Heartlines

(Paperback)

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Description

A pair of queer Jewish lovers flees the fascism of WW II and finds resistance buried deep in their respective art forms. Using play-within-a-play and epic storytelling, real-life artists and life partners Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) take the audience through the dizzying romance of their early life together in Paris and then the fracturing of that life with the rise of Hitler and antisemitism during WW II. Identities of all kinds gender, sexual, religious, national, creative are explored, negotiated, suppressed, and liberated as Claude and Suzanne invoke their surrealist art through dangerous acts of resistance to the Nazi regime. In Heartlines, love perseveres across the perversions of oppression, violence, and time itself perhaps as an ultimate act of resistance to all three.

Author Bio

Sarah Waisvisz is a playwright, dramaturge, and multidisciplinary performer. Her solo script Monstrous, about the Afro-Caribbean diaspora experience and mixed-race identity, has been performed across Canada and the US. Sarah has been Artist-in-Residence at GCTC and at the National Arts Centre. She directed Donna-Michelle St. Bernards Witness Shift for Obsidian Theatre and CBC Arts as part of the filmed anthology 21 Black Futures and is currently working on Double Helix, an Afro-futurist, magical-realist play about the African diaspora. Sarah is assistant professor at the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queens University.