Bitter rose and three storey, ocean view

These two plays by renowned playwright Catherine Banks explore the stories of strong women as they work through their pasts. In Bitter Rose, after a morning of racing around the small liberal arts town where she lives in her bloodied wedding dress, Rose (43), barricades herself in the basement family room to examine her life. For sixteen years she has made small choices (she thought), but on the morning her husband leaves to meet with his female graduate student, she realizes the betrayal that is destroying her is that of the girl artist inside of her. Often painfully funny but with a brutal honesty, Rose confronts what is at the root of her terror of the blank canvas and makes the decision to begin her art.

In Three Storey, Ocean View, Peg has brought her ailing mother, Ruth, to Nova Scotia. Peg sees the old three storey house by the sea as refuge, a place of safety for her mother and a place to begin again with her own angry daughter 14-year-old Zoe. However, when Ruth enters the house she is drawn into the lives of the women who once inhabited it. As the women of the house play out their stories Ruth gathers the courage to tell her own story and in the end, Ruth, Peg and Zoe choose grace over pain thereby offering a small new beginning.