From the award-winning Canadian playwright, performer, and radio broadcaster Tetsuro Shigematsu comes 1 Hour Photo, the follow-up to his acclaimed one-man play Empire of the Son, which was nominated for six Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. Shigematsu’s outstanding new play, another multifaceted portrayal of a singular figure, tells the story of…

Brimming with a dark and brittle humor, 15 Seconds is a play about a young female advertising copy writer, her pro-sports-fan ex-boyfriend, a Gen-X welfare-bum loser and his brother handicapped by cerebral palsy. These four characters are constantly making choices about reality and illusion; imagination and fantasy; the hale and…

1949 continues the saga of the Mercer family, enlarged to include the extended family as well as off-stage characters from earlier plays. David French deals with the emotional and political decisions that the characters must come to as Newfoundland joins Confederation on April Fool’s Day of 1949. As recent immigrants…

According to Joan MacLeod, her play 2000 grew out of a story she read about a cougar that had wandered into a sports arena in Vancouver, BC: “I was intrigued by the notion of the wild invading the city and the city invading the wild, by the idea of things…

400 Kilometres is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Janice Wirth, a thirty-something urban professional, having discovered her roots as the Ojibway orphan Grace Wabung in Someday, and having visited her birth family on the Otter Lake Reserve in Only Drunks and Children Tell…

Everything we eat tells a story. In A Taste of Empire, delectable samples from a real-time cooking demonstration offer food for thought about colonialism and the ethics of modern-day food systems. “Food and Wine named him Chef of the Decade. In 2016 he was inducted into the Culinary Hall of…

John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Inside that theatre today, Ranger Powell of the U.S. Parks Service takes crowds of tourists, the curious and the ghoulish through a step-by-step description of the assassination. Underneath the box where Lincoln was shot, he describes the plot…

A group of almost-over-the-hill urban Egyptian hipsters gathers every night on a Cairo houseboat where they smoke weed, gab on their cell phones, and rag on everything they think is messing up their lives. Led by their master of ceremonies, a near catatonic petty bureaucrat named Anis, they get baked…

In this elaborate agitprop theatrical collaboration, the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the “war on terror” are exposed as the propaganda vehicles for the neo-colonialism of the West that they are. “Ali Hakim” and “Ali Ababwa,” refugees from the imaginary country “Agraba,” attempt to seduce their audience into providing…

Sit your butt down and learn your three Rs: ranting, resisting, and respect.In two new plays, Canada‘s king of black comedy takes on the failing education system. Both Parents Night and The Bigger Issue are set in public-school classrooms after hours and involve confrontations between stressed-out teachers and ticked-off parents.…

Michel Tremblay’s well-loved and award-winning play presents the story of one woman, Albertine, at five different times in her life. The older Albertines warn the younger ones of what is to come—“Our fate depends on you,” Albertine at 70 says to Albertine at 30. Together, these five Albertines provide a…

In this sequel to the hilarious and hard-hitting The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, the agitprop collaborative team of Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef turns its idiosyncratic brand of political satire to new global realities.Following the election of U.S. president Barack Obama in…

A “crucible-inspired” drama surrounding an inquiry into a doubtful molestation incident in a small town daycare, All Fall Down is a play about witch-hunting in the late 20th century.The rumours and whispers in the community—every suspicion of the unusual, the eccentric, the unexplained—are added to the growing body of evidence…

All great art has the ability to move people collectively, to create within it some essential, participatory expression of their humanity, their culture, their heritage. But who creates this art? What is it that gives some individuals the power or the gift to create such works? Who are these works…

A very liberal contemporary couple—Angel, an urban Native science fiction writer, and Colleen, a “non-practising” Jewish intellectual who teaches Native literature—hosts a dinner party. The guests at this little “sitcom” soirée are couples that represent what by now have become the clichéd extremes of both societies: Angel’s former radical Native…

Everything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle-management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets…

Newly unemployed baby boomers Gwen and Ned appear to be ­completely different people: Gwen, a practical, down-to-earth Latin teacher; Ned, an impractical investment advisor constantly dreaming up new ventures for making money. But appearances can be deceiving, as their son Alex, who left home years ago, and their daughter Karen,…

Guillermo Verdecchia’s first play, Another Country (originally Final Decisions [War] ), was his response to his home country Argentina’s Dirty War in 1976–83, when leaders of the military junta held that their campaign against “leftist subversives and terrorists” was the beginning of the Third World War. The scale of their…

We, each of us in the civilized Western world, live in a space inviolate. “Our home is our castle,” as the saying goes: our shelter from the intrusion of the weather and other “outside influences;” our defence against physical and mental threats, real and imagined, to our private space; vault…

Inspired by the classic play by Sophocles, Antigone in Spring takes us to a fictional Québec where dead birds fall from the sky, covering highways, rooftops, and parks. The citizens demand an explanation, but the answer never comes; the government, led by the autocratic Creon, refuses to tell the truth.…

Assorted Candies for the Theatre is a stage adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s fourth book of autobiographical sketches, Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies, offering a rich and colourful cast of characters in this exquisite remembrance of childhood past in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood. Much more than a mere adaptation of a…

Ten ‘translationed’ fragments from bill bissett’s new book:Another near-life experience.““Help, help,”“ such a classical utterance…Can we connect? Is there time for that?Obsession is a replacement for interaction.they showed a cluster of, circle of, people getting back up to standing position after, perhaps, kneeling. It looked like some of them, quite…

Balconville is Canada's first bilingual play. Three families and Thibault, the neighbourhood rubbie, sit on their balconies in the heat of a Montreal summer. It is election time and Gaétan Bolduc is running for re-election for the Liberals. His broadcast truck roams the streets making election promises in English and…

Banana Boots is a one-man-show / memoir in which Fennario recounts, with astonishing insight and wit, the phenomenon of taking his famous bilingual play Balconville to Belfast on a British / Canadian cultural mission. Given the subject of Balconville, that the real problem in Quebec is not one of language…

When naïve small-town boy Dillon meets the sophisticated urban Jack in a gay bar, it’s love at first sight, and not just for a one-night stand either! While these star-crossed lovers manage to bring their initially dubious if not downright disowning families together in celebration of their marriage, their unblemished…

Fastidious and fussy shoe salesman by day and secretive aspiring film screenwriter by night, Oswald Eichersen’s dreams of success are as grandly inflated as his self-esteem is hopelessly deficient. Just outside Eichersen’s place of work, street person Terence Lomy has sat encamped for two years—an indelible fixture on the sidewalk…

Set in landscapes which move from Detroit to China, Bethune is a study of how one man’s vision may shape the world. In this play, Rod Langley attempts to chronicle the journey of Dr. Norman Bethune toward his final destiny. Bethune premiered at the Globe Theatre in Regina, Saskatchewan, in…

