Written and Performed by Pamela Finlayson
Directed by Michael Fera

Ordinary everyday magic...
that’s what The Beekeeper is about.

I wanted to write a play about things that are unremarkable and see if that could be dramatic and, well, remarkable. I also wanted to create an average woman responding to a common occurrence; dealing with a parent who has Alzheimer’s.

Plays and movies are typically focused on either unremarkable people doing remarkable things or remarkable people doing unremarkable things and where do the rest of us fit in? Where are the average person’s stories? So The Beekeeper is about remarkable ordinariness. We are born somewhere, we move somewhere else and life happens and we find ourselves in our 40’s and think, “How the hell did I get here? Is here where I want to be? And what is important?”

Memory: it comes and it goes. Why do we remember some things and not others? Do we just forget sometimes or do we choose to forget because the memory is too painful?

Edie Livingstone, a Vancouver lawyer, faces her toughest judge yet…the bees. Edie’s relationship to her father, a beekeeper in Moose Jaw, and his bees is tenuous at best. The past, memories, and regret haunt her, but, when she finds her father unconscious at the bottom of the stairs and discovers the secret he’s been hiding, Edie is forced to confront the bees, her ambitions that took her to Vancouver and her choices that have left her alone and estranged from her father.

“…bees are known to be the keepers of secrets. Some ancient civilizations believed telling your secrets to bees was like a prayer, a direct line to God.”.

The Beekeeper is a mythical, quirky modern story that deals with the truth and the consequences adults face in an aging, mobile population.

Show times for the Saskatoon Fringe Festival

OFF BROADWAY CENTRE
Saturday, August 2, 2008 -  2:00:00 PM
Sunday, August 3 - 6:45:00 PM
Monday, August 4 - 3:50:00 PM
Tuesday, August 5 - 10:05 PM
Thursday, August 7 - 5:45:00 PM
Friday, August 8 - 2:30:00 PM

Press Releases

» July 7th, 2008 - It's a Honey of a Show!
» July 12th, 2008 - Saskatoon Actress Returns to her Roots

Pamela Finlayson
Writer/Performer

The Sterling award winning writer for The Tit Show: women look at their breasts, ventures into the land whence she came from, what she describes as “backyard theatre” to write and perform The Beekeeper. Simple translation: do it yourself theatre. Write, produce, act, direct if you have to, but-just-don’t-wait-kind-of-theatre. Start-your-own-journey-theatre, in the way you know how to and this is how Pamela knows how.

Versatile and daring, Pamela Finlayson has toured the country. Some of her favourite roles include “The Actress” aka Marilyn Munroe, in Insignificance, Rosalind, from As You Like It, Hermia, in A Midsummer Nights Dream, Aurora, in How She Lied to Her Husband. As well as, the 15 characters she morphed into in Stark.

But it’s the creative collaborative process that Ms. Finlayson comes back to. More independent productions, new works, and new arrangements of classics, pepper her resume, than traditional roles. In the original casts of The Saskatoon Soaps, Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, Yikes and spending 10 summers performing in the Edmonton Fringe Festival, strengthened her barebones-get-back-to-the-story-style that Drama Queen Enterprises is built on.

The Beekeeper Poster for the Sasktoon Fringe Festival

» Download Poster here (3 mb)

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