Fresh from their summer 2023 experimental, extinction-themed puppet show The Last Mammoth, performance collective Good Old Neon is pleased to return March 7-17 to the Aki Studio Theatre with their first full-scale post-pandemic production, Dead Elephants. Written by co-Artistic Director Alexander Offord (winner of the 2014 Fringe New Play Contest and Critic’s Pick Award for Outstanding New Play for his script Potosí), Dead Elephants is directed and co-designed by fellow co-Artistic Director Nicole Wilson (assistant director on the Stratford Festival’s upcoming London Assurance and director, designer, and choreographer of the genre-defying and 2016 Critic’s Pick Award-winner for Outstanding Production, Blue Remembered Hills, and director of the 2023’s sell-out Fringe hit and Patron’s Pick Winner, Frankensteinesque).

With three performers playing a dozen characters across four timelines, Dead Elephants is a virtuosic, harrowing, and poignant meditation on mourning, animals, and technology. In 1870, during a food shortage brought about by the siege of Paris, a pair of French soldiers plot to kill and eat the elephants in the city zoo. In 1885, P.T. Barnum’s famous elephant Jumbo is struck by a train in St. Thomas, Ontario. In 1903, a circus elephant in Coney Island is publicly electrocuted in what becomes the earliest recorded footage of the passage of a creature from life into death. In Dead Elephants, these three stories are braided around the contemporary struggle of a young couple in the midst of grieving the loss of their infant child. At turns larger-than-life and deeply intimate, Dead Elephants is both political and moving, heartfelt and bitterly funny.

Nicole Wilson (The Good Witch, The Real Sherlock Holmes, Two-Character Play) pulls double duty, starring as well as directing. Dead Elephants also stars Good Old Neon company members Hayden Finkelshtain (Murdoch Mysteries, See, Blue Remembered Hills) and Allan Cooke (mainstay of Canadian regional theatre, including the Lighthouse Festival Theatre, Upper Canada Playhouse, and Globus Theatre) , with Nicola Atkinson (co-founder of the acclaimed company Bad Hats Theatre and assistant director of their Dora Award-winning Peter Pan) assistant directing and a set co-designed and constructed by Kristofer Van Soelen (playwright of Gray, writer/director of Fringe hit Big Metal Box).

Good Old Neon is a performance collective founded in 2013 by Alexander Offord and Nicole Wilson. We create theatre from an experimental, ensemble-driven process. We aim to produce theatre that invokes shock, laughter, inquisition and visceral responses from our audiences. The form our work takes emerges from a sense of play: traditional narrative structures, contemporary themes and texts encapsulating the absurd, worldly, and deeply personal are reassembled as novel, entertaining and vivid theatrical experiences. To date we have staged six critically-acclaimed productions, including The Hystericon (2013), Potosí (2014), Two-Character Play (2015), Blue Remembered Hills (2016), One Left Hour: The Life and Work of Daniil Kharms (2018), and The Last Mammoth (2023).

Good Old Neon

Presents:

Dead Elephants

Written by Alexander Offord 

Directed by Nicole Wilson

Featuring:

Allan Cooke

Hayden Finkelshtain Nicole Wilson

Assistant Directed by Nicola Atkinson

Set Design by Kris Van Soelen and Nicole Wilson

Opens March 7, 2024, runs to March 17, at the Aki Studio Theatre, 585 Dundas St E #250, Toronto, ON M5A 2B7. Tickets $25-$45, available starting February 1st.

Show times:

Thursday March 7th - 7:30PM Friday March 8th - 7:30PM Saturday March 9th - 2:30PM Saturday March 9th - 7:30PM Sunday March 10th - 2:30PM

Tuesday March 12th - 7:30PM Wednesday March 13th - 2:30PM Wednesday March 13th - 7:30PM Thursday March 14th - 7:30PM Friday March 15th - 7:30PM Saturday March 16th - 2:30PM Saturday March 16th - 7:30PM Sunday March 17th - 2:30PM

Running time is approx. 100 minutes

Tickets available as of February 1st; online: www.nativeearth.ca

or by phone at 416-531-1402

Payment options: Visa or Mastercard