Rod Langley’s Bethune chronicles the medical and political career of Norman Bethune, a Canadian-born doctor who died a national hero in the Republic of China in 1939. He remains an esteemed figure in China today, for his selfless contributions to the Communist Party of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War…

One of Canada’s most successful and enduring musical plays, Billy Bishop Goes to War was first published in 1982 and went on to win the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award and the Governor General’s Award for Drama. In 2010, the celebrated story of the World War One flying ace –…

Six years after fleeing the 1973 military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the democratically elected, socialist leader of Chile, eleven-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her family return to South America to join the underground resistance. At eighteen, Carmen commits herself to the movement, running a safe house on the border between…

Boiler Room Suite is Rex Deverell’s play about two Skid Row winos who have climbed into the boiler room of an abandoned hotel on the Prairies to seek refuge from winter and from the world, until it turns kinder. Aggie Rose is a former actress and Sprugg is a failed…

Set in a hotel bar in Montreal on Remembrance Day, Bolsheviki has World War I veteran Harry “Rosie” Rollins telling young reporter Jerry Nines about his experience in the trenches. Rollins recalls men pissing their pants, losing limbs and planning a revolt against their officers. The character of Rosie Rollins…

Michel Tremblay considers Bonjour, Là, Bonjour to be the best of all his works. “In Bonjour, Là, Bonjour, I apprehended the most of what I wanted to do in the theatre—to take out everything that is not strictly necessary.“This new substantially revised translation by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco…

In Bordertown Café, seventeen-year-old Jimmy faces the archetypal Canadian dilemma: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south (young man) to the Land of Opportunity. Jimmy’s dad is the powerfully encoded Western hero of American popular myth – the cowboy as trucker, living his freedom and…

Marie Clements’s acclaimed play sears a dramatic swath through the reactionary identity politics of race, gender and class, using the penetrating yellow-white light, the false sun of uranium and radium, derived from a coal black rock known as pitchblende, as a metaphor for the invisible, malignant evils everywhere poisoning our…

In 1938, in a world about to go mad with war, an Ontario insane asylum seems to offer sanctuary to the characters in Can You See Me Yet? But as Cassandra Wakelin begins to confuse her fellow inmates with members of her own ill-fated family, the question arises: Can anyone…

A drunken Anglican minister who has failed to convert anyone in ten years, an avaricious saloon keeper with a murder in her past, a pregnant child star who has become too old for her roles and a man who claims to be the last of the Mohicans all need a…

At first glance a classic tale of immigrants to North America, there is something more to Vittorio Rossi’s autobiographical A Carpenter’s Trilogy than the conflict of a romanticized past confronting the excitement of a brighter future. Carmela’s Table, part two of this chronicle, finds Silvio, the decorated Italian war hero,…

Cerulean Blue is a comedic play about a struggling blues band invited to participate in a benefit concert for a First Nation community in conflict with governmental authorities. Upon arriving, the band discovers the entire lineup of musical acts has cancelled and they’re left trapped behind barricades. Complicating the matter,…

Three early plays from influential Canadian Latina playwright, Carmen Aguirre. The plays, Chile Con Carne, ¿QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh?, and In a Land Called I Don’t Remember, deal with the experience of exile – the hardships, the heartache, and the horror – as well as revealing the fresh…

What makes Chimera so compelling is that Wendy Lill has lived almost all the roles the play dramatizes: NDP critic for both culture and persons with disabilities, she came to politics after a career in community health care and as a reporter for the CBC.This play arose from her experience…

Michel Marc Bouchard’s latest play tells the story of Queen Christina of Sweden, who wreaked havoc throughout northern Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century. An enigmatic monarch, a flamboyant and unpredictable intellectual, a woman eager for knowledge, and a feminist before her time, Christina reigned over an empire…

Cold Comfort: a play of love & bondage is the third in a quartet of plays that Jim Garrard calls “Bondage Plays for My Country.” The play could take place anywhere along the Trans-Canada Highway, but it happens to be set in Saskatchewan, the geographic centre of the country. There…

From the author’s note from the original production: Colours in the Dark might best be called a play box. Why?I happen to have a play box and it’s filled with not only toys and school relics, but also deedboxes, ancestral coffin plates—in short, a whole life. When you sort through…

Copper Thunderbird is a play on canvases based on the life of Norval Morrisseau. Inside the power-lines which Morrisseau boldly defined in his art were the colours he experienced between his Ojibwa cosmology, his life on the street, and his spiritual and philosophical transformations to become the Father of Contemporary…

Corker uses the familiar but difficult and treacherous nineteenth-century device of representing the family as a microcosm of the nation state. Opening with the extended family’s awkward attendance at the funeral of Serena, aging flower child of the sixties, the symbolic conflicts build quickly. Serena’s sister Merit, the hard-driving, social-program-budget-slashing…

Cottage Radio & Other Plays is a collection of three plays by award-winning playwright and director Taylor Marie Graham. While each work is unique, they all feature the strong and hilarious rural women of Southwestern Ontario. The title play, Cottage Radio, is a three-act drama that zeroes in on the…

Cottagers and Indians explores the politics and issues surrounding a real-life event still occurring in the Kawartha Lakes region of Central Ontario. An Indigenous man, Arthur Copper, has taken it upon himself to repopulate the nearby lakes with wild rice, known amongst the Anishnawbe as Manoomin, much to the disapproval…

A heartwarming comedy about two middle-aged First Nations seniors, Evie and Cecil, on their very first trip out of the country. Evie and Cecil reminisce and bicker as they review a lifetime together. CECILSo, what exactly are we going to do now that we’re here in Mexico?EVIEI’m so glad you…

Cruel Tears is one of the most original and inventive theatre pieces ever staged in Canada. Shakespeare buffs may see in the play certain intriguing parallels to Othello, but in Cruel Tears, the jealous hero is a Ukrainian truck driver from Saskatoon, not a moor of Venice. Described as a…

Co-founder of Toronto’s groundbreaking theatre company da da kamera, Daniel MacIvor is Canada’s most influential post-modern playwright.In his latest collaboration with director Daniel Brooks, MacIvor plays the role of Leonard, who narrates the events leading up to his murder while trying to understand them himself. Through the course of the…

Based on true events, Daisy is a political drama that presents the moment in TV history that ushered in the age of negative advertising and forever changed how we elect our leaders. It also tells the more cynical tale of how a nation got led into war, distracted by the…

In Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, Michel Tremblay examines the sacred and the profane—their similarities and differences; how they merge and become one another. The play consists of two interweaving monologues on religion and sex spoken by Manon (from Forever Yours, Marie-Lou) and Sandra (from Hosanna). In the end, both characters…

Shell-shocked, judged un?t for society and haunted by the sins of war, Lieutenant John Carlyle Dancock ?nds himself committed to an insane asylum where he cannot escape the con?nes of righteous authority or his own conscience, which visits him in the ghostly apparition of a soldier he once tormented. Dancock’s…

Canada’s top playwright sears the page with three new darkly comic plays that denounce political culture, individualism, and the accompanying moral depravity. The title play, Dead Metaphor, examines the collision of a politician’s personal and professional lives, complicated by a son’s return from Afghanistan. In The Ravine, a mayoral candidate…

Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions—theatre of the absurd and mystery novels—to create one of the funniest and thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics. In Act One, six “savages”; noble, innocent, ignorant, fearless, wise and gay, respectively; find themselves in a locked room with the body…

Sharing a title with Henry Kissinger’s infamous book, Tim Carlson’s play Diplomacy is a graphic, conflict-fuelled drama with moments of heartbreak and dark humour—a reflection on the international themes that have come to define our contemporary world. Nominally about Canada and America’s active military involvement in the Middle East’s many…

Bryden MacDonald’s most extreme venture into the world of the theatre to date, Divinity Bash, creates a play informed by Ionesco’s arid visions, Dali’s baroque excesses and Jim Morrison’s amateur nihilisms. As the main character, Albert’s secure and straight world begins to unravel, so does the structure of the language,…

Fifteen years to the day after the death of their father, three brothers get together and drive out to the place where it happened: an old fishing spot on the river down Dangerous Passes Road. Each sibling is facing a crucial rite of passage: Carl, the youngest, is to be…

La Duchesse de Langeais and Other Plays is a collection of five short plays by Québec’s best known playwright, Michel Tremblay – “La Duchesse de Langeais,” “Berthe,” “Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs,” “Gloria Star” and “Surprise, Surprise.”

Doyle has a very funny problem: he hears too much. He can hear the most intimate details of the lives of everyone living in his apartment building. He can tell the temperature of a young neighbour’s bath water by the resonance of her pipes; he knows where the old lady’s…

Empire of the Son is an original one-hander that blurs the boundaries between artistic disciplines and continents. It is a unique theatrical hybrid that combines cinematography with the raw immediacy of a performance piece intimately connected to real life in real time. Through a series of audio interviews, playwright Tetsuro…

En Pièces Détachées is Michel Tremblay’s look at “The Main” in Montreal. The play concerns Hélène, a waitress who used to work in a bar called the Coconut Inn, but who now works slinging smoked meat in a joint on Papineau Street. She is married to Henri, who sits around…

Based on a deposition signed by 14 Chiefs of the Thompson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their…

Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. One of Lucia Frangione’s blasphemy plays,’ it inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In an erotic world where men are…

Acclaimed Portuguese Canadian playwright Elaine Ávila’s new play, Fado: The Saddest Music in the World, is a tale of love and ghosts set in the back alleys and brothels of old Lisbon. Part concert, part theatre, the story of a young woman confronting her country’s fascist past and her own…

False Starts presents a series of determining moments between two people stuck reliving the same moment over and over, but in unexpected ways and in different genres (from diary to dramatic dialogue, film script to sound installation). Their interdependence and fundamental inability to say how they feel for one another…

Founded in Stoney Creek, Ontario in 1897, the Women’s Institute played three key roles which helped lay the foundations of the feminist movement. It provided a means for the continuing education of rural women, often not schooled beyond the elementary level, at first in practical areas of homemaking, home nursing…

Forward was partly inspired by a ten-day sailing expedition around the Svalbard Archipelago, located halfway between Norway and the North Pole. Spanning a hundred years and thousands of kilometres from the sixtieth parallel North to the top of the world, Forward presents a poetic history of energy development in Norway…

Fragments of a Farewell Letter Read by Geologists is a dramatized inquiry in which five geologists are interrogated about the death of one of their colleagues in the Mekong Delta, Cambodia.It is a play about the beginnings and endings of all things. It is a ritualized drama in which meaning…

Fuelled by equal parts outrage, intelligence and wit, Fronteras Americanas re-creates one person’s struggle to construct a home between two cultures, while exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. This one-person play works through bold juxtapositions and satiric reference points: Simón Bolívar and Speedy Gonzales;…

The apple of Momma Lou’s eye, Gideon embodies his parents’ hope for a brighter future for their family. College educated with the tireless support and sacrifice of his parents, he was to be the one to break free of the ghetto, to enjoy an integrated family life with his newfound…

As Morris Panych’s latest comedy opens, we hear Iris, a precocious girl of ten, saying: “These are the last few days of my childhood.” The death of her goldfish, Amal, she is sure, has been announced by the air-raid sirens during the day’s school drill. For Iris, there remain a…

While panhandling outside a coffee shop, Johnny, a Cree woman who lives on the streets, is shocked to recognize a face from her childhood, which was spent in a First Nations residential school. Desperate to hear the man acknowledge the terrible abuse he inflicted on her and other children at…

From his wheelchair in a nursing home, the aging Conrad Aiken recalls his long, stormy friendship with Malcolm Lowry. When Aiken is 40, Lowry’s father pays him to tutor the young Malcolm. But the protegé becomes Aiken’s friend, and, gradually, a real literary contender. Mercer’s powerful play reveals the shifts…

Gordon was always an odd little child, given his penchant for setting the neighbours’ sheds on fire with their pets locked inside and his fascination with the funeral rituals at the church across the way. Home-schooled in the evenings within the bounds of a somewhat limited curriculum of drunken impromptu…

Gracie is a dramatic monologue that tells the story of a girl raised in a fundamentalist community that transports child brides between polygamist communities in both Canada and the United States.As the play opens, Gracie is eight years old and moving with her mother, brother, and sisters from her community…

When an image of Jesus appears on the side of a Tim Hortons restaurant in Nately, Nova Scotia, life is forever changed. The town’s inhabitants are challenged to ask difficult questions about faith, life and love with sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious results. Complicating the matter, of course, are the more…

Heaven is George F. Walker’s ‘millennium play.’ Well, sort of, if we can free ourselves from the expectation of the usual science-fiction-based projection and imposition of our current personal, cultural and spiritual values on the future of the coming millennium, considered almost mandatory for authors working in this particular genre.…

It is 1956, and Silvio Rosato, a decorated World War II veteran, shows up at the house of his father, Eduardo Rosato, who had abandoned him and his mother in Italy in 1920 to start a new life and family for himself in Chicago. Silvio’s Italian-American half-siblings, Eddie and Ida,…

Between 1860 and 1930 an officially sanctioned child migration from Britain to Canada took place. During that time over 80,000 children, unaccompanied by their parents or siblings and often separated from them forever, were placed at Canadian factories and farms where, more often than not, they were exploited as indentured…

In Michel Tremblay’s classic play about identity in crisis, Claude leaves the conformity of small-town Quebec to realize a new life and a new persona among the drag queens and prostitutes of Montreal’s seedy “Main” – the boulevard that marks the division of the city’s anglophone and francophone neighbourhoods. Claude’s…

