4th Line Theatre Announces 2023 Summer Season Lineup

The 4th Line Theatre has announced their 2023 Summer Season lineup starting June 27, 2023.

The Cavan Blazers, 2011. Photo by Wayne Eardley, Brookside Studio.

The season will begin with The Tilco Strike, written by D’Arcy Jenish and directed by Cynthia Ashperger, who returns after directing the 2022 production of The Great Shadow.

The Tilco Strike recounts the year-long fight between 50 poorly paid women, and their hard-nosed male bosses at Tilco Plastics in Peterborough, who were determined to crush the women and their union. The strike began in December 1965 over a $25 bonus and escalated into an epic battle between organized labour and strike-breaking employers. The women lost their fight, but changed labour relations in Ontario forever.

In August, 4th Line will remount the theatre’s flagship play, Robert Winslow’s The Cavan Blazers.

The Cavan Blazers is a gritty, intense play that has the audience on the edge of its seat from start to finish. This drama chronicles the religious conflict between Catholic and Protestant Irish settlers in Cavan Township in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Violence erupts when a Protestant vigilante gang known as the Cavan Blazers tries to stop a Catholic settlement from being established.

Kim Blackwell, managing artistic director at 4th Line Theatre was thrilled to announce this lineup for the theatre’s 31st summer season. She is also directing the theatre’s production of The Cavan Blazers.

“I am excited to present one world premiere and to bring back the play that started it all at the theatre,” says Blackwell. “Both plays look at community and what it means to be part of a community, both the good and the bad of that. This eternal search to find a collective of like-minded people, is one of the complex aspects of the human condition.”

4th Line Theatre box office will open to the public to purchase gift certificates for the 2023 Summer Season as of Nov. 1. Gift certificates for single tickets, season subscriptions and charcuterie snack boxes can be purchased in-person at the box office at 9 Tupper Street in Millbrook or online at 4thlinetheatre.on.ca.

Engage with us on social media on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok. Write to us at tips@ptbocanada.com. Sign up for PTBOBuzz newsletter here.