Masks on Meds

The doctors of the Commedia dell’Arte

Come and have a taste of our medicine! Masks on Meds presented a roller coaster of events featuring colourful masked characters inspired by the Commedia dell’Arte tradition, a form of popular theatre mostly performed in comic mode and based on the skills of the actors. Boasting doctors, confused bourgeois, cunning servants, and splendid Lovers were featured in two farces: Molière’s The Flying Doctor and Rolfe’s The Dumb Wife. Both plays, directed by Gabrielle Houle with the Drama students at the University of Waterloo, provided the audience with a delectable taste of popular entertainment, masked performance, sense of improvisation and actors’ inventions. This was a world where doctors and charlatans used both their knowledge and idiocy to cure their desperate patients!