SCPA drama professor releases a book based on award-winning play

School of Creative and Performing Arts Drama Professor and award-winning playwright Clem Martini releases a new book entitled Cantata & The Extinction Therapist: Two Plays by Clem Martini on April 11, 2023.

Clem Martini’s award-winning play, Cantata: Rumours of My Crazy, Useless Life provides a window into the experience of people going through the hidden, high-stakes struggles of elder care and mental illness. In The Extinction Therapist, Dr. Marshall’s therapeutic practice offers group support to those threatened with extinction including a woolly mammoth, a testy short-eared shrew, the uncompromising smallpox virus, an insecure tyrannosaurus rex They all convene to receive therapy, in an attempt to come to terms with the complicated, volatile feelings associated with their life-and-death circumstances. 

Clem Martini is a celebrated playwright, novelist, and screenwriter with over thirty plays, and thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction to his credit. His books include Upside Down: A Family’s Journey Through Mental Illness, the W.O. Mitchell Award-winning Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness and the Alberta Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award-winning, The Unravelling. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada, a recipient of the ATB Financial Healing through the Arts Award and a Professor of Drama in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary.