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…

A young woman, her sports-fan ex-boyfriend, a Gen-X loser, and his disabled brother. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.

Newfoundland joins Confederation in the continuing saga of the Mercer family. Cast of 6 women, 6 men and 2 male children.

The relationships of the young, the aging and the middle-aged, and between urban life and nature at the end of the millennium. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

The third play in Taylor’s hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

A man’s contemplation of suicide leads to a charming and surprising ending. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

A young Palestinian is befriended, then tortured and murdered by Canadian soldiers during Operation Desert Storm. Cast of 3 to 5 men.

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…

Mark Killman—a feared but much admired director—hires two actors to play Laurel and Hardy in a re-enactment of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, while he himself plays the iconic role of the target as a wax figure. Absurd, hilarious and haunting.

In this play inspired by the novel Adrift on the Nile, by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, a group of urban Egyptian hipsters engages in debates about secularism and “fundamentalism” with tragic consequences.” Cast of 4 women and 6 men.

Exposes the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the “war on terror”. Cast of 4 men.

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…

Tremblay presents the powerful story of one woman, Albertine, at five different times in her life. Together, the five Albertines provide a moving portrait of an extraordinary “ordinary” woman in this Chalmers Award-winning play. Cast of 6 women.

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…

A play about modern day witch-hunting. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

Cast of 1 woman and 4 men.

Native activists and environmentally concerned vegetarians are invited to a dinner party, where irreconcilable cultural differences clash over moose roast and vegetarian lasagna. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

A college student’s life changes when he chooses to sponsor a Salvadoran refugee as a class project. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

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 to a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and realizes that the mid-life cocoon he has spun around himself is beginning to unwind.

Gwen and Ned lose their former middle-class lifestyle as they attempt to comprehend the murder of their schizophrenic daughter Karen, even seeking solace in the wry musings of the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut.

Two plays, one on Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976–83, constitute an unsparing interrogation of a world perpetually at war.

This perceptively poignant Governor General’s Award-nominated play by Siminovitch Prize Winner MacLeod involves the hapless, substance-abusing, middle-aged petty criminal we expect to encounter, but is he the real threat to the elderly couple: who is it that’s robbing them of their possessions, their security, their relationship, their family—their home?

Freely 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…

In 2020 near the United States–Mexico border, a family from 1979 drives back towards Chile from Canada. As time and space shift and blend, the family experiences a series of encounters ranging from poignant to comical to fantastical. Encircled by past, present, and future, their journey becomes a collective vision…

Two plays from rising Canadian theatre star Ellie Moon. Asking For It looks at gender roles and sexual consent in the wake of the Ghomeshi scandal, and considers the various ways in which sexual consent is understood personally, culturally, and legally. In this documentary play, Moon speaks with people of…

An exquisite remembrance of childhood past in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood, adapted and re-crafted to the stage. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.

The English and French working class get together on their balconies in Montreal. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.

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. Cast of 1 man.

While the goal of BASH’d is first and foremost to tell an engaging gay love story, it also flips the music industry’s gangsta stereotype of rap music on its head and returns it to its political roots—in this case to explore the dangers of the kind of attitudes that continue to condone and even encourage sexual discrimination of all kinds in our society. Not since Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner has a narrative poem inspired such empathy in the hearts and minds of its audience.

Full of excruciating twists of fate and malice, this dark comedy of “trading places” resonates with uncomfortable truths about how we see (or don’t see) the people we live with every day. Cast of 2 women and three men.

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 (1937 – 1945), when he trained rural peasants to serve as army medics and set up much-needed base hospitals that ultimately saved thousands of lives.

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 –…

In this sexy, fast-paced, and darkly comic follow-up to her acclaimed autobiography, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, Aguirre ultimately asks: Between the extremes of love for the political cause and love for another, how and where does one create space for self-love?

The broken lives and the heroic struggle for joy of two “tramps” in a hotel boiler room. Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.

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. This cutting-edge drama, profoundly in opposition to conventional histories of Canadian troops in World War I, debunks every sentimental notion of duty, heroism and nationhood.

A beloved brother returns to his family. Cast of 6 women and 2 men.

Young Jimmy faces a dilemma: embrace the hero of American popular myth as embodied by his father, or engage the task of building a different identity, embodied by his mother “on the Canadian side of nowhere.” Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

Miners, people of Hiroshima, and others labour under the false sun of uranium. Cast of 4 women and 6 men.

A search for sanctuary in an Ontario insane asylum in 1938. Cast of 7 women and 4 men.