An opera diva, Patricia, (almost 50) meets her Waterloo singing Salomé at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. In an impromptu get-together in her Nuns’ Island penthouse, on the afternoon of her return from Europe, her mother, a popular Montreal stage and television actress (pushing 70), and her idealistic committed-to-new-work daughter…

When Frankie’s dad dies, her mom, Ava, can’t afford to live in the city anymore. The only asset they’re left with is a farmhouse situated on twenty acres of land far outside of town. Ava decides to move there and start an Ayurveda clinic on the property, giving her precocious…

Jason Pierce, a 31 year old Canadian half-Native man, is packing up his urban apartment to leave it all behind for his romanticized vision of a return to life on the reserve where he grew up. As he’s leaving, he is paid an unexpected visit by a 34 year old…

Four seasons after her husband Tom’s disappearance, Colette remains emotionally paralyzed, isolated in a country cottage. She waits in anguish, not knowing whether he is dead or alive, but clinging to hope. A young stranger in a jean jacket waves to her from the frozen lake – a sign? She…

Steve Galluccio's newest stage triumph is a comedy set in 1952 Naples. It recounts how one broken engagement ripples throughout friends and family, affecting all of their respective lives in different ways. In a world conflicted by traditional values and postwar-era thinking, theatrical archetypes evolve into stereotypes that became hallmarks…

“There’s no business like show business,” and if you ever had any doubt about that, In the Eyes of God will bring you back to your senses. A vicious, vulgar, unsparing and grotesque look at the talent agencies that remake the Hollywood stars and tabloid personalities out of the willing…

Daniel Danis’s homage to Aeschylus, the “father of tragedy,” is set on an imaginary island in the St. Lawrence River. The eccentric islanders are about to join in the outdoor “Rages” staged by the trickster Coyote—wild Bacchanalia where the participants, under the influence of his potions, lose all vestiges of…

Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original ScriptInside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.Mirroring controversial real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Inside the Seed concerns a once-brilliant scientist who made a startling discovery: a bio-engineered form of rice…

Like many outgoing young women, Fatima feels rebellious against parents she sees as strict. It just so happens that she is Egyptian-born and wears a hijab. When anti-Muslim graffiti appears on the walls of her school, Fatima transfers to a new school. The guidance counsellor there, Mr. E., does his…

Jacob's Wake explores the relationship of a father, Winston, with his three sons, Wayne, a corrupt politician, Alonzo, a cynical business man, and Brad, a failed priest. It quickly moves from an apparently realistic family drama to nightmarish, expressionistic drama of 20th century failure as an approaching storm begins to…

In this powerful dramatic monologue, Lorena Gale remembers, by reconstructing for the audience, her childhood and coming of age as an African-Canadian in Montreal.Her autobiographical protagonist is unabashedly one of those spoil-sport “ethniques” who, for political factions led by the likes of Parizeau, undermined and destroyed the separatist “pur-laine” vision…

Desperately poor immigrants find refuge with Montreal’s legendary barkeep, Joe Beef. Cast of five women and five men.

In Patrice Martin’s ticklish tip of the hat to the writing of Franz Kafka, we follow the misadventures of a bureaucrat – aptly named “P.” (pun intended) – as he embarks on the illustrious task of collecting the titular headgear. “P.” expects that the accomplishment of this seemingly simple task…

TIME: All. SPACE: The Multiverse. Come along for the ride to Kamloopa, the largest Powwow on the West Coast. This high-energy Indigenous matriarchal story follows two urban Indigenous sisters and a lawless Trickster who face our world head-on as they come to terms with what it means to honour who…

New York City, 1928. Master-thief Mac must join an FBI sting operation against a cadre of corrupt bankers. Music, murder, and mayhem ensue – at the speakeasy where criminals scheme and on Wall Street where financiers conspire.This trenchantly satirical play was first produced at the Stratford Festival in 2009, where…

A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations. The family house in the country is the setting for the story of Victoire and her descendants through her husband and through her true love—who also happens to be her brother. It is Victoire’s anger at being forced…

Lawrence and Holloman, a hapless nerd and a loquacious salesman, meet by chance. From this fleetingly irritating and insignificant encounter, the viciously murderous and incredulously bizarre plot emerges into the full-blown twilight of what appear to be their insignificant and meaningless lives. And it is this very absence of significance…

The booming bedroom community outside a large Canadian city is blown apart when fifteen-year-old Blake challenges long-held views of spirituality and sexuality. A student at the local Catholic high school, Blake confides in her best friend, Tracy, that she feels sexually attracted to her. At first encouraged and then rebuffed,…

Penny and Ezra Lamb are home-schooled by their parents on a hippie colony near Uranium City until the police discover it also happens to be the largest marijuana grow-op in Saskatchewan. “Legoland” is how their pot-smoking elders always described the outside world, and the Lamb siblings are dying to get…

Life Without Instruction is based on a true story and a real trial. Artemesia Gentileschi’s father, the late-Renaissance painter Orazio Gentileschi, takes the unusual step of having his daughter trained in the art of painting under the instruction of his friend, Agostino Tassi. Tassi rapes Artemesia, and is taken to…

Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now gathers many of the poems from Daphne Marlatt’s 1972 Vancouver Poems, somewhat revised or in some cases substantially revised, and follows them with “Liquidities,” a series of recent poems about Vancouver’s incessant deconstruction and reconstruction, its quick transformations both on the ground and in…

In a Perth County farmhouse some time during the 1930s, a boy named Owen decides to spend the summer putting on plays with the help of his cousins, his grown-up relatives and the neighbourhood children. One of the plays they put on is their adaptation of a Victorian novel, The…

This book does more than collect three of John Gray’s musical plays in one volume. In his preface to each play, and in his charming and wide-ranging introduction, Gray takes this opportunity to offer his readers some startling insights into the process by which his plays have come about; into…

Lost Souls and Missing Persons premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1984. It is a comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class—a trope of insulating banalities which trades the body’s physical and spiritual content for the artifice of a formalized security…

La Litière (1994), Rappel (1995) and Ressusciter (1996), published together here in English translation as Embedded, Apocalypse, and Resurrection respectively, make up a trilogy of plays featuring Gen-Xers Ludwig and Mae. Ludwig, trained as an engineer, hasn’t been able to find work since graduating some time ago. The fact that…

Mambo Italiano achieves its overwhelming power through a perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama. Angelo, at the prompting of his equally repressed sister Anna, has told his very traditionally Italian immigrant parents, Maria and Gino, that he is gay. Hurt, betrayed and mortified by Angelo’s coming out, his…

An extended tour de force with no act or scene breaks, Marcel Pursued by the Hounds examines how our “innocent” childhood games and fantasies can come back to haunt us in adult life, full of the dangers and realities that were invisible to us as children. An extended dialogue between…

