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  Virgin play for the virgin playwright  By Stephen Weir  The Caribbean Camera Inc.  on  April 20, 2023 Rarer than a church handing out money on Sunday to its congregation, the new play Vierge (virgin) is breaking ground with its black all-female cast and its Black female playwright. oh yes, its director is a Zambia-born Black woman. The city has a long history of White male dominated theatre, Vierge is making a huge racial and gender statement that, judging by the rousing Thursday night premier, rocked the standing-room-only Toronto audience. Etobicoke’s Shauna Thompson stars in Vierge, the new play recently unveiled at the factory theatre. The play features Thompson as Divine, a sixteen-year-old who feels like she doesn’t belong anywhere and whose only comfort is her rarely read Bible. However, when her family joins a Montreal Congolese church and she befriends three African Canadian girls in her newly formed youth group, Divine discovers that the world around...

Theatre Review By Stephen Weir, Caribbean Camera Today's Caribbean Camera - Review by Stephen Weir Toronto’s Factory Lab Theatre has given auidences an extra few days to see a very funny dark play about the police shooting of an unarmed black man.    Bang Bang (guess what it is all about) was to close earlier this week, but, due to overwhelming demand for tickets   five additional performances have been added   - the curtain drops February 24 th . A rookie female black police officer ( Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah) shoots an unarmed black youth, and a white playwright ( Jeff Lillico) uses the incident as inspiration for his new hit play. Problem is, the playwright changes an important fact about the outcome of the shooting –   the victim survived the shooting but the very successful play (which everyone believes) has the victim dying from his gun shot wound.   The black community believe the play and turn against the rookie cop. The play which ...