Hilarious drama ensues when a bedraggled troupe of players heads into the wilds of the Cariboo to perform a Christmas pageant. Set in the gold rush era, Cariboo Magi is an unabashed celebration of the power of theatre to renew our lives and banish our cares. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

The second play in Rossi’s A Carpenter’s Trilogy finds Italian war veteran Silvio in Montreal with his new family and his mother. Deeply traumatized by his wartime experiences, Silvio’s gradual unravelling ultimately threatens to destroy his family. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

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. The play was written for a large ensemble cast, which makes it ideal for musical theatre departments in high schools and colleges – every student can play a part. Cast of ten women and ten men.

With perceptive, unflinching wit, these three early plays from award-winning Chilean Canadian writer Carmen Aguirre document the hardships, horrors, and heartache of exile, revealing the far-reaching effects of dictatorial violence and terror. Highlighting the fresh perspective refugees bring to North American society, Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works also…

This compelling drama by a former parliamentary critic for persons with disabilities explores the ethical controversy and public policy surrounding reproductive technologies, particularly cross-species chimeras. Cast of 2 women and 5 men.

Governor General’s Literary Award, Translation: Michel Marc Bouchard, Christina, The Girl King, translated by Linda Gaboriau (Finalist)

Enigmatic, flamboyant, and unpredictable, with a passion for philosophy and the arts, Sweden’s Queen Christina seeks to make her country the most sophisticated in Europe. But her personal aspirations – and her unconventional sexuality – put her profoundly at odds with her culture’s expectations of her, both as a monarch and as a woman. She was Sweden’s Elizabeth Rex.

Cissy is a timely collection of three moving and thought-provoking plays on gender and young LGBTQ+ folk by the acclaimed playwright Dave Deveau, hailed as “one of Vancouver’s brightest up-and-coming playwrights” (Vancouver Magazine).

Explores the complex relationships among three characters at the geographic centre of Canada. Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.

A mosaic of experiences that form a childhood. Cast of 2 women, 2 men, 1 female child and 1 male child.

Africville’s residents struggle to save their homes and their dignity. Cast of 4 men and 3 women.

A multilayered drama based on the persona of famed Ojibwa artist Norval Morrisseau. Cast of 5 women and 4 men.

Corker uses the familiar but difficult and treacherous 19th-century device of representing the family as a microcosm of the nation state. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.

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 woman manipulates the men in her life into assuming the stereotypical privatized roles of husband, lover, father and son. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.

A heartwarming comedy about two Cree Elders, Evie and Cecil, on their very first trip out of the country. Evie and Cecil reminisce and bicker as they review a lifetime together. CECIL So, what exactly are we going to do now that we’re here in Mexico? EVIE I’m so glad…

An innovative “country opera” set in Saskatoon, with a captivating parallel to Shakespeare’s Othello. Cast of 5 women, 10 men and a band.

Written by one of Canada’s most influential postmodern playwrights, this dazzling one-man show is storytelling of the highest order.

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…

Two interweaving monologues on the sacred and the profane. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

The influenza epidemic of 1918, and the ruin and chaos of the First World War resonate through the locked doors and barred windows of an insane asylum and into the lives of the patients confined within. Cast of 1 woman and 5 men.

Dead Metaphor includes three new darkly comic plays by George F. Walker, each addressing in different ways a modern world of ambiguous morals and corruption: Dead Metaphor; The Burden of Self Awareness; and The Ravine.

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.

Nominally about North American military involvement in Middle East wars, this graphic, conflict-fuelled drama scrutinizes the part the media plays in manufacturing our private reactions to foreign policy. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.

Bryden MacDonald’s most extreme venture into the world of the theatre to date: a play in which everything, and therefore nothing, is sacred. Cast of 3 women, 5 men and 1 transgendered person.

A powerful new play by the author of Jabber and The In-Between, with a text exploring social issues, interclass dialogue, and the possibility of communal improvement Award-winning playwright Marcus Youssef takes his readers to the future with his riveting new play Do you mind if I sit here? Thirty years…

In 1876, Jack the Ripper, a.k.a. Canadian Dr. Cream, graduated from McGill’s faculty of medicine. Cast of 4 women and 6 men.

15 years 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. Cast of 3 men.

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 blames his hyper-sensitive condition on a physical abnormality; but we’re not so certain. Cast of 1 man.

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…

The life of a lower-class family in East End Montreal. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.

Retells one of the most tragic cases of cultural genocide among Native peoples of British Columbia. Cast of 4 women.

A classic tragedy about the Inuit, white settlers, priests and government officials. Cast of 6 women and 9 men.

Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

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 scene over and over, but in unexpected ways and in different genres (from diary to dramatic dialogue, film script to sound installation).
Cast of 1 man and 1 woman.

A look at post-World War II Canada from a recent high-school graduate’s viewpoint. Cast of 2 women and 9 men.

The rise of an urban and radicalized feminist agenda in the latter part of the 20th century leads to a head-on collision with its much more conservative, rural roots in the Women’s Institute, founded in 1897. Cast of 16 women and 3 men.

Tremblay offers glimpses of himself and his mother at five different stages of their lives together. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

Tremblay’s penetrating analysis of a Quebec family unit. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

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…

A dramatized inquiry in which five geologists are interrogated on the death of one of their colleagues in the Mekong Delta. Cast of 1 woman and 6 men.

One man’s struggle to find a home between two cultures, exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. Cast of 1 man.

One man’s struggle to find a home between two cultures, exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. Cast of 1 man.

Gabriel Dumont’s Wild West Show / Le Wild West Show de Gabriel Dumont is a flamboyant epic, constructed as a series of tableaux, about the struggles of the Métis in the Canadian West. It is a bilingual book, co-published with Éditions Prise de parole, and enhanced with a historical background,…

Hoffman provides an effective and multifaceted description for the student seeking a quick understanding of Ryga’s stature as a playwright
– Canadian Literature

The profound humanity of Boyd’s characters reminds us that while neither drug abuse nor the breakdown of the traditional family is exclusive to the black community, racism accelerates their destructive effects in ghastly measures. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.

It’s into the goldfish bowl of a dysfunctional family that the audience peers with acute recognition, hysterical laughter and an overwhelming sense of the creative healing power of the imagination. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

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, Conrad Aiken recalls his long, stormy relations with Malcolm Lowry. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.

Gordon and his former cellmate, Carl, break into Gordon’s family home, wherein they confront some very disturbing metaphors. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.

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.

When an image of Jesus appears on the side of a Tim Hortons restaurant, the town inhabitants are challenged to ask difficult questions about faith, life and love. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.

Instantly recognizable multicultural characters play out their coincidental relationships in a park on the outskirts of a city. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.

Silvio Rosato shows up at the house of his estranged father and meets the family he raised in Chicago after leaving Silvio in Italy 36 years ago. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.

Between 1860 and 1930, over 80,000 unaccompanied British children were “exported” to Canadian factories and farms, often exploited there as indentured child labourers. Cast of 5 women and 3 men.

A transvestite’s illusion of herself is shattered when she goes to a costume party dressed up as Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Cast of two men.

In an impromptu get-together in an opera diva’s Nuns’ Island penthouse, on the afternoon of her return from Paris, her celebrity mother and her idealistic daughter lie in wait for her. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

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 and grieving daughter a new start. One problem presents itself, though: a squatter who won’t leave.

A Canadian half-Native man is thrust into an absurd dilemma when he is asked to be tested for a possible kidney donation to his dying non-Native father, who abandoned him when he was two months old. Cast of 2 men.

Four seasons after her husband’s disappearance, Colette remains emotionally motionless, isolated in a country cottage, waiting for word, or perhaps even more significantly, a connection. A young stranger in a jean jacket waves to her from the frozen lake – a sign? She emerges to give him her husband’s parka – strangely, the boy has a likeness to Tom.

A comedy of errors, this two-act play recounts the story of how one broken engagement ripples throughout friends and family, affecting all of their respective love lives in different ways. And there’s gossip. And an earthquake.

A vicious and unsparing look at the talent agencies that remake the Hollywood stars out of the willing clay of their own flesh. Cast of 3 women and 4 men.

Before fleeing her eccentric island community, Djouke is determined to discover the mystery of her paternity. Cast of 4 women and 5 men.

You take your seat in the theatre. You are given a remote control. The play begins. An urban couple are on a getaway to visit her father at his vast rural estate. But when they arrive, they find him missing and a local Indigenous man staying there instead. They ask…

Winner of the 2015 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script, Inside the Seed is a contemporary version of Oedipus Rex reimagined as a darkly comic political thriller.

Interplay of Indigenous characters from different historical periods (modern vs. First World War), different cultural groups (Cree, Coast Salish …). Suited for younger and young-adult audiences. Introduction to Indigenous Peoples in Canadian history.

Fatima and her friends call themselves the “jabbers,” because they wear hijab. But when anti-Muslim graffiti appears on the walls of Fatima’s school, Fatima’s parents force her to transfer to a new school. In an unfamiliar environment where none of her peers share the Egyptian-born teen’s background, Fatima starts an…

A Maritime family’s tragedy, set in a raging storm. Cast of 2 women and 5 men.

