Love Sick

ACT (a community theatre) will present Love Sick next month, with performances on November 6, 8, and 19–22 at The Guild in Charlottetown.

ACT first hit the stage in 1995 with Our Town, the Thornton Wilder classic that demonstrated—twice, as ACT remounted the show for its 25th anniversary—that life looks much the same anywhere. This November, ACT takes a less bucolic look at life with Love Sick by Kristina Poe, a dark comedy with a grim sense of humour, well suited to today’s changing world.

PEI actress Jenna Marie Holmes is returning to the stage to play the lead in Love Sick after successes in Boeing Boeing, Skin Flick, and Doubt (to name a few). “I play Emily in the show, she’s a newly single [297 days to be exact] woman who’s heartbroken about her break-up with her husband. She goes through quite a journey to find passion in her life again.”

The production team includes Director Alyssa Malone and Stage Manager Sharon MacDonald.

Malone, who had her directorial debut in February 2025 with Venus in Fur, shares, “I had been planning a fall show that could encapsulate both the eerie, tense atmosphere of Halloween but still included comedic elements. This is that show. 

“As it is also an ACT 30th anniversary show, I wanted to include a wide range of actors, who may have been with us from Our Town, or may have auditioned with us for the first time.”

MacDonald, who has stage managed some of ACT’s most celebrated shows, including Noises Off (2023), Hamlet, Macbeth, and 12 Angry Women, notes, “The struggle of the main character to make sense of her world spoke to me. I think a message that could be taken from this show is that things are not always black and white; there is not a clearly defined good guy/bad guy in most conflicts and sometimes one needs to step outside of oneself to see the truth.”