D²: Edna and Olive by Leonard Belsher

John George Diefenbaker, Canada's 13th Prime Minister, married twice: Edna Brower in 1929, and two years following Edna's death, Olive Freeman in 1953. The two women never met in life. D²: Edna and Olive imagines the first and only conversation between them, seated side by side in identical armchairs in some unspecified afterlife, comparing and contrasting their marriages to the same man at two very different points in his career. There is no reconciliation scene waiting at the end and no pretense of friendship at the start. What the play offers instead is something harder-won: two women, thirty years and one husband apart, discovering barb by barb, confession by confession, that they were never really rivals. They were the same story, told twice, in different decades. This two hander depicts two Canadian women who were both married to the same politician at different times of his life: Edna Brower in 1929, and Olive Freeman in 1953 - two years after Edna's death. Keywords: Canadian, historical, prime minister, politics Genre: Drama/Historical/Biography Acts: 2 Run time: 90 minutes Cast size: 2 Female roles: 2 Additional notes: The play is written with no stage movement directions, by design: two women no longer required to follow the direction of a man determine their own postures for themselves. Directors and actors are given latitude to decide how much, if at all, the two women move. The two-scene structure allows for a natural pause point (intermission or a simple lighting break) between Act One and Two. Minimal production requirements: two chairs, two specials make it well suited to touring, black-box, and studio spaces alongside larger main-stage production. D²: Edna and Olive sits alongside works such as two-hander afterlife-encounter plays in the tradition of Sarah Ruhl's Dear Elizabeth or Brian Friel's Faith Healer in its use of a non-realist frame to stage historical intimacy that the public record never provided. It extends the author's established interest in under-represented Canadian historical figures, particularly women, and in paranormal or afterlife framing devices as a structural solution to dramatizing lives the historical record treats as marginal.