Manfred Meurer is a book-lover and the proprietor of Book Stage, the crammed, musty, lovely book store across the street from the Studio Theatre in Stratford, Ontario. If you love the smell of books - in the morning, afternoon or evening - as I do, as well as the thrill of discovery, you’ll love this store. It beats online shopping to a pulp. I have no idea how many books Manfred has in his store and I doubt that he knows either, give or take a thousand or so. Yet he seems to be able to find what you want. He has always found what I wanted, sooner or later.

I hadn’t seen him in a while, dependent as I am on my driver friends’ patience or on the Festival bus schedule. Last week I was granted a rare opportunity to drop in and say hello. As always, I asked him if he had any women’s diaries. He said he thought I had finished with that project and had stopped looking. See, I wrote a book, Reading Between the Lines: The Diaries of Women (Key Porter Books, 1995) about, obviously, women’s diaries, but when I finished it, I never stopped buying, reading and keeping women’s diaries. I have a huge collection now, too large to disperse. I just bought another diary this week, one by a First-World-War nurse, only recently discovered and published in 2013. Anyway, I told Manfred I’m still looking.

He is very patient and now long-suffering, I fear. I also fear that he buys more books than he sells, most days. I asked him, impertinently but sympathetically, if he was making much of a living. Not really, he said, but he owns the charming building he lives/works in (store below, home above) and he has relatively no expenses. He is not too happy with people who come in to do research, plundering information and then leaving without buying or paying for library hours. I wouldn’t be happy with them either, but then I was remiss. I left without a purchase, not like me.

So I’ll try to make up for it by quoting from his book mark: “Selected new books, fine used, rare and out-of-print books for readers and collectors. Book search offered.” Next time you’re in Stratford, pop in and buy a book, and say hello from me.

Book Stage Email: bookstage@bellnet.ca

Website: bookstage.com

Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch was born in 1978. Toronto Life magazine called her “an indie sensation”; CBC Radio says she’s ”the wunderkind of Canadian theatre." “The dark angel of Toronto theatre” (the Toronto Star) has been acknowledged by The National Post, The Globe and Mail and Now magazine simply as “Canada’s Hottest Young Playwright.” She has received a quiver full of grants, prizes, awards and nominations to encourage her in her work, including a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize of $150,000. Established in 2013, administered by Yale University, this prize is given out to eight or nine writers of drama, fiction and non-fiction from around the world each year. WOW.

Sorry to be self-referential for a moment, but when I was 38 I was married with four children (the youngest brain-damaged), recently moved to Stratford, where my husband was the new manager of the Festival, cooking a lot for a never-ending stream of guests, drunk with my own goodwill. I considered myself a playwright, beginning with puppet plays that trouped the schools in Winnipeg; a Canadian adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (produced by the ManitobaTheatre Centre and the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto); and a children’s play, Kingsayer (MTC plus the Calgary Pumphouse Theatre).

The Writer’s Union of Canada was not yet formed; The Playwright’s Co-op (then Union, now Guild), only a gleam in Brian Doherty’s eye in the back yard of his house in Niagara on the Lake; PWAC, the Periodical (now Professional) Writers’ Association of Canada, in the wings until 1976. Canada Council had been formed by an Act of Parliament in 1957; funded originally by revenues from an endowment fund. It had only recently begun to receive annual appropriations from Parliament (in the late 1960s) to sustain and increase a system of grants to artists.

The world was very different then. That was then, this is now.

Last week I saw Moscovitch’s new play, “Bunny”, commissioned by the Stratford Festival and presented at the Studio Theatre, to - need I say? - rave reviews. Any criticism I dare to offer is going to be seen as sour grapes. (Aesop, anyone?) Well, let me say that to me, the play is like the curate’s egg. This expression comes from an old Liverpudlian friend who explained that since curates were generally known to be poor, they couldn’t afford really good, fresh eggs. So the curate's egg was only good in parts. Like Bunny.

Bunny is Moscovitch’s 8th, maybe 9th play? (lost count) The others have been very grown-up, with important backgrounds (e.g. Holocaust, Afghanistan). This one is personal, a youngish woman coming to terms with her family, position in life, sexual drive, etc. etc. A lot of it is presented in long monologues that make it sound more like a novel than a play. I think Playwriting 101 and Judith Thompson teach playwrights to begin with monologues to help them discover their characters and stories. Too often, they remain stuck in narrative. A younger audience is very forgiving though, because the play offers explicit sex - very hip, very hot - and that seems to forgive a lot.

Well, who am I to say? I’m nobody.