Note: This event took place on Sunday, Sept. 25.
During the course of the play Ten Lost Years, actor Scott Swan moves to the front of the stage and delivers a monologue.
He speaks as a young boy in 1936 during the height of The Great Depression in Canada.
“I tell the story of a boy whose father could hardly afford to pay the monthly mortgage payments on the family home, despite having tried to negotiate a lower rate.
“One day each month, he’d go to pay the mortgage at the home of the man who owned the house.
“Then the father would come home, he’d go into the basement, crack open a bottle of booze and curse out everything. Then he’d go upstairs, and his wife would comfort him, telling him everything would be all right. This was a cycle that was repeated once a month.
“It as really hard on the family, especially the mother, because the father was such a good man.”
Swan said the story is sad, but there are happy stories to be heard during Ten Lost Years, a play which features actors telling stories of experiences during the Depression in Canada.
The play will be performed on Friday evening at the Moose Jaw Cultural Centre by actors from the Seacoast Theatre Centre in Vancouver.
The stories are ones told by real people who survived the Depression, collected by author Barry Broadfoot in his book, with the same name as the play, published in the 1970s.
