Green Spears and Pomegranate Seeds
Green Spears and Pomegranate Seeds explores a woman’s journey through the garden. Written by Deborah Sheppard and Vincenzo Sestito, the one-woman play moves from the idyllic sun-baked of cottage summers in the Eastern Townships, to the lush springtimes of Northern Virginia and back to the oak shade of a Toronto ravine. The play moves from garden, to living room, to office, to kitchen, to garden as the narrator keeps finding her way back to the earth at each new phase of her life.
Up against a lyrical botanical backdrop, the one-woman play weaves through three relationships that mark each new phase of her life: her father, a Virginia farmer and the six-year-old boy who lives next door. Green Spears and Pomegranate Seeds is beautifully and powerfully written using a unique blend of poetry and prose. This stirringly true story is filled with sensuality, colour and humour that will leave you crying one moment and laughing the next.
Green Spears and Pomegranate Seeds is approximately 50 minutes in length and was first performed in March 2014 at the Papermill Theatre in Toronto to sold out-audiences.
Audience Reactions
“There wasn’t a moment where I wasn’t completely absorbed (funny, sweet, sad and poetic), at times you could hear a pin drop, other times, not a dry eye in the house, other times, gales of laughter.”
“The show was wonderful. It was like a magic show but it was images that were conjured up, not rabbits, and there was no deceit, the stories all rang true, and it was sleight of words that captivated me, not hands. The performance was superb. How could one person keep an audience hanging on her every word for so long?”
“Wonderful. Poignant, humorous, full of colour and narrative, sensual world of garden, the tragic dimension.”
“Each polished word butted up to the next, nestled into its cocoon, was a delight.”
“(…) Green Spears was just wonderful – deceptively simple…but really much more complex than it seemed.”
Technical Requirements
Set: wing chair and side table, bookshelf with books, office chair, garden wall (supplied by Legacy New Works)
Audio: System can be rented if necessary; not required in a small venue
Projections: Fully cued audio-visual presentation is available to accompany the play; requires projector; can be done without if necessary
Lighting: can be done with simple lighting or without, depending on venue