That Summer

It’s Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the
Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before, she had vacationed
with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For her and her sister
Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery

Both of the girls fall in love with two of the local boys. Daisy, on the lookout for action, cruising the dances at the resort, can’t deal with what she initiates, and falls victim to her own confusion and naiveté

Not even the neighbour, the eccentric, bourbon drinking, cigar smoking Mrs Crump, who knows all the fairy-tale spells to capture the heart of a lover can save Daisy from drowning in her own misadventure

Margaret, bookish and withdrawn, inhabiting a universe defined by poets and novelists, is seduced in spite of herself

As the narrator Margaret watches Maggie, her younger self, relive the innocence and beauty of that summer, the play moves inexorably back to the heartbreak of a headlong surrender to experience, both won and lost in a single day

“At a time when worldliness and cynicism dominate the literary arts, the quiet sense of wonder, of bygone innocence conveyed through this lovely play is as refreshing as a summer storm after a heat wave ... Like the plays and short stories on Anton Chekov, the particulars of time and place in That Summer speak of universal experience for all time” ~ The Record
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