Our Country’s Good, Strawdog Theatre Company. The redemptive power of the arts is the crux of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play (based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, itself based on a true story). In 1788 British authorities send 11 boatloads of petty criminals to what would become Sydney, Australia, hoping to prevent the kind of unrest that would shortly tear France apart. This leaves the new governor of the penal colony in a quandary: how can he make productive citizens out of convicts who would rather have been hanged than exiled for life? After discussion with his mutinous soldiers, the benevolent governor (Tim Curtis) decides that the play’s the thing, and under the flustered direction of Lieutenant Ralph Clark (Kyle Hamman), the convicts rehearse a tepid drawing-room comedy that nevertheless brings out the humanity of all involved.
