CBC | Montreal playwrights — including Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton — take centre stage at McGill
The poetry of Leonard Cohen is a point of pride for many Montrealers, but his brief stint as a playwright is a lesser known part of his artistic oeuvre. In fact, Cohen wrote several little-known plays with another Montreal literary heavyweight: Irving Layton. One of their collaborations, a one-act play called A Man Was Killed (1959), has never been professionally produced — until now.
Cohen and Layton's play is one of eight that will be pulled out of the archives and onto the stage in a series of staged readings held at McGill Feb. 24- 27. The series, organized by the McGill English Professor Erin Hurley and Playwrights' Workshop Montreal, features plays from different periods in Montreal's English theatre history from 1930 to 1979. "One of the aims is to try to raise visibility of English language theatre practice in Montreal and in Quebec more broadly," said Hurley.