This powerful dramatic monologue reconstructs Lorena Gale’s coming of age as an African Canadian in Montreal. Cast of 1 woman.

A sophisticated backstage comedy. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.

Desperately poor immigrants find refuge with Montreal’s legendary barkeep, Joe Beef. Cast of 5 women and 5 men.

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…

A collaboration across perceptions of cognitive difference.

New York City, 1928. Master thief Mac must join an FBI sting operation against a cadre of corrupt bankers. Music, murder, and mayhem ensue, both at the speakeasy where criminals scheme and on Wall Street where financiers conspire. This satirical play with songs exposes the world of corporate crime and, like The Beggar’s Opera of 1728 that inspired it, challenges the conservatism that is increasingly apparent today.

A stunning new play by star Québec playwright Michel Marc Bouchard.

A father who feels his family is better off without him … a daughter who retreats completely into the virtual world … a family torn apart by the past with little hope for a future. But each discovers the desire to save each other, and perhaps themselves. From the acclaimed…

Plays by Quebec’s best-known playwright: La Duchesse de Langeais; Berthe; Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs; Surprise, Surprise; Gloria Star.

A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations. Cast of 3 women, 4 men and 1 male child.

Lawrence and Holloman, a hapless nerd and a loquacious salesman, meet by chance. From this fleetingly irritating and insignificant encounter comes a viciously murderous and incredulously bizarre plot. Cast of 2 men.

A small prairie community is blown apart when an audacious teenaged girl challenges long-held views of spirituality and sexuality. Suspected of being gay, she is brutalized by her classmates. This searing drama of bigotry and transcendence challenges the fallout of the Catholic Church’s response to the same-sex marriage rulings in Canada. Cast of 2 men and 3 women.

When Mom and Dad are busted for growing pot, Penny and Ezra Lamb embark on the wild road trip that comprises this vaudeville-inspired one-act play. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

A housewife wins a million trading-stamps and invites her friends over to paste them into books. Cast of 15 women.

A play about Quebec and Canada using hockey as a metaphor. Cast of 7 men.

A woman’s struggle for freedom, identity and dignity. Cast of 3 women and 5 men.

Two stories intertwine and illuminate the relationship of life to its creative dream. Cast of 4 women, 4 men, 1 female child and 1 male child.

A satirical farce play about land claims, in the spirit of Drew Hayden Taylor’s Indigenous theatre.

Three musicals by John MacLachlan Gray: 18 Wheels, Rock and Roll and Don Messer’s Jubilee.

A comic, biting, surreal investigation of the question of self and identity in the North American middle-class. Cast of 9 women and 11 men.

Three plays about the co-dependent relationship between a chronically unemployed engineer and actress who has never been out of work.

Outrageous pathos and hilarity is unleashed when Nino informs his very traditionally Italian parents that he is gay. A perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama that explores family dynamics and the vast spaces between the old world and the new. Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

How our “innocent” childhood games and fantasies come back to haunt us in adult life. Cast of 4 women and 1 adolescent male.

Includes screenplay and stage play. Cast of 3 women.

The life of Elizabeth Smart pivoted on a turbulent affair that produced four children and her one book. This is a portrayal of the book as a record of one great life lived. Cast of 4 women and 1 man.

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.

A riveting adaptation of a theatre classic about an affair between the daughter of a count and the count’s man-servant. Cast of 2 women and 1 man.

This fourth edition of the “classic” Modern Canadian Plays sets out for us an even broader range of plays than previous editions, outlining a Canadian drama-scene that is far from colonial, inert, middle-class, or middle-aged. spanning the years from 1967 to 1997. This fourth edition contains The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Les Belle Soeurs, Leaving Home and others.

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.

Continuing on from Volume I, this selection of plays not only takes us farther into the annals of the lives of the marginalized; it also provides a revealing cultural and philosophical cross-section of late-20th-century life in Canada. This fourth edition contains The Orphan Muses, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Amigo’s Blue Guitar, Fronteras Americanas and others.

This second volume presents a range of exciting Canadian plays from the late 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first ­century. These plays respond directly or indirectly to the events of our time; work effectively on the stage, on the page, and in the classroom; and are contextualized with accompanying history, biography, and criticism.

Humourous stories, bittersweet monologues, poetic reflections and revelatory anecdotes about motherhood.

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 Park It’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,…

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 of duty, heroism, and nationhood that figured so prominently in Canadian war effort campaigns and that persist in Canadian history textbooks today.

