Bye Bye Baby is a dramatic comedy inspired by Elyse Gasco’s multi-award-winning book Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? and marks her debut as playwright. The play follows one woman’s journey to discover the truth about her birth mother as she struggles to make sense of her own life and identity. Bye Bye Baby has a shockingly tactile quality that hits you right between the eyes with its brazen probing of the human heart. The play’s protagonist, Elle, is a seductive, witty, and immediately recognizable character. The sumptuously vivid images of her womanhood, the intimate realities of her early pregnancy, and her rage at the uncertainty that is her legacy are woven together as Elle navigates her way through the reams of bureaucratic red-tape which link her to the truth of her origins. As the plot twists in this part-mystery part-thriller, various suspects (the elusive birth mother, the chatty imaginary friend, the adoptive mother, the social worker) make their intentions clear and argue a justifiable defence for their presence or absence in Elle’s life.

Elyse Gasco was born in Montreal. She received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Concordia University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. Her award-winning collection of short stories, Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? was published in 1999 and was the recipient of the QSPELL/FEWQ First Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

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