This fascinating version of Daniel MacIvor’s most successful play to date lets the reader in on a secret: it was never primarily written as a work for live theatrical performance, but as a vehicle for his development of a screenplay, also included in this new edition. In his surprisingly revealing…

Memories of You is a play about the triumph and freedom of the spirit. It validates a woman’s right to chose the shape of her own life, in the full knowledge and understanding of the lasting consequences of her desire, her imagination and her actions. In its rejection of sentiment…

As in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, two brothers struggle for power and ideals each believes are right. Set in the late nineteenth century in a coastal town in Norway, Enemy charts the journey of an idealistic and naive doctor who believes people will behave responsibly if given the facts,…

In this probing character study, Rideout fashions a hypothetical 1969 meeting in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay and an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer – beat generation author Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately called him Ti-Jean. At the…

As all the great dramatists since the Greek tragedians have known, class and gender roles continue to remain the two fundamental determinants of the social fabric of any culture—even one, like our own, in which the boundaries of those identities have become fluid, situational and transitory.David French’s adaptation of August…

This fifth edition of the classic Modern Canadian Plays sets out an even broader range of plays than previous editions. The plays in the first volume date from 1967 to 1991, and outline an indigenous Canadian drama emerging from its colonial roots to celebrate a rising nationalism. But more to…

Modern Canadian Plays is the core text for university-level Canadian drama courses around the world. Now in its fifth edition, with the previous edition published in 2002, the two-volume Modern Canadian Plays drama series anthologizes major Canadian plays written and performed since 1967. The second volume presents a range of…

“I don’t see how a play can be Canadian. I don’t think there are any plays that you could call strictly Canadian … What does that phrase mean?”Now, thirty-three years after Canadian directors spoke their minds, or rather shrugged their shoulders at the seeming hopelessness of de-colonizing Canadian theatre, this…

In Volume II, Wasserman shows us Canadian drama from 1985 up to 1997, during which we see women playwrights rise to greater prominence, along with Native, gay and lesbian, and Quebecois playwrights. But, continuing on from Volume I, this selection of plays not only takes us farther into the annals…

Mom’s the Word was created out of a Saturday morning writers’ support group. Getting together to share their experiences, six women performers struck upon the idea to write about what they were going through as mothers trying to maintain their careers, their individual identities and their relationships with their partners.…

When the feisty and rebellious Moragh (Moo) MacDowell meets the intriguing Harry Parker, she decides nothing will ever separate them … and Harry has been running ever since. Moo is an unconventionally comedy of love and obsession. Cast of 5 women and 3 men.

Canada’s top playwright takes on teen pregnancy in two comic dramas for young people. Moss ParkIt’s been twenty years since the debut of Tough!, but only two years have passed in the lives of Tina and Bobby, the main characters. Of course the poverty trap, which grips them both, is…

From the renowned author of Balconville, this powerful drama gives a voice to the disillusioned working-class women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec, during the First World War. Following in the trudging footsteps of Fennario’s anti-war protest play Bolsheviki (Talonbooks, 2012), Motherhouse similarly debunks the sentimental notions…

My TWP Plays presents five important plays written by Jack Winter while he was resident playwright at Toronto Workshop Productions, one of the first great troupes of the experimental and alternative theatre movement. The carnivalesque style of the selected works in this anthology reflects the turbulence, contradictions, and subversion of…

It is 1976. In a tavern in the Point Saint Charles working class district of Montreal, three friends gather on their lunch hour and reminisce about the past. They are survivors of a decade. One is Jerry Nines, a writer who has had some success, having written a novel and…

Welcome to the small town of Tartan Cross, Nova Scotia, where skeletons rattle in closets and past histories are so intertwined that the lives of four fortysomething, eccentric characters have become so complicated that something needs to change. In the comedy, Odd Ducks, award-winning playwright Bryden MacDonald positions his four…

A phenomenal critical success when first produced by Western Theatre Conspiracy in 2004, Omniscience is much more than a murder-mystery set in a quasi-familiar contemporary landscape of high-tech urban warfare. The plot, not surprisingly optioned already for a movie, is redolent with untrustworthy “embedded” journalists manufacturing positivist pseudodocumentaries about the…

Charlie Evans, a pool shark down on his luck in the bedroom as well as in the pool hall, has two days to pay off a $3,000 debt, or have his legs broken by Bulldog, a psychotic debt collector who also happens to be having an affair with Charlie’s wife,…

Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is the emotional story of a woman’s struggle to acknowledge her birth family. Grace, a Native girl adopted by a White family, is asked by her birth sister to return to the Reserve for their mother’s funeral. Afraid of opening old wounds, Grace…

Other Schools of Thought is a collection of three unique plays that allow adult audiences to reflect on their past and young audiences to reflect on their future. With stark sets and minimalist presentational styles, they leave no room for condescension—for dismissal of “adult concerns” by the young. In their…

Canada. 1940. In a time and country fraught with the uncertainties of war, Prime Minister MacKenzie King calls for the destruction of any “subversive elements” on the nation’s soil. The Act is supported by the majority of Canadians: anxious, patriotic and “intolerant” of fascism. After Canada officially declares war with…

In the gold-rush era of the 1850s, the McKinnons settled on an island off the west coast of Canada, where the first thing they did was to turn this “wilderness” into an English country garden complete with vegetables, flowers, fruit trees and an elegant gazebo. After six generations, times and…

In Albertine in Five Times, Michel Tremblay portrayed one of his most unforgettable characters during five decades of her life, beginning in her thirties. Now, in Past Perfect, we meet Albertine at twenty and discover the dark secret of her being. Still reeling from the heartbreak that plunged her into…

In “The Axe” a literature professor arrives at the door of one of his students in the middle of the night. On his way he has stumbled (with a flask of whiskey) through the pouring rain, stopping in a city park to vandalize the statue of an angel, tormented by…

Rose is the eagerly awaited third installment in Tomson Highway’s “rez” cycle—a large-cast musical set on the Wasaychigan Hill Reserve in 1992, reintroducing many of the characters from the first two plays, The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.The play features, as the title suggests, Roses. One…

Her star rising as a Hollywood diva, Frances Farmer chooses to join the socialist Group Theatre in New York. This idealistic, raucous and non-conforming movie star, pursued by the government for her alleged communist connections, was finally incarcerated with the help of her mother at Steilacoom, a Seattle psychiatric hospital,…

In Sainte-Carmen of the Main, Carmen—a character who appeared previously in Forever Yours, Marie-Lou—returns to the Rodéo from Nashville, where she has been sent to “improve her technique” in yodelling. But not only does she improve her technique, she also begins to write her own songs whose lyrics speak directly…