Moving the Centre is a two-play anthology exploring the problems and possibilities of verbatim theatre and undertake questions of justice, identity, and the history all around us.

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 the social revolution during which they were written and first produced, as well as the cultural politics at a time when Canadian artists were investigating new, noncolonial, and distinctly Canadian forms of expression that would define the nation and challenge received artistic styles and practices.

1920s Hong Kong. Battling racism and his own reputation, Chinese detective Tommy Lam investigates the deaths of several women.

No More Harveys is the third play of the Arctic Cycle, a series of eight plays that looks at the social and environmental impacts of the climate crisis on the eight Arctic states. It follows Sila, set in Canada, and Forward, set in Norway.

A powerful verbatim play about young women’s resilience through foster care, No White Picket Fence is drawn from a research project involving in-depth interviews.

Working-class survivors of the ’60s stage a workers’ sit-down strike. Cast of 9 men.

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 forty-something, eccentric characters have become so complicated that something needs to change. In the comedy, Odd Ducks, award-winning playwright Bryden MacDonald positions his four characters at the brink of existential angst – and the action unfolds from there.

The play begs the question of how many of our freedoms have been lost to the institutions engaged in surveillance “for our own protection.”Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

On Christmas Eve the workers in a Montreal shipping room get drunk and go on strike. Cast of 8 men.

Charlie Evans, a pool shark, has two days to pay off a debt, or have his legs broken by a psychotic debt collector who is also having an affair with his wife. Cast of 2 women and 8 men.

The emotional struggle of an adopted Native woman to acknowledge her birth family. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

Dramas that encourage adults to reflect on their past and young people to reflect on their future: Life Science, 2B WUT UR and Cost of Living.

After Canada officially declares war with Italy, Romano, a recent immigrant, is arrested without charge in his own home. Cast of 2 women and 8 men.

After generations of living in the paradise of their west coast family estate, the McKinnons have fallen on hard times—half of it has just been bought by a Turkish immigrant family. The heirs of both families, Day McKinnon and Leyla Zeki, fancy themselves to be sophisticated citizens of the world, alienated by their ancestors’ “outdated” traditions. Yet Leyla recognizes something fundamental and mysterious in the vestiges of the old estate garden, and Day has uncovered an ancient family secret there. Abandoning their families for their careers, Day and Leyla are reunited years later, having discovered that love is not just something that happens to us, but a paradise that we must build and tend by hand: like a garden in the wilderness of our lives.

Albertine, Tremblay’s most unforgettable heroine, sets out to re-conquer her lost beau. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

People Live Here is a collection of three exciting new plays by George F. Walker, Canada’s king of black comedy and a winner of two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Drama. The Chance, Her Inside Life, and Kill the Poor complete the the author’s Parkdale Palace trilogy of plays that deal with issues of social justice and ally heart, humour, and a contemporary reflection on human inequalities.

Three tales spin a web of suspense, impending violence, and tragedy that haunt the sleek façade of a city. In “The Axe” a teacher of literature in drunken despair awakens and confronts one of his students with the term assignment he has submitted—an axe. In “Piercing” a teenage runaway seeks to escape the mediocrity of her small-town family life, only to end up in a very different kind of urban “family,” a cult of dominance and body piercing presided over by the maimed and orphaned son of a millionaire. In “Anna on the letter C” a lonely, virginal typist transcribing the “c” words for a dictionary project, takes pity on a middle-aged stalker and invites him to her apartment for tea and nasty surprises.

A mordant satire on the relation between theatre and life. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.

Hadfield traces the process of creating a theatrical “success” and investigates how the politics involved influences what we perceive as “good” playwriting.

Private Jonathan Woodrow is a young Indigenous soldier fighting on the Western Front during World War I. Thanks to his experience in hunting and wilderness survival, he quickly becomes one of the 1st Canadian Division’s most feared trench raiders. But as the war and the fighting stretch on with no…

Two ex-lovers meet and compare and confess their fears and disillusionments. Cast of 2 men.

A musical set on the Wasaychigan Hill Reserve in 1992. The battle for the future of the community builds to a shattering climax. Cast of 10 women and 7 men.

Four Quebec women writers meet at the centre of a fabulous vortex. Cast of 4 women.

The tragic life of Frances Farmer, the raucous, idealistic, non-conforming movie star of the ’30s and ’40s. Cast of 4 women and 4 men.

A play about cultural identity and cultural awakening based on a country and western singer of Montreal’s “The Main.”

Test
Cast of 4 women, 13 men and a chorus.

A play about the conscience of a priest during the disastrous mission the Jesuits made to the Huron Indians in the 17th century. Cast of 11 men.

The third book of the Mercer family saga. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

This drama set in a one-room schoolhouse evokes a past way of life. Cast of 5 women and 7 men.

Seeds is part courtroom drama and part social satire about the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada showdown between Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser and biotech company Monsanto Inc. In question is the legitimacy of patenting genetically modified food crops. The play takes us back to the seminal moment when a single farmer stood up to international agribusiness and almost won.

A dark and steamy comedy that explores the harmonies and dysfunctions of six sexually entangled musicians on an ill-fated winter tour. When a blizzard strands this sextet for an extra night, they have only their instruments, each other, and their secrets to keep them warm.

Noh-influenced libretto by renowned Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt Shadow Catch recounts the dreams – or are they dreams? – of the Runaway, a teenage boy who ends up one night in Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Here he is visited by four troubled spirits from the park’s past: the…

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 (English, French, and Inuktitut).

French delivers a thriller guaranteed to have audiences perched on the edge of their seats. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.

Sir John A is an uproariously funny and sharply inquisitive new play from one of Canada’s leading Indigenous playwrights. Bobby Rabbit, the play’s Anishnawbe main character, convinces his friend Hugh to accompany him on a “sojourn of justice” to dig up the bones of Canada’s infamous first prime minister and…

A tough uncompromising look at a convent-run Native residential school. The soul-destroying devastation caused by these institutions from the point of view of the nuns running the school. Cast of 4 women and 2 men.

In these theatre pieces stripped to the essentials of character sketches in quick, subtle lines, the emphasis is on the performer’s resources as an actor, rather than the externals of scene changes and stage contexts.

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 reinvented himself as a counsellor) arrives on the doorstep of Daniel (a housebound agoraphobe), offering to help “liberate” his brother by administering his newly invented technique of “Paratherapy.” Convincing Daniel to face his fears by pursuing their long abandoned childhood dream of jumping from an airplane, the brothers begin a series of misguided training exercises to prepare for their adventure.

Esau Mercer, a veteran of the First World War, tries to persuade his alienated 16-year-old son, Jacob, not to leave. Slowly Esau’s devastating and unsparing account of what secrets lie in his soldier’s heart brings father and son together. Cast of 3 men.

Contains Walker’s own selection of his early plays which matter; which for him have stood the test of time: Beyond Mozambique (1974), Zastrozzi (1977), Theatre of the Film Noir (1981) and Nothing Sacred (1988).

Three brothers strive to unite and care for their ailing sister after the death of their adoptive parents. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.

Arguably the first North American play, this edition includes the original French script, two English translations, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and an extensive historical and critical introduction.

Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector
Georges Feydeau & Maurice Desvallières’ Hotel Peccadillo
Arthur Schnitzler’s The Amorous Adventures of Anatol
Introduction by Jerry Wasserman
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.

Still • Falling and The Code explore issues today’s teens face in their daily lives: mental-health struggles, the complexities of gender dynamics, and the challenges that arise when the lines between friendship and romance blur. A realistic, honest, and bitingly funny look at the difference between so-called teen angst and…

The stop-motion sequences of pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured the moving body on film for the first time and laid the foundation for modern cinema. Kevin Kerr vividly dramatizes this technological breakthrough in this multimedia drama.

Six plays that take place in the same hotel room: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta and The End of Civilization.

One town. Two playwrights. Two radically different worlds.

A collection of Larry Tremblay’s four memorable solo performances for the stage: A Trick of Fate, Anatomy Lesson, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi and Ogre. With an introduction by Jane M. Moss.

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.…

A woman returns to the cottage country of Ontario where, 32 years before, she vacationed with her family. Cast of 5 women and 2 men.

The story of a woman sent away from her family by her brother the Bishop after she is found exploring her sexuality at age seventeen. Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.

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…

A highly wrought farce of patrimony among “fancy dancers” on the powwow trail. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

Two epic labour plays, based on true events, by the acclaimed author of Fado: The Saddest Music in the World. Discover how Canada got the eight-hour workday! Visit the first town to vote on Big Oil! The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin recreates the events surrounding the mysterious death of Albert…

German developers propose a Native theme park for the “Otter Lake Reserve.” Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

“ The Book of Esther examines the seemingly irreconcilable positions of two groups: conservative rural Christians and militantly anti-religious urban queer activists. But Brodie doesn’t take sides. Instead, it’s like she’s picked up a rock to discover what’s scurrying around underneath, pointed it out to us, and said, “Isn’t this interesting. Maybe we should all look at this for a while. Maybe we should talk about it, instead of just pretending that it isn’t there.”

