In 1977, Reva Stern became Artistic Director of the Leah Posluns Theatre in Toronto, where she maintained her position until 1994. Director, writer and dramaturge for almost thirty years, Reva retained the position of Regional Casting Director for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in both New York City and Los Angeles from 1975 to 1993, while still at the helm of the Leah Posluns Theatre and Theatre School. Ms. Stern has been bestowed with several awards of merit in theatre and has been a guest speaker at esteemed venues such as The University of Miami, the Actor’s Workshop, the New Play Festival in New York City, and the ‘Playwright’s Conference’ at the University Of Pittsburgh.

In recent years, Reva Stern has brought her love of writing to the forefront as her primary career. Writing and editing professionally for the past decade, she has been encouraged by three writing award nominations. Her first published novel “The Water Buffalo That Shed Her Girdle.”

Additionally, her manuscript “The Prescott Journals” was optioned for the screen prior to publication, and is now slated to become her second published novel.
Reva has also compiled a collection of short stories and a series of Children’s books titled “Tales from Grandma’s Cupboard”. Her additional publishing credits include extensive freelance writing for periodicals, magazines and newspapers including the National Post, and several years as an editor for Wellness Way Publications.

SYNOPSIS: MEMORIES OF A WATER BUFFALO By Reva Stern

After living through a monumentally acrimonious divorce, Rachel Morgenstein was pretty certain that the very worst thing that could ever happen to her had already happened. She was wrong.

She soon ascertained that the sudden, fierce, and absolute estrangement by her youngest child was the singular most excruciating event of her life.

It was an elusive mystery, without an obvious villain or even a foreshadowing conflict.

It is just a matter of days until her son will be married and she is not welcome to attend. And so the story begins with Rachel contemplating a virtual shopping list of alternative suicide options. After exhausting each deadly proposition as unworthy or just plain messy, Rachel resorts to investigating this injustice by searching the cold files of her memory. That is, she reaches as far back into her past as is humanly possible in the hope of finding some cryptically hidden answers to this anomaly.

Her history unravels as we travel with her into the lost innocence of the fifties and the zeal of the sixties. We wince over the garishness of the seventies and are numbed by the sudden changes in our heroine as she braves her way through the next couple of decades only to end up facing the deadly “list”. Does she find alternatives?

Although “Water Buffalo” is a painful journey for Rachel, it is a funny, thoughtful and often wry story of love gone mad.