Alexandria Haber

Alexandria Haber's new play Housekeeping & Homewrecking received an In-House Workshop in May, 2007. She was also a member of the Playwrights' Gym from January to June, 2007

Alexandria Haber is a Montreal based actor and writer. Most recently, she appeared as the Nurse in Romeo & Juilet ( Centaur Theatre) Other stage credits include: Infinite Theatre’s 17 Anonymous Women and Mary Macgregor in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Centaur Theatre) A former playwright in residence at the Centaur, Alex has written several plays and radio dramas including: Ordinary Times (Centaur Theatre’s Wildside Festival, Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival) The Full Molly (Montreal Fringe Festival, Infinite Theatre) Arrhythmia (Montreal Fringe Festival) Birthmarks (Infinite Theatre, Montreal Fringe Festival, also published by Playwrights Canada Press), and The Farm (Infinite Theatre) The Very Little Girl (winner of CBC radio’s New Voices) and most recently, A Grown Girl’s Guide to an Almost Perfect Existence (CBC radio). Her work has been published in several anthologies: She Speaks (Playwrights Canada Press), Going It Alone (Nuage Editions) and most recently, Short Stuff (Vehicule Press). Her latest play, Housekeeping& Homewrecking premiered at The Montreal Fringe Festival 2007 and will be remounted in November at Theatre St. Catherine.

Housekeeping & Homewrecking is about seven interlinking characters crossing lines and boundaries, breaking hearts and mending bridges. A modern take on the ties that bind and those that break.

Shelley Tepperman's new translation/adapatation of 24 Exposures (24 Poses) by Serge Boucher was presented as a staged reading at Quebec Scene, at the NAC (Ottawa) in May, 2007. Both Shelley and Serge were participants in the 2006 Tadoussac Playwrights' Residence.

Shelley Tepperman has a long history in professional Canadian theatre specializing in script development, project development and translation for the stage. Her more than 25 translations— two of which were nominated for the Governor General’s award—have been produced at CBC radio and on stages from coast to coast, include 4 plays by Wajdi Mouawad, 3 plays by Serge Boucher, as well as plays by Dominic Champagne, Yvan Bienvenue François Archambault, and Suzanne Lebeau and two plays by Mexican playwright Sabina Berman. From 1994 -1998 Shelley worked for CBC Radio Arts and Entertainment developing, adapting and directing/producing radio dramas for national broadcast.

Shelley speaks five languages, and much of her work involves helping audiences discover other cultural landscapes. Her passion for bridging cultures through art extends to documentary film and television where she works as a writer, story editor and director. Her film Legacy in a Jar, about Italian food canning rituals, has aired dozens of times on OMNI and has a cult following among food-lovers and Italiaphiles.

Shelley is currently translating a collection of plays by Ottawa-born playwright Patrick Leroux to be published by Talonbooks in 2008.

Serge Boucher, an acting graduate from the Cégep Lionel-Groulx Theatre Department, shares his time between teaching and writing. His first text, Natures mortes, was staged by Michel Tremblay. His second play, Motel Hélène, nominated for a Governor General's Award, directed by René Richard Cyr, was created at the Festival international des Francophonies en
Limousin, France. Revived in Québec, Montreal and Ottawa, the production was brought to television and staged in English at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. 24 Poses (portraits), nominated for a Masque Award and for a Governor General's Award, was performed hundreds of times at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui and toured Québec before being brought to television and staged in English at the Alberta Theatre Projects. In 2004, Avec Norm was created at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui and Les bonbons qui sauvent la vie at Compagnie Jean Duceppe. His most recent play, Là, premiered at Compagnie Jean Duceppe this past February and was nominated for a Masque Award for best original text.

24 Exposures - On a beautiful August Saturday, in the back yard of a bungalow, a family gathers to celebrate the oldest son’s 40th birthday. The day and evening of storytelling, joking and bickering reveals 8 lives in a family who love all wrong but love each other just the same. Shelley Tepperman reinvents Serge Boucher’s hyper-realist hit, transposing it from a pure laine family in small-town Quebec to a working class Jewish family in the Niagara region.

Klaas Van Weringh's All Changed received an In-House Workshop of his play in March, 2007

Klaas van Weringh’s family immigrated from the Netherlands just in time for him to play the Muffin Man in grade one. He grew up mostly in Kingston, took a degree in English Lit, wrote some poetry and fiction, but ended up concentrating on art. He taught drawing part time for ten years at a commmunity college, and was represented by a Yorkville gallery in Toronto. In recent years, after a hiatus to earn a living, he returned to writing and painting, winning a third prize in the annual Ottawa Public Library short story contest, and in the same year, an honorable mention in a juried art show in Kingston. Klaas also acts and directs in community theatre. All Changed, his first play, was begun five years ago.

All Changed is a complex play about how some events change everything. Set in the Netherlands under the Nazis and in Canada afterwards, it examines at a personal level the terror of historical events beyond our control, and shows how they can derail lives, leaving us possessed by self-doubt and an almost endless search for absolution.

Joseph Erban

Joseph Erban has received an In-House Workshop of his play The Nursing Home in February, 2007.

Joseph Erban is a writer and a smoking cessation counsellor with a background in biomedical ethics. He has been working in the healthcare system for the past 22 years and has written his first play Woven Colours in 2002 and an introductory book in philosophy, Is There Truth? in 2006. Both published by Lulu.com.

The Nursing Home, his most recent play, recounts the story of Gertrude, a senior citizen who cares for her husband Sam inflected with dementia. Michael, a novice Black Canadian orderly befriends Gertrude and Elsie, a patient at same establishment. Michael's life is irrevocably altered by his discoveries and goings-on in a senior's home.

Leo Berkowich

Leo Berkowich's play What are Friends For? received an In-House Workshop in February, 2007.

Leo Berkowich began writing at the age of 50 because he felt like doing it and he thought he might have some talent for writing. He had very little previous experience in the world of theatre before joining Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal for advice and guidance. After a few promising but confused attempts at writing a grand comedy he wrote a one-act play. He is a lazy writer and is slow at coming up with new plays but hopes to write others in the near future.

The play What are Friends for? is an absurd comedy. Two men come on the stage and sit on chairs. They don’t know why they are there, they think it is to do a play but they don’t know what play and who the author is. They start to get bored, one of them, either to have something to do or maybe because it is true accuses the other of sleeping with his wife. The other man denies it but the first man keeps on pushing him till he must fight back at least psychologically. Various forms of dramatic mayhem occur during the course of this struggle. The play ebbs and flows back and forth with at first one person and then the other being dominant. The testosterone levels rise as does the tension and the bull as the play goes on. It all ends happily, more or less.

Maryse Warda & Elyse Gasco

Maryse Warda's French traslation of Bye Bye Baby had a public reading in collaboration with Imago Theatre in January, 2007. Maryse was a participant in the 2006 Tadoussac Playwrights’ Residence.

Maryse has been active in theatre for more than 10 years. During her tenure at Montreal’s Théâtre de Quat’Sous, she was instrumental in her role as literary translator in bringing the works of English Canadian writers such as Brad Fraser and George F. Walker to francophone audiences. Her translations are celebrated for being faithful to the original, while making effective yet unostentatious use of the Quebec idiom. Her translation of four plays from Walker’s Suburban Motel series earned her a Masque trophy in 2000 from the Académie québécoise du théâtre and a nomination in 2001 for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Ms Warda is a graduate of Université de Montréal in English literature.

Elyse Gasco was born in Montreal. She received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Concordia University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. Her work has appeared in literary magazines in the U.S. and in Canada, including The Little Magazine, Western Humanities Review, Canadian Fiction Magazine, PRISM international, Grain, and The Malahat Review. In 1996, the title story from this collection was awarded the $10,000 Journey Prize for the most accomplished work originally published in a Canadian literary journal, and anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology.

Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? was the winner of the QSPELL Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the QSPELL/FEWQ First Book Award, and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Award at The Word on the Street. It was also a New York Times Book Review Notable Book.

Elyse Gasco lives in Montreal with her husband and their two daughters. She is at work on her next book of fiction.

Bye Bye Baby is a dramatic comedy inspired by Elyse Gasco's award-winning collection of short stories, Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? After three years in development, the play is a cunning concoction of ambitious narrative, strong imagistic design and movement-based language.

The story tracks the journey of a young woman, Elle, and her mission to uncover the truth about her birth mother; a quest for redemption and wholeness that swings her like a pendulum between a mysterious past and an uncertain future. In the midst of this, she struggles to make sense of her own life and identity, her complicated relationships with her adoptive mother and her own growing fetus.

The audience shares in the intimate realities of Elle's early pregnancy, in her rage at the uncertainty that is her legacy, and in her frustrations as she butts up against the bureaucratic red-tape that provides the only route to her origins. The vertebrae of the play are Elle's sometimes diplomatic, sometimes self-sabotaging encounters with her social worker, whose job is to help Elle reveal her elusive past.

Sandy Moore

Sandy Moore came to Montreal from Halifax for a 4 day Residency in November, 2006, to work on his operatic solo Echoes of Time Weeping with Linda Moore as his dramaturg and soprano Janice Jackson.

Composer Sandy Moore uses skillful invention to give his music a style all its own to create ambitious pieces that can be high energy, light, graceful, romantic and calm. His significant repertoire for film, concert, theatre and dance includes compositions for solo instrument and voice, small chamber ensembles and symphony orchestra. Most recently he was awarded Best Original Score for the Atlantic short, Dinner For One at the 26th Atlantic Film Festival, 2006 and he was a first time nominee in the 24th Annual Genie Awards for Thom Fitzgerald's feature film, The Wild Dogs. Of his film score for the Trudeau miniseries, the Globe & Mail responds: "Music is used with great skill to establish a time and propel the story. Often it's eerily perfect and moving." and Maclean's, "Scene after scene is heightened by a superb soundtrack." Sandy's compositions often reflect an unique blending of cultural sources and ultimately express an emotionally communicative style. Moore often uses music as a metaphor, and through every movement of every piece there resonates an authentic texture of heartfelt personal expression. He gives sound everything; resonance, warmth, presence and clarity.

Echoes of Time Weeping is a dramatic solo for Soprano and Tape based on the Mexican folkloric tale of La Llorona, The Weeping Woman, taken from Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. This is a shiver story that strikes the shiver of fear into children to stay away from the river or your soul be taken by La Llorona. An abbreviated version is as follows: A rich Hidalgo (nobleman) courts a beautiful but poor woman who bears him two sons. One day he announces that he is returning to Spain and will take his sons away with him. The young woman is crazed, drowns them in the river and falls to the riverbank in grief and dies. I have chosen this tale because of its dramatic implications for vocal and electronic possibilities. The text is nonlinear and explores the inner echoes of a mental treadmill, passing through eternity. The style of the music conveys an imagistic, sonic environment with each of the eight movements, from Prelude to Conclusion, exploring the loss, the guilt, the lamentable action and psychological, emotional confrontations. The tape at times is a dramatic enhancing of the voice, and others building to a chorus of tonal landscapes as well as presenting a confrontational reality. Andreas Guibert provided Sandy with Spanish translations and he was further assisted by Marcelo Arroyo. Echoes of Time Weeping was sung by the experienced and exciting voice of soprano, Janice Jackson.

Philippe Ducros

Philippe Ducros was a part of the Tadoussac Playwrights’ Residence to work on his French translation of Greg MacArthur’s recovery.

Philippe is the Artistic Director of Productions HÔTEL-MOTEL. His plays Le 4e round, and Diapodiaspora (a small show for the event « Si je vous racontais des images… »), were presented at Espace Libre. He has also written for Danse Carpe Diem (Comptine pour demain, Attention Morgane and Chanel et les Gémeaux). Theatre du Grand Jour produced his play 2025, l’année du Serpent which won the 2002 Fonds Gratien-Gélinas Creation Subsidy as well as the Louise-LaHaye Bursary. The play was recorded by Radio-Canada. CEAD had a public reading of the play in December 2002 as part of the Semaine de la dramaturgie and at the Salle Pauline-Julien of the Gérald-Godin Cégep in January 2003.

Greg MacArthur

Greg MacArthur attended the Tadoussac Playwrights’ Residence in September 2006 with Philippe Ducros who was translating Greg’s play recovery into French.

Greg is a writer and a performer. His work has been nominated for numerous awards and has been produced in cities across Canada. Some of his writing credits include: Get Away; Snowman; girls! girls! girls!; Epiphany; The Rise and Fall of Peter Gaveston; and Beggar Boy (a play for theatre for young audiences). He was the co-founder and co-artistic director of House of Slacks, a collaborative theatre company, whose work includes The Millennium Project and Stem. He has been Writer-In-Residence at The Writer’s Network / Centre for the Book in Cape Town, South Africa; Playwright-In-Residence at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre (Toronto); and Artist-In-Residence at Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal. His newest work, recovery recently premiered at The National Arts Centre and will be produced this fall in Vancouver (Rumble Theatre). It is currently being translated into French. Snowman (Schneemann) will have its German premiere in December, 2006. His plays are available from Coach House Books.

recovery - Paranoia is the most contagious germ of them all! recovery is a new work by Greg MacArthur, one of this country's most exciting and subversive playwrights. Around the world, people are succumbing to the addictive pleasures of a mysterious new substance. Society is threatened. But not to fear, "They" are taking care of everything. A speculative examination of an addicted world and the ramifications of a 500 billion dollar pharmaceutical industry, recovery is a sometimes funny, sometimes horrific tale about the commodification of fear and the oppression of the individual.

Shahin Sayadi

Shahin Sayadi attended the Tadoussac Playwrights’ Residence in September 2006, to work on his translation and adaptation of the novel Khanoom (The Lady) by Masoud Behnoud.

Shahin Sayadi, Artistic Director of OneLight Theatre will be undertaking a two-year (20 months) project, The Veil, comprising the development and production of an original play based on Iranian writer, Masoud Behnoud’s epic tale, Khanoom (The Lady), and the development of an original staging design, The Veil, as the center piece of the production. To achieve the goals of these projects and as a means to incorporate both diverse and expert perspectives into the work, OneLight Theatre will be partnering with both Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia (Windsor, Nova Scotia), Neptune Theatre (Halifax, Nove Scotia) and Harbourfront Centre (Toronto). OneLight Theatre will follow the guided, disciplined collaborative working style which is the core of the company, and work with our partners not as external advisors, but as active members of the production team working with OneLight throughout the development and production of Khanoom.

Khanoom is a slightly fictionalized account of the exceptional life experiences and survival of a Persian princess, Khanoom. The story is both an epic tale which sweeps through modern history, and an intimate portrait of one woman’s journey from an insulated childhood, to a rebellious youth, to a grown woman who must make a place for herself in a world that is entirely different from her own and which is, itself, in constant flux.

The current run of the show will be: 3 weeks at Neptune Theatre in Halifax, 2 days at Mermaid Theatre’s stage in Windsor and 3 weeks Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. They are presently looking at a national and international tour of the show after closing in Toronto.

Leanna Brodie & Philippe Soldevila

Leanna Brodie took part in the Tadoussac Playwrights’ Residence as the English translator for Philippe Soldevilla’s Conte de la lune in September 2006.

Leanna Brodie is an actor and writer whose plays include For Home and Country and The Vic (both published by Talonbooks Ltd.), as well as the CBC radio drama Invisible City. She was the first Canadian invited to attend the prestigious ACT/Hedgebrook Women Playwrights' Festival in Seattle; has twice been Playwright-in-Residence at the 4th Line Theatre; and has made NOW Magazine's list of Top 10 Toronto Theatre Artists. Upcoming: The Seeds of Our Destruction - a conspiracy thriller about agribusiness, GMOs, and the world's food supply -- on CBC Radio. Also, Schoolhouse -- a play about a young teacher connecting with a mysterious boy in a rural school - premiered at the Blyth Festival in 2006, and will be produced at the 4th Line Theatre in 2007.

Philippe Soldevila was one of the playwrights who participated in the Tadoussac Playwrights’ Residence with his play Conte de la lune, translated into English by Leanna Brodie.

Philippe, director and playwright, has been the Artistic Director of Théâtre Sortie de Secours since its inception in 1989. Born of Spanish parents, he has developed, with Sortie de Secours, an artistic approach guided by a fascination with foreign cultures. With a Bachelor in French Literature (Laval University) and in Theatre (University of Ottawa), he also studied at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Québec. With Sortie de Secours, Philppe Soldevila directed Tauromaquia, Le miel est plus doux que le sang, Exils, Le temple, Chroniques de la vérité occulte and ¡Anarquista!; and in collaboration with Teesri Duniya Theatre, Bhopal by Raul Varma, last fall. Outside of Sortie de Secours, he has directed, amongst others, Des fraises en janvier by Evelyne de la Chenelière (Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui and Compagnie Jean Duceppe) and its English translation Strawberries in January (Centaur Theatre/Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui), Quatuor by Ronald Harwood at Théâtre du Rideau Vert, Faust, Pantin du diable (Pupulus Mordicus), Le piège, Terre des Hommes (Théâtre du Paradoxe), Les parents terribles, (Théâtre du Trident de Québec / National Arts Centre in Ottawa), and Doldrum Bay by Hillary Fanin, (Théâtre de la Manufacture). His direction of Miel est plus doux que le sang (1996) and Temple (2002), in Quebec City, won the award for Best Direction. In May 1998, he received the John Hirsch Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts “in recognition of the originality of his artistic process, which is based on research on the spatial context and the relationship between stage and hall. The committee hailed Soldevila as a committed creator who is developing a mastery of his art while renewing the language of the discipline and constantly setting himself new challenges.” Previously, he worked with Robert Lepage as an Assistant Director, which permitted him to work with actors and theatres from many different countries.

Conte de la lune - In the harshly repressive Spain of General Franco, a father (a former inventor of better worlds, now reluctantly recycled into an inventor of things) is reunited with his 10-year-old son, Joan (an inventor of words), whom he hasn’t seen in five years. A few days earlier, Joan woke up with an unfamiliar word on his lips: an unknown word, an unimagined, unimaginable word, a word not found in any dictionary, a word whose meaning is . . . yet to be discovered. There is poetry in Joan’s words and in his father’s inventions, and together they conspire to reveal something profound, unique, something only the imaginary word can decode. . . for all eternity.

Greg Kramer

Greg Kramer’s play, Death of a Fabulist received an In-House Workshop in September 2006 and December, 2005.

Author, director, actor, musician, illustrator and magician, Greg Kramer was born in the UK, ran away from home in his early teens, attended theatre school and eventually landed in Canada in 1981. He spent seven years in Vancouver, a decade in Toronto, currently resides in Montreal, and can order his meals in French. His novels include Wally, Hogtown Bonbons, Couchwarmer: A Laundromat Adventure, and The Pursemonger of Fugu: A Bathroom Mystery.

Death of a Fabulist - Welcome to the Theatre of Dead Celebrities. Years past, in the Parisian catacombs below the Père Lachaise Cemetary, illicit theatrical picnics were held as popular novelties for nobility. Tonight, in the style of theatrical period tableaux, Isadora Duncan reconstructs key moments of her life. She is both aided and confounded in her task by some familiar figures - Jim Morrison, Chopin, Molière, Alice B Toklas - shadows of famous souls, all chock-full of jealousies, bitterness, pride and undisputed talents. Into this world of ego and death stumbles a young girl, fresh from disgrace and ruin. Before she knows it, she is roped in to play Isadora’s maid. She soon becomes determined to prove to our côterie of superstars that her non-existent charisma is her passport to instant, long-lasting membership in their club of infamy. What follows is a battle to the bitter end, where Beauty, Art and History duke it out with television, media and the Great American Dream.

Check out some of the playwrights we have worked with in our past seasons.

The 2005-2006 playwrights

The 2004-2005 playwrights

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