One of the most intriguing theories about the identity of the infamous London murderer, Jack the Ripper, is that he hid behind the skirts of respectability, social position, and perhaps, even royalty …In Saucy Jack, the author of Blood Relations and Doc, Sharon Pollock, implicates the most upper echelons of…

The time: 1938. The place: S.S. #1 Jericho School, a one-room schoolhouse in a farming area just outside the fictional village of Baker’s Creek. There, a delightful but unmanageable group of children finally meets its match—Melita Linton, an 18-year-old teacher fresh out of Normal School. But Miss Linton soon faces…

Seeds presents an intelligent portrait of farming and scientific communities in conflict. Part courtroom drama and part social satire, Seeds documents the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada showdown between Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser and biotech multinational Monsanto Inc. In question is the legitimacy of patenting genetically modified food crops. The…

Music has long been considered beneficial in enhancing cognitive skills, and some have even suggested that music constitutes its own category of brain function; that it is, in fact, a separate and distinct type of thought. As is sex, which can produce, aside from children, complete dysfunction, confused mental activity…

In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages…

An uproariously funny and sharply inquisitive new play from one of Canada’s leading Indigenous playwrights, Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion explores the possibility of reconciliation between Peoples and urgently questions past and contemporary forms of Canadian colonialism. Taylor’s twenty-seventh play, Sir John A’s characters include Canada’s…

Sisters is a tough, uncompromising look at a convent-run Native residential school. While the play chronicles in graphic detail the by now well documented agenda of cultural genocide which motivated the establishment of Native residential schools in Canada, the daring triumph of this play is that it reveals the far…

Skydive explores the world of dreams and imagination: the universal human desire to push beyond our physical limitations and to fly.Having grown apart after a traumatic and defining moment in their youth, two brothers reconnect to fulfill a life-long ambition to go skydiving. Morgan (a feckless schemer who has recently…

David French’s award-winning and ongoing dramatic cycle about the Mercer family, both in their native Newfoundland and later, as participants in the great outport clearances, relocated in Toronto, has become a defining part of Canada’s theatrical history.Set in Toronto, the first play, Leaving Home (1972), introduced the family saga’s key…

Somewhere Else contains George F. Walker’s own selection of his early plays which matter; which for him have stood the test of time; which represent, as he once said, his “classical veneer.” In them he honed his considerable and unique dramatic talent along “that fine line between the serious and…

During a thunderstorm, lightning strikes the home of the Lastings, killing the parents and forever bonding the children, even though Rock, William, Fred-James and Naomi are not blood-related. Years later, still haunted by their terrible childhood memory, the three older brothers await the return of their beloved sister who has…

2006 marked the 400th anniversary of a major theatrical event in the history of North American drama. The Theatre of Neptune in New France by lawyer, poet and historian Marc Lescarbot was a masque of welcome performed on the Bay of Fundy by members of the tiny French colony of…

The universal mark of good satire is still to make audiences laugh at the worst traits in human nature. Here, in his own words, is how Morris Panych updated these three great comedy classics from a century ago: The Government Inspector is peopled with the most duplicitous, under-handed and shifty…

Photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s life was filled with the events of Victorian melodrama: adultery, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and an abandoned child. Tried for the murder of his wife’s lover, he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide. However, these events, which predate his subsequent obsession with stopping time and freezing…

Something completely different from George Walker! Six plays, united only by the fact that they each take place in one and the same suburban motel room. Transients, lovers, the haunted and the hunted, the desperate and the dumb, each “strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are…

Talking Bodies collects Larry Tremblay’s four stunning and memorable solo performances for the stage. Thematically related, each deals with the reconstruction of an identity which, through trauma, illusion, accident or destiny, has been threatened, destabilized, broken or dispersed.It is the body in which any identity finds its origin, but it…

In this psychological thriller set in a fictionalized 1930s Vancouver, Alex Braithewaite, a troubled but passionate theatre critic, believes he has found the legendary Stanley Lee, director of the infamous avant-garde theatre The Empty Space. Alex becomes convinced that this man’s radically subversive ideas are what the city’s arts community…

Nan’s family is home for Thanksgiving, but some unsolicited truths are about to be dropped at the dinner table. Old wounds and new realities collide, and sibling rivalry is stoked, but the enduring spirit that guides this family charges on, ever fierce. Thanks for Giving offers plenty to chew on.…

It's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before, she had vacationed with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For herself and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery.Both of the girls…

The story of a woman (her name is never given), sent away from her family by her brother, the Bishop, after she is found exploring her sexuality at age seventeen. In a series of twenty-four “snapshots,” That Woman is a devastating Judeo-Christian allegory where voyeurism, fantasy, masturbation, seduction, violence and…

Canada’s most famous Indigenous playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or…

The Art of Building a Bunker is a dark, viciously funny story recounting a week in the life of your average Elvis as he endures mandatory workplace sensitivity training. Elvis struggles to meet the demands of Camerson, the sensitivity traning leader, and to work with the group that surrounds him…

The Baby Blues is Drew Hayden Taylor’s highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of “fancy dancers” of every stripe on the powwow trail. In juxtaposing three generations of careless wandering hedonists, progenitors of a string of offspring from their six-night stands, with their erstwhile…

Three timely and provocative plays by the award-winning, internationally produced Portuguese Canadian playwright Elaine Ávila.

A consortium of German developers shows up on the fictional Otter Lake Reserve with a seemingly irresistible offer to improve the local economy: the creation of “Ojibway World,” a Native theme park designed to attract European tourists, causing hilarious personal and political divisions within the local community.The Berlin Blues concludes…

It is June 1981: the farm debt crisis. Pride Toronto’s first parade. Everything is changing, including fifteen-year-old Esther, who runs away to the city to escape the family farm. With the help of a brash young hustler and a gay activist who shelters street kids, she confronts her conservative Christian…

In this collection of two plays about the process of children becoming adults, Drew Hayden Taylor works his delightfully comic and bitter-sweet magic on the denials, misunderstandings and preconceptions which persist between Native and Colonial culture in North America.In “The Boy in the Treehouse,” Simon, the son of an Ojibway…

The Buz’Gem Blues is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s ongoing zany, outrageous, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his “Blues Quartet.”Marianne has talked her mother, Martha, into attending an Elders conference with her, where she is to…

In 1956, Silvio Rosato, a decorated World War II veteran, shows up at the house of his bigamist father, Eduardo Rosato, who had abandoned him and his mother in Italy in 1920, starting a second life and family for himself in Chicago. Handsome, assured and accomplished, there is something sinister…

The Concise Köchel cannot be substituted for the “Complete” catalogue. Published in response to the many requests from musicologists and musicians received by the publishers Breitkopf and Hartel, this abridged, less costly and easier to handle edition is designed to meet the most frequent needs of those interested in the…

May 1953. The Empress of France sets sail from Montreal. On the pretext of attending the celebrations marking the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, an important mafioso leaves for England where he secretly plans to live in exile with his two sons. Aboard this floating palace in the middle of…

