Home
Home
Synopsis
Two families, four languages, one house.
Home is the story of an aging man, Toomas, exiled from his homeland, who through repatriation efforts, can now return and reclaim his home and property. However, fifty-five years have passed and the home has been inhabited by three women, who, though caught in the shifting tides of a new world of globalization, find themselves threatened with expulsion when Toomas and his son, Wendall, return to reclaim the land and house. The women who have lived in this adopted country and in this house for so long, feel suddenly rootless.
Home explores our deep connection to home, not just as place, but memory and language, our sense of identity. It explores rights and morality and the need to belong.
Premiere
Home premiered at the Busstop Theatre, Halifax, NS, February 2010 and was directed by Mary Vingoe and starred John Beale, David Hughes, Sarah English, Mary-Colin Chisholm and Karen Bassett.
Press
Playwright Colleen Wagner has created moments that I will long be thinking about; snapshots such as a line literally drawn between feuding cultures or a conversation conducted in two languages, yet entirely understood by the audience. I marvel at her ability to write primarily in English yet to give the flavour of several languages. But perhaps the message of the play is the ultimate reason to see it: Home may be where the heart is, but a heart will wither and die if it lives only in the past. –Kate Watson. The Coast Review
Beautifully written Home funny and sad
You can never go home again, or can you?
In Colleen Wagner’s new play, Home, an elderly Canadian man returns to the Estonian house where he was born. His parents fled the Russians 55 years ago but now the government is returning the house. There’s one hitch — three fierce Russian women are living there and they also call it home.
It’s a great conflict and Wagner mines it for all its thematic power in a beautifully written play that is intense, poetic and moving. The actors are very solid and the two-hour journey is at once funny, involving and sad. – Elissa Barnard. Chronical Herald
Purchase
Home was published in 2014 by Scirocco Drama