OCNews

Curtain up! After a two-year, pandemic-imposed hiatus, Okanagan College’s theatre troupe, the Red Dot Players, are bringing back the wonder of live theatre this March.

Wonder of the Age is an original comedy by playwright and director Jeremy Beaulne about a medical hoax that scandalized eighteenth-century London. The show will run March 10-13 in the theatre at OC’s Kelowna Campus, 1000 KLO Road at the following times:

• Thursday, March 10, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, March 11, 7:30 p.m.
• Saturday, March 12, 7:30 p.m.
• Sunday, March 13, 2 p.m.

Tickets are available at www.reddotplayers.com and at the door.

“We presented our last Red Dot Players show, Vanity Fair, the week before everything was shut down by the pandemic,” explains Beaulne, who is also a Professor in the English department at OC. “Two years later, it is exhilarating to be back in the theatre and working on a new production.”

The play will transport audiences over the Atlantic and all the way back to 1726, to hear a fictionalized account of Mary Toft, an illiterate peasant from the village of Godalming, England. Toft became the talk of London when she convinced several prominent physicians—including Nathanael St. André, anatomist to the Royal Household—that she had given birth to seventeen rabbits.

When Toft’s hoax was exposed, the doctors she had fooled were satirized in the popular press, and several reputations were ruined.

“Toft herself was denounced as an “Abominable Cheat & Imposture” and incarcerated in Bridewell Prison for four months,” notes Beaulne. “There has been much speculation about what might have motivated Toft’s hoax and how much agency she had in the deception.”

Wonder of the Age is set in the fashionable Westminster bagnio where Toft was held while all of London debated the veracity of her claim—and waited for her to give birth to another rabbit.

For their part, the Red Dot players have been waiting anxiously to get back to the stage in front of a live audience.

“Although some of us have learned to appreciate Zoom theatre over the course of the pandemic, it cannot match the rush of performing in front of a live audience,” says Beaulne. “We’re very excited to transport audiences back to the early 1700s as we tell the strange-but-true story of the Rabbit Woman of Godalming!”

This play is recommended for mature audiences. As per provincial COVID-19 health mandates, all audience members must by fully vaccinated (vaccine passports will be verified at the door) and masks are mandatory.