Responding to the Region: Co-operative Theatre on Mulgrave Road

Abstract

Nova Scotia’s Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre Company was founded in the fall of 1977 by Robbie O’Neill, Gay Hauser, Wendall Smith and Michael Fahey who researched, mounted, and toured the original Mulgrave Road Show, a collective arrangement of music and theatre based on the culture of Guysborough County, Nova Scotia. Since that time they have extended and deepened their exploration of the culture of northeastern Nova Scotia in such critical and popular successes as Let’s Play Fish, a probing of the 1971 Nova Scotia fishermen’s strike; playwright Chris Heide’s The Coady Co-op Show, about the founding and development of the co-op movement in Eastern Canada; One on the Way, an exploration of the lives and concerns of women in rural northeastern Nova Scotia; and Heide’s Bring Back Don Messer, a musical about cultural survival in the T.V. age. Focussing on their regional roots, they have established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in Canadian theatre.