican Communist Party. Having been exiled from Russia, then deported from Turkey, France, and Norway, Trotsky was grateful for his Mexican refuge, despite its obvious dangers, and spent his spare time collecting rare cacti, raising chickens and rabbits, and contemplating the fate of the revolution in a world locked in mortal combat. However, on May 24, 1940, an attempt was made on his life by twenty armed men led by Rivera’s rival muralist David Siqueiros, during which Trotsky’s grandson was slightly wounded and his American bodyguard Robert Sheldon Harte was kidnapped and later found murdered. So it was, three months later, on that fateful morning of August 20, that he rose early to prepare himself for work on the sequel to My Life, which would cover the period from 1930 to 1940, the review of a recent Stalin biography, several articles, letters to editors, and an appointment he had agreed to reluctantly.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT Gary Geddes was born in Vancouver, B.C. in 1940. He completed a doctorate at University of Toronto and has taught at various institutions in Canada and abroad, including Western Washington University, where he was Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture. Geddes has written and edited fifty books of poetry, fiction, drama, translation, criticism, non-fiction, and anthologies and won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Lt.-Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile, awarded simultaneously to Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti and Mario Benedetti. In addition to editing several major teaching anthologies for Oxford, he was the founding editor of Studies in Canadian Literature, Quadrant Editions and Cormorant Books. He served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, University of Ottawa, Green College (UBC), Vancouver Island University, Vancouver Public Library and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Best known as a poet, Geddes has recently produced four books of acclaimed non-fiction: Sailing Home, Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things, Drink the Bitter Root and Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care. His most recent work-in-progress is a play about Trotsky on the morning of his assassinaton.