"Is This the Hill You Wish You’d Died On?” Review & Recap

Night Ten at the Year of the Arts Women’s Play Festival featured a stage reading of Trudy Morgan-Cole’s latest play, “Is This the Hill You Wish You’d Died On?”

You may be most familiar with Trudy’s novels – The Rivers of Brooklyn, That Forgetful Shore, the Cupids Trilogy and my personal favorite A Sudden Sun, plus many more. Trudy made her first foray into playwrighting with The Mirror, which PerSIStence Theatre will be remounting in 2025.

I really enjoyed this show, especially since director Sharon King-Campbell went the extra step to include some staging along with the reading; it gave the audience a taste of what a fully formed show might look like. Kudos to Emma Cole for the simple but effective costuming.

On the surface, this play is about a modern young woman, Taylorbeth, who is visited by the ghosts of her ancestors (and a ghost from her more recent past) in the General Protestant Cemetery on Waterford Bridge Road. A central theme in this play is religion, but I think all the talk of faith and denominational differences sometimes overshadows the true core of this story, which in my opinion is storytelling itself and the myths we create to neatly box up the past.

In introducing her work in development, Trudy explained: “I think constantly about what it would be like to meet the women of the past that I write about, including the women in my own family history – how we would get along, what we might agree on and disagree on – and that wondering is what this play grows out of.” 

It’s such an interesting idea. All of us lucky enough to have been raised, like Trudy, on a rich traditional of family storytelling, have these pictures and impressions in our minds of relatives dead long before we were born, based on commonly retold stories. But, as the characters so deftly demonstrate, nothing is every so black and white, romanticised or simple in real life as it is when we create a good story about it. People are complex. 

Taylorbeth has such a firm perspective on who her Great-Great-Great-Great - (did I miss a great?!) - Grandmother is that, when she gets the opportunity to meet her ghost, talk to her and ask her questions, she struggles with accepting Theresa’s real story. And not only does she struggle with accepting the truths, she also argues with her ancestors that they are wrong about why they made the decisions they made. At one point, Jean asks Taylorbeth what she’s so mad about, anyway, and we learn the real reason for this ghostly encounter. I’ll say no more. We will see this show on a stage for sure!

Gabrielle Therrien as Taylorbeth and Allison Woolridge as Theresa were stellar, as were the other actresses: Jean Graham as Lizzie; Melissa Ralph as Jean; Nicole Redmond as Isabelle; Christine Hennebury as Gail; and Mandy Armstrong Singer as Danielle. 

Night Eleven features Iphis Is a Man, written and directed by Cheney Emberg. Only two nights left – see you at the show!