Two plays about the process of becoming an adult and the necessity for rites of passage in all cultures.

The third play in Taylor’s ongoing zany, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his “Blues Quartet.” Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

This heart-wrenching but beautifully cathartic story of a family coming to grips with itself unfolds with unmistakably poignant honesty. Cast of 4 women and 5 men.

A lifetime’s devotion to the music of Mozart conceals a gruesome secret. Cast of 4 women.

Will a Montreal Mafioso sacrifice his young son for safe conduct to England? Cast of 6 women and 8 men.

The fifteenth summer of Beth Weeks’s life is full of strange happenings: a classmate is mauled to death, children go missing on the nearby reserve, and an unseen predator pursues Beth. Not to mention Beth is becoming aware that there is darkness in her own home: her mother’s relationship…

An astonishingly profound and prophetic political drama that delivers the powerful and cathartic stillbirth of a nation, stripped of both pity and fear. Cast of 2 women and 4 men.

Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler presides over the steam-choked basement of an upscale restaurant, tyrannizing his co-workers with his rants of pride of craft and Marxist rhetoric. Cast of 3 men.

Quebec City, 1905. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a cease-and-desist letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. The Divine was commissioned for the 2015 Shaw Festival in honour of George Bernard Shaw and everyone who loves the theatre, and in memory of Sarah Bernhardt, “the woman who dares to say everything that should be left unsaid.”

The stormy and angst-filled relationship between Claude and his father Alex is compellingly played out with a cruel and disconsolate irony in an Alzheimer’s ward. Cast of 2 men.

The first of three plays in this saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest and most ruthless families. Cast of 2 women and 6 men.

A dark family secret emerges in this second play about the wealthy and ill-fated Dunsmuir family. Cast of 3 women and 6 men.

Contains the Governor General’s Award-winning Criminals in Love (1984), Chalmers Award-winning Better Living (1986) and Escape from Happiness (1987). With an introduction by Jerry Wasserman.

Contains Beautiful City, Love and Anger and Tough.

A lyric documentary about a young Indian girl who comes to the city only to die on Skid Row. Cast of 5 women and 15 men.

A profoundly moving new drama by Marie Clements, combined with a spectacular contemporary photo exhibit by Rita Leistner.

Panych’s brilliant tale reminds us all that fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

Drawn from his own experiences, Vittorio Rossi’s new comedy-drama exposes the bureaucratic institution that is the Canadian film industry, and we follow the character Michael Moretti, a veteran playwright, as he struggles to get his new play, Romeo’s Rise, turned into a movie.

Two school boys plot and enact the murder of a classmate. Cast of 3 women and 17 men.

Three women – a housewife, a whore and the Virgin Mary – fight to break their stereotypes. Cast of 3 women.

Georgia O’Keeffe resigns herself to an old age spent alone in the auburn and tawny light of her beloved Faraway mountains, in the desert’s dangerous energies, its desolate beauty, until a stranger enters her life. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.

The polarities of public and private lives, and issues of racism and pacifism in the suffragette movement. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

Daniel Brooks’s The Full Light of Day is a modern epic tragedy, a timely exploration of crumbling privilege and power, beautifully told and innovative in form. Mary’s family finds itself in serious difficulty, and some bad decisions lead to disaster. Mary soon falls ill, and as she is dying wrestles…

The ill-fated love between a wandering musician and a Cape Breton coalminer’s daughter. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

The destruction of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy by the liquor trade in Alberta and Montana. Cast of 5 women and 13 men.

Winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize, The Gull is a play written in the classical Noh style. Set in 1950, when wartime restrictions on interned Japanese Canadians had finally been lifted, allowing them to return to the coast, it exquisitely dramatizes the historical link between the fishing town of Steveston, home to many Japanese Canadians, and Mio, the coastal village in Japan from which many of their ancestors originally emigrated. An international collaboration, The Gull featured: Noh master Akira Matsui, declared an Important Intangible Cultural Asset by Japan in 1998, as the main actor; music by American Noh expert Richard Emmert; masks by Wakayama artist Hakuzan Kubo; and a troupe of professional Noh musicians from Japan.

“If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all-knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us.” Murphy’s play, centred around the playwright’s assumed persona of “Jesus Murphy,” opens up a discourse where creation interrogates religion; atheists engage believers; and secularists confront theists. Cast of 1 man.

One of these plays uses natural disaster as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis; the other tackles issues of self-image.

