Cantata & the Extinction Therapist

Clem Martini''s award-winning play, Cantata: Rumours of My Crazy, Useless Life provides a window into the experience of people going through the hidden, high-stakes struggles of elder care and mental illness. In Cantata, Martin Bussinger discovers his elderly mother’s health and mental acuity is deteriorating, facing him with emotional and medical problems that feel almost unsolvable. He realizes that negotiating the delicate network of caregiving, strung together with the further challenge of supporting a brother living with a mental illness, places him in a situation that is simultaneously heartrending and darkly comic.

In The Extinction Therapist, Dr. Marshall’s therapeutic practice offers group support to those threatened with extinction including a woolly mammoth, a testy short-eared shrew, the uncompromising smallpox virus, an insecure tyrannosaurus rex They all convene to receive therapy, in an attempt to come to terms with the complicated, volatile feelings associated with their life-and-death circumstances.

Cantata was named winner in the full-length category of Theatre BC’s 2021 Canadian Playwriting Competition and following the play’s premiere production with Sage Theatre on April 28, 2022. it was named Most Outstanding New Play in the Calgary Theatre Critics’ Awards. As Martini puts it, “Some readers will recognize themselves in these characters. Some may even be going through these trials right now.” The book will be of interest to theatre practitioners, students of acting and directing, social workers, therapists, nurses and others in the caregiving professions as well.

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