Theatre Kingston’s Artistic Director Rosemary Doyle is thrilled to bring you Alexandria Haber’s ALICE AND THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. A beautifully written exploration of life and loss, ALICE explores the memories of a wonderful marriage unexpectedly cut short.

"When I read this script, I was taken with how well it captured that feeling of living in your mind’s eye, recalling and being swept away by a past moment” reflects Rosemary “How that can leave you not in the present. We blink and go, and then wake from our thought, where am I really? Theatre can capture and share that experience in a unique way.”

Alice and the World We Live In pairs two of Kingston’s most charming actors, Helen Bretzke (Mercy, We Speak) and Sean Roberts (These Deeds). Helen plays Alice a recently widowed woman who is left holding nonrefundable tickets for a hiking trip to Italy. Finding herself on a trip for two alone.

In Alexandria Haber’s case, the potent thought was a woman paralyzed with fear, stranded on a mountainside. That image, terrifying to the acrophobic Haber, haunted her and the only way to exorcise it was to talk the woman down, so she began to write.

“Writing this, I realized that I’m petrified of losing the people I love,” said Haber. “I’ve always been interested in grief and as a society; I think we are mourning the loss of a world we once knew, due in part to the rise in terrorist attacks, which by their nature are random. Death is very random; even when it’s expected, it’s sudden. One minute the person is there and the next they are gone. The world we live in is very different from the world I knew as a child. Similarly, when someone you love dies, the world you once knew is not the same anymore. Everything changes.”

The creative team is completed with award-winning theatre designer Andrea Robertson (Happy Days, What A Young Wife Ought to Know, These Deeds) stage management and Lighting by Will Smith-Blyth, (Bakersfield Mist, Blood River)

ALEXANDRIA HEBER (writer )

Alexandria Haber is a Canadian playwright and actor. Haber was born in Hamilton, Ontario and moved to Montreal, Quebec at age five. She studied Theatre Performance at Concordia University. Her plays include Life Here After (winner of the 2009 write-on-Q playwriting competition), I Don’t like Mondays, Four Minutes if You Bleed, Housekeeping & Homewrecking, Ordinary Times, Birthmarks, A Christmas Carol, and Tom Waits. She has written radio plays for CBC Radio including The Very Little Girl (winner of the CBC Radio New Voices Competition) and Washing Day (winner of the CBC Radio Sound FX contest).

Rosemary Doyle (Director)

Rosemary Doyle is the Artistic Director of Theatre Kingston and the founding Artistic Director of the Red Sandcastle Theatre. She has been a performer, writer, set designer and theatre person since the tender age of 8. Born in Kingston, Ontario, and educated at AMDA in New York City. Her most recent directing projects for Theatre Kingston include Blood River, What a Young Wife Ought to Know, Mercy, We Speak.

Helen Bretzke

Helen Bretzke – Alice With TK: Jordan in Mercy, Helene in We Speak, Marta in Waiting for the Parade. Elsewhere: Sandy in The Crackwalker (Kingston Summer Festival); Maria in Twelfth Night, Stacey in Some Assembly Required (Thousand Islands Playhouse); Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Impromptu Productions); Ruth in Blithe Spirit, Rose in Enchanted April (Domino); Agnes in Bug, Catherine in Rapture, Blister, Burn (Kingstown Players); Masha in Vanya, Sonya, Masha and Spike, and a randy mayfly in Time Flies (Bottle Tree).

Film: Jane in the psychological horror Boneyard (bnice films 2017).

Other: Helen is a software developer and Thursday morning cohost of Mighty Fine Shindig on Amherst Island Radio.

Sean Roberts

Actor, director, and writer, Sean Roberts appeared as Buffalo Bill in Theatre Kingston ‘s These Deeds (2022). He is delighted to work again with Helen Bretzke with whom he shared the stage in Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike (Bottletree Productions, 2017). He has had the great good fortune to be a part of Kingston’s vibrant and vital performing arts scene since 1985, both on the stage and in independent films. Thanks go to Rosemary Doyle for the opportunity to be a collaborator on the Kingston premiere of Alexandria Haber’s moving Alice and the World We Live In.

Alice and the World We Live In 

directed by Rosemary Doyle, 

written by Alexandria Haber 

performed by Helen Bretzke and Sean Roberts, 

stage management by Will Smith-Blyth, 

design by Andrea Robertson,

October 24 - Nov 16.

Tuesday - Saturday 7.30

Saturday and Sunday Matinees 2.30.

Opening Night Thursday, October 24 - 7.30 pm

Purchase Tickets Online at: www.kingstongrand.ca