Is there a limit beyond which a creative re-shaping of someone else’s story becomes a disowning, even a violation, of the original? With a fidelity to content, Michael Healey, in The Drawer Boy, creates characters who are composites of citizens from a Passe Muraille production, The Farm Show. Healey grafts dialogue and incidents from this earlier work into his new narrative, transfusing an aspect of the authenticity that so engaged audiences in 1972. A comparison of form and implicit values, however, reveals oppositions and absences. Where we had collective creation, we have a single author; episodic structure, a single, linear, cause-and-effect plot; anti-naturalistic presentation, realistic representation. Whereas a co-gendered cast in The Farm Show built a community portrait in which women’s presence and stories were full and embodied, the females in The Drawer Boy are figured as deserters and ghosts. Disturbingly, the tone of certain passages ---acting exercises, political consciousness, industrious note-taking---works to devalue an actor-centred, improvisational, play-creation process, implicitly diminishing it as a viable, productive genre today. This paper proposes that those who come to know, and re-know, The Farm Show through The Drawer Boy will encounter an ideologically modified version, more dis-membered than re-membered. 05/27: 1400