In taking on “The Matter of Québec,” David Fennario provides audiences and readers with an abiding critique of the notion that history is created around “great causes” by “great men.” Given the recent reversal of fortune delivered to the tempestuous sound and fury of the Québec separatist movement, The Death…

Of all our contemporary urban myths none is more absurd than the fiction of the “classless society,” and Morris Panych’s latest comedy penetrates ruthlessly to the shock and horror of the residue of hardened pesto soiling its porcelain heart.Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler…

Quebec City, 1908. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt.As part of her long career, Bernhardt – known to her loyal fans as “The Divine” – visited Canada several times between 1880 and 1917, most often…

In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues—to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles,…

The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept is the second of three plays chronicling the saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest, most ruthless and ill fated families.While Robbie and Joan’s two sons, Alex and Robert, heirs apparent to the family fortune, are groomed to hold the reins of power, Robbie Dunsmuir cuts…

The first of three plays in this saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest and most ruthless families, The Dunsmuirs: Alone at the Edge chronicles the disgrace and exile of Robbie Dunsmuir from Scotland, the settlement of his family as indentured labourers to the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Nanaimo coalfields…

By the time he was writing Gossip in 1977, George Walker had already begun to shift his settings from, on the one hand, North America’s colonial roots in Europe, and on the other, its fascination with other, exotically foreign locales. Yet, even in The Power Plays, Walker is still exploring…

Where is the East End? It’s where the sun comes up and where you bury the dead. It’s where George Walker set six of his plays. It’s the East End of Toronto; the Lower East Side of New York; down by the East River; East L.A.; East Vancouver. It’s where…

Edward Curtis saw his job as that of creating a photographic record of “the vanishing race of the North American Indian.” His work therefore became as much a projection of colonial attitudes upon aboriginal peoples as it was an authentic record of their lives.The Edward Curtis Project began when the…

Frank, having dedicated his life to the unremarkable, and Walker, paranoid since being struck by lighting at age three, attempt to flee from each other and end up following each other instead. They find themselves in a run-down hotel operated by deaf and misdirected Willy and blind Alice, who has…

This comedy-drama skewers the film world when a veteran playwright must decide between accepting government funds to turn his new play into a Canadian-made feature film with a multi-million dollar contract. Or accept an American producer’s offer of total artistic control but far less money. Will Moretti stand firm in…

The Execution is Marie-Claire Blais’s only play for the stage. Set in a boarding school, it tells the story of two schoolboys who plot the murder of one of their classmates and enact the crime. As a play, it is a study of innocence, evil and complicity, themes well-known to…

A story of the ill-fated romance between a wandering musician-social-idealist and a Cape Breton coal miner’s daughter, whose dreams are reawakened by their passion. The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum is a play in which the all-consuming brightness of dreams and memory are overshadowed by absentee greed, callousness and exploitation. It…

Winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize, The Gull is the first Canadian play staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese Noh. Produced by Vancouver’s Pangaea Arts, and written by award-winning poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt, the play is set in 1950: wartime restrictions on interned Japanese Canadians…

The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: “If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created…

Two plays by award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod. Little Sister was first performed at Theatre Direct in Toronto in 1994 and won the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Theatre for Young Audiences in 1995. The Hope Slide was first performed at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1992 and won the Floyd…

Set in a school facing the real-life challenges of immigration, income inequality, and fears of violence in our schools, The In-Between is a realistic, relatable exploration of the complex social circumstances students must navigate in contemporary schools.

Camus’s The Just is based on the true story of a group of Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905. This new translation by Bobby Theodore comes at a time when the play is more relevant than ever and provokes a troubling yet vital question: Do the…

What happens when the “other woman” becomes your roommate? What happens when she starts to confide in you about her affair?From the playwright of “A Common Man’s Guide to Loving Women,” comes a claustrophobic drama, set in the Black community of Toronto’s Bloor and Bathurst neighbourhood, which challenges the distance…

Peter and Mary are unhappy. But they don’t know it yet. They work long hours. They invest their money for a retirement they will probably never enjoy. They buy things that are supposed to make them happy but that they never use. They obsess about the nightmare engines of Western…

At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the spanish ?u epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated…

’Ordinarily, theatre relies on illusion in order to reveal truths; The Noam Chomsky Lectures relies on truths in order to reveal illusions. Following the impetus of Chomsky himself, Brooks and Verdecchia have recognized that mass media, mass spectacle, have trivialized and severed consciousness and conscience, separating both from a communal…

Two epigraphs that frame The Occupation of Heather Rose, one from Alice in Wonderland and the other from Heart of Darkness, prepare the audience for the nightmare of dislocation and alienation this one-woman show evokes.Young, naïve, and inadequately trained, urban health care/social worker Heather Rose flirts with the pilot as…

The published version of George Ryga’s hit play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is widely available as a best-seller. Yet the work of one of Canada’s best known playwrights, canonized by critics and studied by students world-wide, remains largely absent from the Canadian stage; Ryga’s very reputation as a dramatist…

First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Plays contain Gossip (1977), Filthy Rich (1979), and The Art of War (1983). Completely revised and updated for this new Talonbooks edition, these three plays showcase both the development and the culmination of Walker’s engagement with the film noir style.

London, 1483. From the aged Duchess of York, who is 99 years old and will never sit on the throne, to the young Lady Anne who will marry Richard III in order to reign, Chaurette traces the shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre and portray…

A play within a play. A young playwright draws on his family as the raw material for his first work. Cast of four women and three men.

Two events gave birth to this play: the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet by the spanish courts and the 1995 death of Aguirre’s uncle, who drank himself to death on Vancouver’s skid row, never living to make a victorious return to his country. It has taken decades of silence for…

Published for the first time, David French’s The Riddle of the World remains a classic of the Canadian stage.Stockbroker Ron and ex-priest Steve are two new singles who get together to console themselves after having been abandoned by their mates. Through a comic series of false starts, disastrous one-night stands,…

Hubert Clements is a black cellist on tour with a symphony orchestra. Their guest soloist is injured and the conductor asks Clements to stand in. After wrestling with an extremely dif?cult passage in the performance piece, Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello, Clements ?nally resorts to improvising his way through…

In an imaginary letter to an absent older brother, Braidie struggles to understand the torture and killing of a teenage girl by a group of her school-mates. MacLeod’s young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as…

Edgerton Foundation New Play Award: Morris Panych, The Shoplifters (Winner)In this riotously funny new comedy from Morris Panych, we meet Alma, a seasoned career shoplifter who prefers the five-finger discount over some lousy seniors’ day deal. But it’s not just an empty wallet that leads Alma to a life of…

