A young Actor abandons the big city and heads back to the land to find some authenticity. He meets a finicky tractor, a soulfull cow and two dairy farmers bound together by war, forgetfullness, forgiveness and abiding friendship. One of the best-reviewed plays of the decade, this uplifting comedy puts a new spin on the old country/city divide.
Hear an interview with the show's director, Randy White >
Download the Herald Times Review by Glenn Kaufmann >
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Listen to George Walker's Review on WFIU >
Ken Farrell, Dave Cole, and Harry Watermeier star in The Drawer Boy
Season Sponsor:
First Financial Bank
Show Sponsors:
Ivy Tech Community College
Media Sponsor:
WFIU
Printing Sponsor:
Rainbow Printing
Community Partners:
Bloom Magazine,
Bloomingfoods,
Busick Design,
Runskip,
Indiana Arts Commission.
Contains mild language.
Harry Watermeier and Dave Cole
The Cast
Ken Farrell (Morgan) has performed in regional theatre in the U.S. and Canada. This is Ken’s fifth production with Cardinal Stage, having most recently appeared in Inherit the Wind. He also performed in The Diary of Anne Frank and in two holiday shows, Treasure Island and Oliver! He was seen last summer as Gerald in There Goes the Bride at The Brown County Playhouse. Ken studied under Thomas Haas at Emerson College and was a member of the Proposition in Cambridge, MA. He dedicates his performance to TC and Evan.
Dave Cole (Angus) returns to the Cardinal Stage Company having appeared in Amadeus, Oliver! and The Sound of Music. He is a regular at the Brown County Playhouse recently as actor/musician for “Pump Boys and Dinettes” and “Smoke on the Mountain”. A theatre graduate of Indiana State University, Dave has taught, directed and acted in school, community theatre, and regional stages in the past 30 years he and his wife, Patty, have lived and worked in rural Southern Indiana
Harry Watermeier (Miles) recently graduated from Indiana University where he studied Theatre and Drama and Film. He previously appeared at the Lee Norvelle Center in Parentheses of Blood (Pueblo), Stop Kiss (Peter), Dead Man Walking (Press), An American Ma(u)l (Lincoln), and Measure for Measure (Benedick). He was in the independent student production of Finer Noble Gases (Gray), 1305 Guerilla Theatre Company’s Caffeine/Nicotine (Robin), and Indianapolis Spotlight Players’ Proof (Hal). Harry is from Carmel, Indiana.
More about The Drawer Boy
The Drawer Boy emerged out of Toronto in 1999 to become the fourth most produced play in the United States in the past decade. The play was dubbed a “new classic” by Time magazine and included in their list of best plays of 2001. The comedy-drama had its genesis in a Canadian theatre project called The Farm Show, which launched when a group of Toronto actors moved into a farming community in rural Ontario to gather stories for a play about the lives of people who live and work in farming communities. Inspired by the collision of city actors and rural farmers and the thin line between truth and fiction, The Drawer Boy is a funny and heartwarming look at how friendship matters and how we are all shaped and transformed by the stories we tell.
In Canada, The Drawer Boy was the winner of four Dora Mavor Moore Awards including outstanding new play, the Governor General’s Literacy Award for best English drama, and the Floyd S. Chalmers Award for best new play. The Drawer Boy also won the Helen Hayes Award in the United States.
Background Information: The Farm Show
The Drawer Boy is inspired by The Farm Show, a play developed as a collective creation by Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille in the summer of 1972. The show’s director, Paul Thompson, described the project saying: “The idea was to take a group of actors out to a farming community and build a play of what we could see and learn. . . . We hope that you can see many stories woven into the themes of this play and that out of it will emerge a picture of a complex and living community.”
Ted Johns, who later scripted the piece, wrote: “In the early days of that summer of ’72, the actors had no idea what they were doing. The dramatic techniques and the songs grew out of the actors’ attempts to dramatize their discoveries in daily improvisational sessions. At first the results didn’t seem like a play: no lights, no costumes, no set, a barn for a theatre, hay bales for seats." But the show was an enormous success, performed in barns and theatres across Canada. As Johns observed, "No one anticipated the delight people would take in hearing their own language and observing their own culture.”
The Farm Show is now recognized as a Canadian classic and an important part of theatre history for its role in the Collective Theatre movement. Michael Healey’s 1999 play The Drawer Boy reflects on the impact the theatrical visitors and this collective piece had on the community of Clinton, Ontario.
