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Synopsis
The Breakfast Club meets Shirley Jackson in a fusion of live theatre and technology that tells a darkly comic but hopeful story of four teenage outsiders struggling with death, depression and the shadow of a black dog. Two is fraught. While dealing with the impossible expectations of her parents, she is trying to understand why her brother, a bright and talented teenager, has taken his own life. It’s not until a fateful school detention that she meets three other students who all seem as lost as she is. There’s Three, a quiet, misunderstood guy who doesn’t quite know how to care for himself; Four, the fashionable, popular kid and class clown; and Five, a rebel ready to fight against everyone and everything. Despite their differences, they each grapple with depression and anxiety and become an unlikely source of comfort to one another. As the four unite to battle teachers, parents, therapists and their own demons, their promising futures begin to reveal themselves. Reviews "There’s some heartbreaking moments in Black Dog 4 vs the World, which opened on Friday night at the Sudbury Theatre Centre (STC) – a play aimed at teens exploring many conditions of the mind and the darkness that can pad up unexpectedly and snap like a black dog. But it’s not all bleakness. It also has a great sense of teen culture (which today also translates into tech-culture as they become ever more mind melded with their phones); that same teen spirit that infused in the 1985 John Hughes cult classic. You know the one. 'It’s like the Breakfast Club but only realer and rawer,' said one woman in the audience." - Lara Bradley, The Sudbury Star |