When Samantha Jeffery and Perry Gratton decided to form StoneMarrow Theatre, it was because they spoke the same theatre language.

After working together to produce and direct a 2017 Fringe show called A Beautiful View by Canadian playwright Daniel McIvor, they discovered a joint taste for risky, often heartbreaking material produced in a way that has meaning for both the artists and the audience.

Like all art, theatre is made to be entertaining, somewhat relatable, and most importantly, challenging. Late British playwright Sarah Kane took that last point to heart and became something of an outcast in the 1990s for her practice of ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre—a form that broke away from conventional drama and was often criticized by the upper British middle class for being extremely violent and vulgar. Kane has three plays, Blasted, Cleansed, and Phaedra’s Love, that fall under the In-Yer-Face umbrella, but her 1998 play Crave—while still touching on darker themes such as suicide, loss, and assault—is much more subtle and poetic. Perhaps this is why it caught the eye of Perry Gratton and Samantha Jeffery’s little Edmonton theatre company, StoneMarrow Theatre.