Three sisters have an “impromptu” and re-examine their personal and social problems. Cast of 4 women.

Camus’s The Just (Les Justes) is a five-act play based on the true story of a group of Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905. First produced in 1949, The Just is a significant, eerily resonant, moving, and highly theatrical work. With a humanist perspective, Camus delves…

Rather than confront her husband when she sees him with another woman, a blues singer follows the woman and insinuates herself into the other woman’s life. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

A dark and thoroughly contemporary comedy. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

The Living is a powerful and unsettling documentary play by Colleen Wagner, author of the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning play The Monument. It is inspired by the actual stories of women and girls who survived trauma in post-conflict zones like Rwanda and Uganda. The Living examines the lives of victims…

A young priest commissions a wandering painter to decorate the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

Marchessault evokes the doubts, the trials and the joys of this singular existence. Cast of 3 women and 1 man.

The Mystery Play is a detective story, a ghost story, and a memory play: a theatrical blending of Wit and The Woman In Black. Though fully self-contained, The Mystery Play is also the Second in a trilogy about crime-solving Sister Vivian Salter, a flinty, fifty-ish Catholic nun forced into the…

An innovative, multi-layered deconstruction of mass media and politics. Cast of 2 men.

Young, naïve and inadequately trained nurse Heather Rose arrives in a remote Native community hoping to improve the lives of its residents, but ends up utterly disillusioned by the impotence of her interventions. Cast of 1 woman.

Dorothy Dittrich’s The Piano Teacher is a play about loss, love, friendship, and the healing power of music. When Erin, a classical pianist, experiences the loss of the life she knew, she meets an unconventional piano teacher who gives her new hope for the future.

First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Plays contains Gossip (1977), Filthy Rich (1979) and The Art of War (1983). These three plays showcase the development and the culmination of Walker’s film noir style.

The shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre. Cast of 6 women.

Young playwright draws on family as the raw material for his first work. Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

Laid bare in the fictionalized autobiographical details of The Refugee Hotel are the universal truths both the victims and the survivors of political oppression continue to experience everywhere: the terror of persecution, arrest, and torture; the exhausted elation of escape; the trauma of learning to live again with the losses, betrayals, and agonies of the past; the irrational guilt of the survivor—even the tragedy of surviving the nightmares of the past only to have them return to challenge any hope of a future free of fear. More than a dark comedy about a group of Chilean refugees who arrive in Vancouver in 1974 after Pinochet’s coup, this play is Carmen Aguirre’s attempt to give voice to refugee communities from all corners of the globe.

A stockbroker and an ex-priest get together to console themselves after being abandoned by their mates and are forced to come to terms with their fragile natures as men. Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

A black cellist, on tour with a classical symphony orchestra, invokes the ghost of Louis Armstrong to help him with a difficult passage from Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello. The highly mythologized spirit of “the father of jazz himself” takes form in the cellist’s hotel room, where the lives of the characters intertwine and begin to play off each other, and issues of class, hope, courage, family, and race emerge in a lively and powerful struggle between head and heart, intellect and intuition. Ultimately, the drama resolves with the cellist’s beautiful rendition of the Bach piece. Full of great jazz and classical music, but using none of Satchmo’s own compositions, the play incorporates nine original jazz songs, co-written by the author-musicians, into the action.

A revitalization of a Russian theatre classic. Cast of 5 women and 8 men.

The Shape of a Girl examines the code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized murder of Reena Virk by school-aged bullies in 1997. Jewel is based on the real-life catastrophe of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, in 1982.

From the award-winning author of runaway hits Mambo Italiano and In Piazza San Domenico comes a saucy, delicious new comedy. When a young Italian couple announces they are moving to the Anglo suburbs, it’s like they’ve committed a mortal sin against their traditional relatives. Ultimately floodgates open to other unspoken desires and revelations, turning conservative St. Leonard upside down.

A play set in rural Quebec in the ’50s in which a battered child, Maurice, seeks refuge in a fantasy world. Cast of 1 man and 1 male child.

When inspector Milton shows up in a town in the middle of nowhere to investigate a mysterious murder, fifteen year-old Lowell’s skills at shaping the truth to protect both himself and those he cares about are put to the ultimate test: shall he plea bargain, or stick to the truth as he understands it? As Hardy once pointed out to him, “There’s something in between lying and not lying. It’s called a story.”

Roughly based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, this black comedy changes the lead character to a modem business woman who finds herself accused of an unknown crime. The more she delves into the bureaucratic nightmare the more her ordered, little world unravels and the more she is entangled in the increasingly obscure process.