Botticelli in the fire & Sunday in Sodom - Jordan Tannahill

Two plays from a leading Canadian playwright, presenting wildly apocryphal retellings of two events - one historic, one mythic - that reconsider the official record through decidedly queer and feminist lenses.

In Botticelli in the Fire, painter Sandro Botticelli is an irrepressible libertine, renowned for his weekend-long orgies as much as he is for his great masterpieces of the early Renaissance. But things get complicated when Lorenzo de' Medici commissions Botticelli to paint a portrait of his wife, Clarice.

What emerges is the famed painting The Birth of Venus - and a love triangle involving Botticelli's young assistant Leonardo that risks setting their world alight.

Jordan Tannahill's play Botticelli in the Fire was first staged at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington DC in 2018 (a shorter version played Toronto in 2016).

In Sunday in Sodom, Edith - who in the Bible is referred to simply as Lot's wife - recounts how her husband welcomed two American soldiers into their house, the fury this sparked in their village, and the chain of events that led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sunday in Sodom was first performed in a double bill with Botticelli in the Fire at Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto, in 2016.

Botticelli in the Fire and Sunday in Sodom received the 2018 Governor General's Award for Drama.