Chimera

By Wendy Lill

What makes Chimera so compelling is that Wendy Lill has lived almost all the roles the play dramatizes: NDP critic for both culture and persons with disabilities, she came to politics after a career in community health care and as a reporter for the CBC.

This play arose from her experience as one of the parliamentarians who passed a Canadian law in 2004 concerning human reproductive technologies. She recalls being at a conference where a spokesman for a pharmaceutical company boasted about the array of new pre-diagnostic tests being developed to detect anomalies in fetuses. “I was sitting in this room with many people with disabilities and I realized that what he was saying is that quite possibly a lot of these people would not be around today. They wouldn't have been born.”

The ethics of stem-cell research—in particular the creation of crossspecies “chimeras,” the mixing of genetic material from humans and animals, is a hotly debated topic with political, scientific, moral and spiritual dimensions. While such experiments could hold the key to curing many diseases, to their detractors they conjure up everything from visions of divine retribution to sci-fi nightmares from B-grade horror films. To explore this controversy, Lill created a chimera of her own: a hybrid play that’s part Parliament Hill exposé, part examination of the efforts to regulate genetic engineering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Sep 15, 2007
• ISBN: 9780889227712

Wendy Lill

Wendy Lill was born in Vancouver in 1950 and was educated in both London and Toronto, ON. She lived for many years in Winnipeg, MB, and now resides in Dartmouth, NS, with her husband Richard and two children, Joe and Sam. She has written for magazines, radio, television, and stage. Her plays have been produced extensively on Canadian and international stages. Her play All Fall Down examines the roots of intolerance and hysteria and their effects on love. Sisters received the Labatt’s Canadian Play Award at the Newfoundland and Labrador Drama Festival. Primedia Productions brought out television versions of two of Lill’s plays, Sisters and Memories of You, both of which Lill scripted. (Sisters won a Gemini in 1992). Lill has four plays nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Drama: The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, All Fall Down, The Occupation of Heather Rose, and Corker. Talonbooks has also published her Chimera, Messenger, and The Fighting Days. Between June 1997 and June 2004, Wendy Lill was the Member of Parliament for Dartmouth and the Culture Communications critic for the federal New Democratic Party (NDP).

Book preview

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