Four disparate people confront each other--their memory and their responsibility--at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode. Tortoise Boy is a “chamber play,” four monologues, or mon-dialogues, if you will. Through these four voices, four instruments--a quartet--these characters confront numerous existential quandaries: Can we have a future without a past? Is there meaning to a past that has no future? When do our memories open doors, and when do they close them? What’s best forgotten? What’s indelible? The ancient Greeks believed that memory is the mother of the muses, and the words memory, muse, and music all share a common root.

Praise for Tortoise Boy: "... gritty and profane, unabashedly poetic." (Adrian Chamberlain, Times Colonist) "Like reassembling a window from pieces of shattered glass … Tidler allows the audience to piece it all together." (Monday Magazine)