Synopsis
Staged for the first time as a trilogy, the one act plays composing The Islands of Love - The Dispute, The Colony and The Slaves' Island - propose a complete tour of the philosophical, political and artistic landscape of the Enlightenment era. The great disputes over natural education, gender equality, social justice find their echoes in the burlesque confrontations between the traditional commedia dell'arte characters and the new worlds they encounter, each island becoming an arena where the old order confronts the new.
The Dispute
Love and fidelity become a matter of dispute between an enlightened Prince and his sophisticated companion, Hermione, when two young couples raised by the Prince's clever servants prove to be 'naturally' inconstant in matters of the heart, according to the principles of 'natural' education. A powerful storm suspends the quarrel and the characters are shipwrecked on a desert island, struggling to found a better society based on the principles of 'natural' relationships between the two sexes.
The Colony
In the new colony, love and marriage are abolished as the women settlers, excluded from political activities, declare war on the male race. Arthénice and Madame Sorbin, the aristocratic and bourgeois leaders of the female revolution, force Lina, Madame Sorbin's daughter, to renounce her love for Persinet, her childhood sweetheart, and try to convince their followers to abandon coquetry in view of acquiring real citizenship. A false rumour of an imminent war with the natives of the land, combined with the exploitation by cunning Hermocrates of the dissentions between the two leaders, seems to reconcile the women with their role as guardians of the home.
The Slaves' Island
Another storm, even more powerful than the first, carries the Prince and Hermione to the Slaves' Island, where they are forced to become subservient to their former servants, Harlequin and Carisa, in order to experience the profound injustice at the basis of the social order they uphold despite their overall enlightened vision of nature and society. Equality and fraternity triumph over the natural impulses of envy and greed when Harlequin takes pity on his former master and the characters are allowed to return to their native land.
About the director
Cristina Iovita is a director, playwright, student in Concordia's PhD Humanities program, and founder and artistic Director of Le Théâtre de l'Utopie. After her graduation with honours from the UNATC I.L. Caragiale at Bucharest, Iovita developed a decade-long career as a director, author-in-residence and artistic director of various theatre companies in her native country of Romania. She was awarded the Best Director Prize at the national and international festivals of Braila in 1989 and Skopje in 1991. Between 1993 and 1996, Iovita studied and worked in Boston and, along with earning her Master's Degree from Emerson College and directing and teaching at several theatre schools in Massachusetts and Maine, she obtained awards for playwriting at the New England and Emerson One Acts festivals. In Canada, she continues to direct and write for le Théâtre de l'Utopie, the independent company she founded in 1999, where she has staged eighteen successful productions.