by Dennis Foon
Playwrights Canada Press, 2009
ISBN 978-0-88754-857-4
$14.95, 64 pp, ages 8+
www.playwrightscanada.com
In this play by award-winning playwright and author, Dennis Foon, eleven-year-old Damon, Keegan and Tessa are struggling with problems familiar to many of today’s pre-teens: bullying, poverty, loss of family members, global disasters. A love of animals eventually emerges as a common thread that links the three former adversaries. It is a compassion for the plight of pets left homeless by Hurricane Katrina that ultimately encourages them to work together and brings out the best in each, and even transforms the local bully. The play has a contemporary setting and the fast-paced dialogue sounds very much “today” so that both actors and audience will feel at home. The roles of the seventeen characters can be shared among fewer actors (the first production was staged with just four actors). Although Kindness touches on some serious and troublesome topics, it ends with a hopeful tenderness.