Lion in the Streets
Lion in the Streets is a two-act play by award-winning Canadian playwright Judith Thompson and was workshopped as the first Public Workshop Project at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, Canada in May 1990. It was then produced in its now published form one month later at the duMaurier Theatre Centre, also in Toronto, as part of the duMaurier World Stage Theatre Festival. Music for the production was composed and performed by Bill Thompson.
Its central character is the ghost Isobel, a nine-year-old Portuguese girl who is searching for her killer by observing and occasionally interacting with her neighbors seventeen years after her murder, revealing their dark, horrific, emotional, and very private experiences.
Characters
There are twenty-eight or twenty-nine characters with speaking parts of varying lengths. The original ensemble was composed of four women and two men who roughly split the roles up as follows (there is some confusion in the Playwrights Canada Press printing, as some character names in the initial list do not actually exist in the play, and some characters who do speak are omitted entirely):
Women:
- Isobel
- Nellie, Laura, Elaine, Christine, Sherry
- Rachel (who is also Rose for two pages), Lily, Rhonda, Ellen, Scarlett
- Sue, Jill, Joanne, Joan (an optional character)
Men:
- Scalato, Timmy, George, Maria, David, Rodney, (Edward?), Ben
- Martin, Bill, Isobel's Father, Ron, Father Hayes, Michael, (Edward?)
Adaptations
In 2002, Ed Gass-Donnelly directed a 6-minute film, Dying Like Ophelia, based on a scene between the characters Joanne and Rhonda.