Directed by the author, the staging features three Dora Mavor Moore Award nominees: Catherine McNally, Richard Clarkin and Melyssa Ade, plus Aaron Poole and Bruce Gooch.

This is the first new play by Gass-Donnelly (The Jones Boy, See Bob Run and Wild Abandon) in four years, according to the announcement. UrbanImage Theatre is producing.

The play is billed this way: "Johnny Good Boy procures heroin for Pretty Girl. She turns tricks to pay the bills. Wife has sex with Cop in motel, Husband invites Pretty Girl out for dinner, but only after watching a man beat her with a piece of rubber. And the talking cancer in Johnny's heart has grown to the size of walnut. Let the good times roll."

After spending the past four years directing a number of award-winning short films based on the works of Judith Thompson and James Harkness, Ed Gass-Donnelly returns to the theatre "with a stylish and vicious new play about five characters who are searching for numbness as an escape from the pain, loneliness, or banality of their lives," according to the announcement. "Told through an interweaving narrative structure, the play shifts from dark humor to personal suffering and redemption as the characters are caught in a tumultuous nightmare that spirals out of control."

The Factory Theatre Mainspace is at 125 Bathurst Street in Toronto. For more information, call Summerworks hotline at (416) 410-1048 or visit www.summerworks.ca.