Andrew Moodie
Andrew Moodie
A dramatic and often humourous look at six black Canadians of diverse backgrounds who share a Toronto house. Their lives unfold against the backdrop of civil unrest which erupted when the Lost Angeles police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King are acquitted. The fracas outside keeps intruding as characters clash, collide, and swap jokes about everything from racism to the status of Quebec as a distinct society, from Malcolm X to The Road to Avonlea.
The story of inventor Elijah McCoy, whose name became a byword for quality, as in "the real McCoy." The play explains why we've never heard of him and reclaims a fascinating man's life from undeserved obscurity. Elijah McCoy, born in Canada to runaway American slaves, showed so much promise in school that he won a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at Edinburgh University. McCoy moved to the US, where no one believed a black man could be an engineer and so he was set to stoking boilers. Nevertheless, McCoy devised a solution to one of the greatest problems facing steam locomotion that was sold worldwide with the marketers proviso that McCoy's race be concealed.
When top Crown attorney Thomas Matthews, a victim of racial profiling himself, is assigned to prosecute the accused against a Left-leaning white attorney, tensions mount and personal politics bubble to the surface. Cutting deep into the lawyers' private lives, their families and foibles are richly portrayed as an integral part of Toronto's shifting mosaic. From an ostensibly routine traffic stop, each character must come to terms with the city's racial politics and how they have shaped their own beliefs and prejudices. Written in response to the rise of gun crime in the streets of Canada's largest city, Toronto the Good probes the problems that perpetuate the changing metropolis and explores how they have been allowed to flourish.