My Pregnant Brother WOWS Audiences

July 29, 2010

Johanna Nutter’s opening lines  from her award-winning play My Pregnant Brother, onstage at the Victoria Playhouse to August 8, immediately capture her audience.  How can a brother be pregnant? Nutter’s tale is riveting – beginning with her description of growing up in Montreal with a spaced out hippie Mom and her younger sister. Her sister became her brother through hormone injections and surgery - though not completely, because he got pregnant. When the baby was put up for adoption, the emotional fallout forced Nutter to put words to paper, ultimately creating the play My Pregnant Brother.

Jeremy Taylor, director and dramaturge for My Pregnant Brother thought Nutter’s story was amazing. “There were so many times where I would say, ‘really, really? That happened?’” as new elements of the story revealed themselves over the course of rehearsals.” But Taylor was won over by the way Nutter revealed her tale. “I was hooked on the story immediately,” he said. “She told it with such simplicity and such honesty, with such bareness of emotion that I could instantly see how it would work onstage.”

Pat Donnelly of the Montreal Gazette wrote in her column ‘Stage & Page’, “This winsome, folksy performer weaves an incredible tale with pitch-perfect balance, avoiding the maudlin while alternately wrenching the heart and making us smile. This show deserves to be seen across the country -- and the continent.”

My Pregnant Brother was the winner of the 2009 Montreal Fringe Festival Centaur Theatre Award for Best English Language Production. Centaur Artistic Director called it “a show with a lot of heart.”