From the award-winning author of stage hits Mambo Italiano and In Piazza San Domenico comes a delicious, saucy new comedy about Terry and Robert, a young couple with roots in the Italian neighbourhood of St. Leonard in Montreal. The couple’s newly renovated duplex has barely a hint of gilded rococo…

Rural Quebec in the fifties. A battered child, Maurice, has taken refuge in a fantasy world. Alone on the farm one afternoon, he invites his pet goose, Teeka, into the house where his bedroom and the bathroom become the scene of some of Tarzan’s most terrifying adventures. His parents unexpected…

The Trespassers unfolds over the course of a few weeks in a town in the middle of nowhere—not small enough to be a quaint place or large enough to be in any way an interesting one. They once had a sawmill here, which was a going concern before it was…

“When I was thirteen I was raped by the Paper Bag Rapist. I was with my younger cousin at the time, and neither one of us ever saw him—he used a paper bag to cover his own head or those of his victims. Not that we would have seen him…

The Unnatural and Accidental Women is a surrealist dramatization of a thirty-year murder case involving many mysterious deaths in the “Skid Row” area of Vancouver. All the victims were found dead with a blood-alcohol reading far beyond safe levels, and all were last seen in the company of Gilbert Paul…

Eighteen-year-old Connor, an aspiring author whose fantastical stories foretell his growing struggle with depression, can’t wait to be free of his adverb-wielding, solve-it-all mother, Sharon. But six weeks after leaving for university, he drops out and returns home.Dan Mulano is an infatuated new dad and well-meaning police officer whose selfishness…

In The Ventriloquist, Larry Tremblay directs his celebrated mastery of the dramatic monologue to an interrogation of the process of characterization itself. Alone on the stage with his puppet, the ventriloquist introduces his “self ” as a construct of characters, along with his “other” imagined characters, to an audience which…

A young woman has disappeared at the edge of the city. Four women are drawn into the race to find her. As we watch them grid-search the fields for traces of her passing, we move through the shattering events of their recent lives that have left them as lost as…

How much do we value clean water? Enough to stop our industrialized way of life from degrading it? The documentary play The Watershed follows an artist and her family in the struggle to chart a sustainable course between economic prosperity and environmental stewardship.Largely constructed from original interviews conducted by the…

Three short plays by Michael Cook: Tiln, Quiller and Therese’s Creed.In Tiln, two old men are caught in a personal power struggle. Using a lighthouse setting, Cook explores the modern man's dilemma in an uncaring world. Cast of 2 men.In contrast, Quiller is a one-person play set in a Newfoundland…

Lambda Literary Award, Drama: Michel Marc Bouchard, Tom at the Farm, translated by Linda Gaboriau (Winner)Following the accidental death of his lover, and in the throes of his grief, urban ad executive Tom travels to the country to attend the funeral and to meet his mother-in-law, Agatha, and her son,…

Three Young Native American sisters and their mother board a bus bound for Los Angeles, leaving home as part of a 1950s government mandate to relocate reserve Indians to urban centres. This assimilationist policy was one focus of Métis playwright Marie Clements’s research when she was commissioned to create a…

Jhana, is a beautiful eighteen-year-old who lives with her mother Maddie and their boarder Bill, a sometime poet. Jhana’s father, King, shows up partway through the first act and it is his presence for the first time in a long time in this unusual family that really galvanizes all four…

This volume contains two uniquely Canadian stories of exile. Whether portraying the romantic lovers in The Island of Demons, or the political revolutionary Gabriel Dumont in Six Dry Cakes for the Hunted, the plays are related by their underlying themes. From the earliest days of settlement in Canada, those who…

In the fall of 1918, a world ravaged by four years of war was suddenly hit by a mysterious and deadly plague—the “spanish Flu.” The illness struck not only the young and the elderly, but also people in the prime of their lives, advancing rapidly toward mortality in its victims.…

It is 1897, and word of gold on the Klondike has spurred a frantic rush of miners to cash in on the riches rumoured to be found there. But by the time the prospectors arrive, all the claims have been staked. Without enough supplies or expertise to endure the harsh…

War Cantata translated by Keith Turnbull How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? War Cantata looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his…

Warriors enters the world of advertising where, even if the product is war, the product can be sold. Two ad men lock themselves in a room to work on a new slogan for The Canadian Armed Forces — the tension of creation is brilliantly and dangerously portrayed as they consider…

WASPs is one of those plays where the whole is quite literally much greater than the sum of its parts—so much so that it becomes, in retrospect, the subject of the play, “what the play is about,” and that doesn’t hit you until you are half-way home after a fun…

Canada’s master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism. We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed. The list of characters in We the Family reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed,…

Inspired by a true story, we the same opens in 1979 Việt Nam, where six children and a mother become separated from their father and husband as they flee their homeland by boat. Against all odds, they survive pirate attacks, typhoons, and starvation, ending up shipwrecked on a desert island.…

When the Westray mine exploded, the human tragedy and suffering that resulted were chilling proof that the age-old price paid for coal is human blood. After the dead were laid to rest, the bureaucratic back-stabbing and corporate refusal of responsibility were all too familiar to followers of the history of…

Two-time Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Morris Panych has done with What Lies Before Us the almost unthinkable: he has turned Waiting for Godot into a comedy while simultaneously heightening rather than minimizing the profound existential questions it asks. But this play is no mere parody of a theatre classic, nor…

Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some,…

Dragging Newfoundland “kicking and screaming into the 20th century” (a quote attributed to Joey Smallwood), resettlement was a carrot-and-stick approach to depopulating the province’s fishing outports. Communities were encouraged to abandon themselves in exchange for financial aid and the promise of better services in centralized “growth” towns. Between 1954 and…

Willful Acts is an expanded and updated collection of Margaret Hollingsworth’s best-known and most popular plays, including The Apple in the Eye, Everloving, Diving, Islands, and War Babies (nominated for a Governor General’s Award); along with her latest play, Commonwealth Games. Hollingsworth’s earlier work showcases recurring women’s issues and themes…

Two buddies, theatre artists and long-time friends Marcus and James, sit at a table and pass the time together playing a made-up game in which they name people, places, or things – Pamela Anderson, microwave ovens, their fathers, Goldman Sachs – and debate whether they are successful or not; in…

With Bated Breath asks questions about memory—how and why it plays such a prominent role in our lives: how time affects it, how it fractures, how we often reinvent it depending on the situation—and why it is that certain things stay with us with a blistering clarity, while the shadows…

Torrential rains have descended upon a small isolated village, and the overflowing river has washed away everything in its path. The mudslide has gutted the writing room, the place where a group of senior citizens used to meet to record their memories. It was after the exodus of their children…

Memory, personal, familial, and societal – is the central theme of this new play by Governor General’s Award-winning playwright François Archambault. Translated by Bobby Theodore, this work follows a family’s struggle with dementia. Edouard is a University professor and historian, a figure prominent in the public eye and a long-time…