Struck

JANUARY 31ST-FEB 11 2023

Blissfully ignorant, a young man at the tipping point between adolescence and adulthood is struck by lightning, shocking him into a free fall of survival, atonement, and search for self knowledge. STRUCK is based on playwright Eric Rose’s true story surviving a lightning strike while camping with friends on Sudbury’s Long Lake during the summer of 1999. The show explores the lightning strike as both physical and psychic mapping: fractured friendships, leaving home, losing loved ones - looking backward and forward in time from a point of view that can only be perceived in the electrified filament of one's mortality.

Rose originally wrote and performed the first act of STRUCK in Calgary as part of the 2005 Solocentric Festival. Recently, he was commissioned by Ghost River Theatre to develop a second act of the play. "My desire to revisit and re-contextualize this story was spurred by the sudden death of my father, and recently entering into middle-age. As an artist, I find myself eager to explore and investigate themes surrounding growing up, mortality, home towns, and life’s sudden and irrevocable moments of change.” STRUCK reflects Rose’s critically-acclaimed, highly-theatrical aesthetic, as a compelling, thoughtful, and viscerally surprising experience created with a team of committed and insightful collaborators.

Host or Publisher Ghost River Theatre