forgiveness. Forgiveness wins: she tells Ben "I love you" and asks him for her life back. Now appearing as an adult, Isobel tells the audience that though he took her heart, her heart was never silent, and she urges the audience to take back their lives. Background After 1953 there was a large influx of Portuguese immigrants to Canada, seeking economic opportunity and political freedom. 69% of Portuguese Canadians live in Ontario, and many are in Toronto. Isobel comes from a Portuguese family in Toronto and her strong accent indicates that her family has not lived in Canada for very long. One of the themes of the play is the difficult lives experienced by immigrants (shown by Isobel's father's job as a manual laborer, and his subsequent suicide). Structure and Inspiration Lion in the Streets is a series of shorter scenes or vignettes linked by the character of Isobel. The playwright, Judith Thompson, said: "I thought I just can’t bear some giant narrative, somebody taking this immense journey. So I thought, well, write a bunch of little plays, like two women in a restaurant and one says, ‘Guess what?’ I had no idea what it was going to be. It was an improvisation" (Zimmerman interview 188). The scene-to-scene structure of Lion in the Streets is somewhat reminiscent of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, which is made up of ten interlocking scenes between pairs of lovers, with each character appearing in two consecutive scenes. The difference with Lion in the Streets is that it has a main character, Isobel, whose thread we follow throughout the play as she witnesses the other scenes take place. Themes and Ideas Isobel continually encounters evil and violence within the city; Judith Thompson is showing a sort of "hidden" side of Toronto and discussing issues that are often taboo. Isobel says that a lion lurks among us, which only she can point out. The play looks away from the "upper-class, male-centered, high-art paradigm" to "[locate] freedom and power for a lower-class, female, immigrant-child." Criticism Critics have commented on the dream-like nature of the play: "Besides Isobel's ghostly presence, other aspects of the play are surreal as well; it begins with a circus-like dance in which masked actors swirl around the open stage... frightening, seemingly on the edge of losing control. Like the lion of the title, there's something wild here in the midst of apparent civilization, something