Memories of You

Memories of You is a play about the triumph and freedom of the spirit. It validates a woman’s right to chose the shape of her own life, in the full knowledge and understanding of the lasting consequences of her desire, her imagination and her actions. In its rejection of sentiment and any search for approval outside the self, it is an intense affirmation of the humanist spirit. It defines heroism as the ability to always embrace the world as it is, and never to make do with the way it ?should be.’ The life of Elizabeth Smart pivoted on a turbulent affair that produced four children and her one book By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Yet the dramatic strength of Wendy Lill’s play resides in her clear-eyed portrayal of Elizabeth Smart’s life not as a sacrifice to one great literary work, but of the book as a mere record of one great life lived.

When her resentful, drug-dependent daughter Rose comes to visit, mother and daughter confront each other with their own distinctly different visions of the past. Rose remembers that her father used her mother; Elizabeth remembers that she chose the father of her children, and that she did not regret that choice.

Wendy Lill
Wendy Lill has not only written extensively for radio, magazines, film, television and the stage, but has also been active in national politics. In 1979, while with CBC Radio in Winnipeg, Lill wrote her first play, On the Line, to dramatize the plight of striking Winnipeg garment industry workers. Since then, her plays have gone on to examine the Canadian women’s suffrage movement (The Fighting Days); aboriginal-white relations (The Occupation of Heather Rose, Sisters); pedophilia and mass hysteria (All Fall Down); the slashing of social programs (Corker); and the dangerous lives of coal miners in her adopted province of Nova Scotia (The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum).