Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal’s professional development program centers around the annual Masterclass.

Each year, Master teachers and playwrights are brought to our studios in Montréal to conduct an intensive program (one to two weeks long) in new play creation. The purpose of the program is to provide a strong mentorship for playwrights, with practical ways of broadening the process and honing the working practice.

Recent Masterclass instructors include Daniel MacIvor, Leah Cherniak from Theatre Columbus, John Murell, Denise Clarke, Judith Thompson, Maria Irene Fornes, and most recently Tomson Highway, whose plays were some of the first to bring an aboriginal perspective to Canadian stages.

As a means of building on our successful professional development work, we have inaugurated the “mini-Masterclass” which focuses on particular aspects of text analysis. This shorter professional development program featured a Montréal-based Master teacher, and was aimed at a group of 10-12 local writers. In 2002, Theatre and opera director Keith Turnbull designed and delivered a two-day class on meter, rhythm and punctuation in theatrical text. In 2003, Mr. Turnbull led a Masterclass exploring one of Northrop Frye’s critical methods of analyzing dramatic literature.