Playwrights' Workshop Montréal
Centre national de développement théâtral
Playwrights' Workshop Montréal
Centre national de développement théâtral
Developed plays include Governor General Award nominated works by Sean Dixon, Brendan Gall, Jonathan Garfinkel, Michael Healey, Joan MacLeod, and Hannah Moscovitch, and Governor General Award-winners Erin Shields and David Yee; eleven Dora Award Outstanding New Play nominees and three winners; and a Trillium Book Award winner. Throughout her career, Andrea has been a regular panellist for the Directors Lab North, and contributed a chapter entitled “Master Class: Dramaturgy and New Play Development” to the book The Directors Lab edited by Evan Tsitsias (Playwrights Canada Press 2019). She has mentored both graduate students and professional theatre makers through university training programs, internships, and play development programs at a variety of theatres. Previously, she has worked with Brian Quirt at Nightswimming and with Maureen Labonté and Neil Munro at the Shaw Festival, and contributed to Canadian Stage’s inaugural Festival of Ideas and Creation. Andrea also participated in workshops at the National Theatre Society (Dublin) while she pursued her MPhil in film and theatre at Trinity College, Dublin.
No one is multi-disciplinary artist, poet and singer-songwriter from Montreal.
No one fell in love with theatre while studying in school. No one is a past participant of the 2019 Artista cohorte at Imago théâtre. No one’s first play will be presented at Revolution They Wrote 2020. No one also participated in the 24e recueil intercollégiale de poésie, Escale Montmorency, Udem en spectacle, Concours Musique jeunesse…
Aborted is a metaphorical play about a moment in a woman/daughter’s life when they can step out of self-protection, and see the whole story of their life more objectively.
Through this nonlinear, musical, poetic and image-based performance, a young woman starts to revisit a particular day in her life and the years that led to it, revealing her own pain and suffering.
Nicolas is a playwright and actor who graduated from Bishop’s University and Humber College (relatively recently!).
With a particular interest in comedy and humour, he is dedicated to exploring the absurdities of life. After all, we don’t need to look further than reality to laugh at our quirky actions.
Two university graduates struggle to share a 1½ in Montreal, as they completely invent THE SAME fictitious theatre agent in order to make their lives sound more interesting.
Kyng “Blxck Cxsper” Rose (they/them) is a multi disciplinary hip hop artist who also happens to be a workaholic.
Why else would they decide to start writing their own play on top of self producing their music career, acting in other people’s plays, freelancing in graphic design, managing a record label and working full time as a video game tester?
Capricorns… Am I right? #smh
« So the play opens in two weeks, tickets are selling and everything but the playwright has not written a word so this is the description we’ve been given: “this play sucks, don’t go see it. Also fuck that title.” – Kyng Rose »
Lar Vi specializes in making bizarre magic-realist feelings-comedies.
Inspired by a multi-disciplinary background in improv, dance, puppetry and clown, they strive to create work that explores vulnerability, engages the uncomfortable and cultivates empathy.
Based on the “myth” that you swallow seven spiders in your life while you are sleeping, this interdisciplinary eco-gothic horror/dark comedy imagines the stories of spiders as they navigate the haunted house of human experience.
Revan Badingham III is a queer Filipinx multidisciplinary artist.
As a theatre creator, they are the founding artistic director of Voices of Asia International, a Filipinx theatre company based in Montreal. Their last major production was Beats Around the Bush: The Word Opera, which ran in Newfoundland to critical acclaim. They have done work for Tuesday Night Theatre Café, Theatre NDG, and Sigaw ng Bayan CKUT.
Revan has also been involved in the spoken word scene. They were part of Spoken Word St. John’s and Throw Poetry Collective. As a poet-performer, they have performed in stages across Canada, including McSway, The Words & Music Festival, and the 100 Thousand Poets for Change. They have also facilitated workshops, including the Axana Poetry Spa.
In addition, Revan is a trained actor, musician, and designer. They can also speak ten languages.
To The Boys Who Wear Pink is their debut novel.
Weaving through nine scenes, a character unravels, deconstructs, and redefines what it means to be BPD
Miriam is a Montreal-based theatre artist.
In 2012, she co-founded Hopegrown Productions and with Hopegrown, has workshopped and performed three new plays by Montreal playwrights, which have toured within Canada and internationally.
In 2019, Miriam wrote and performed her first play, The One, a solo piece about a woman in her early (late) twenties searching for love in real life (online) while developing the world’s most authentic (fake) dating app. The One premiered at the Montreal Fringe Festival and enjoyed a sold-out run, was nominated for two awards, and won Most Promising Local English Theatre Company (Segal Centre). The One was developed with support from PWM, Young Creators Unit.
Miriam graduated from Concordia’s Theatre Performance program in 2013 and currently trains with the Moving Voice Institute and Tectonic Theater Project. As an actor, Miriam has worked with Repercussion Theatre, Playwright’s Workshop Montreal, In Your Face Entertainment and Passionfool Theatre, among others. Miriam instructs acting at Concordia University and Geordie Theatre School and has taught for the English Montreal School Board.
www.hopegrown.ca | @HopegrownPro
In 2092, cities are no longer cities and individuals must be self-sufficient or perish. A family torn apart by grief struggles to maintain a failing farm in Southwestern Ontario. GIRL is an old soul; at age nine she understands grief, though she doesn’t have the word for it. While her father falls deep into himself, GIRL is left to care for her baby brother and visit her dark place.
Sabrina is currently living and working in Montreal.
She was previously in Toronto, studying Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University.
When she first moved to Montreal last year she took up playwriting courses at the National Theatre School. Now a part of the Young Creators Unit of Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal, she is further developing her work as a writer and working towards greater goals in the theatre industry.
Sabrina has several creative interests and skills in drawing, panting, photography and styling – she look forward to utilizing this creative mixed bag to bring her stage ideas to life.
Lyris is a play about a young woman awaking from an eternal slumber to be thrown into a new world she does not yet understand.
As she meanders through this world interacting with the characters that colour it, she is called to understand her role and impact on this world. As her experience plays out as a sort of map of North American culture, she witnesses the insidious realities of disempowerment that plague the people.
In the end, Lyris and her loss of innocence bring forward a greater redemption.
Kieran Dunch is a graduate of the University of Victoria (BFA Theatre),
where he specialized in directing and devising collective creation from historical sources. His performances and projects have taken him as far as Prague and Thailand, and now brings him here, to Montréal. Kieran is hoping to capture the environment of this city built on conflict and use it to better his practice.
SAS is a play that tries to examine the politics of space (and what keeps us apart) by dissecting the history of two neighborhoods in Montréal, and more notably the fence that was built to separate one from the other.
Frederic graduated from Concordia University in design for the theatre,
and loves reimagining plays and concepts in a new light. In addition to Antoine: l’esquisse d’un rêve, he is directing The bald soprano by Eugène Ionesco that will be presented at Mainline theatre.
The story follows Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at the time which he was exiled in New York in early 1940s chasing his own childhood in order to find his lost creativity and imagination that a young child has in order to write his beloved novel: The Little Prince.
As well as YCU, the project is being developed through the program “Young Volunteers” under the supervision of Director/Dramaturg Diane Roberts.
Ander is a clown, drag queen and longtime cabaret performer.
With a background in clown and dance, Ander has trained with John Turner at the Manetoulin Conservatory for Performance and Creation (The Clown Farm), and with Lynsey Billing at Scream Dance Academy. No stranger to the Fringe Festival, he has participated in three collective theatre creations with the House of Laureen, as well as playing Twinkerbell in Glam Gam’s sold-out production, Peter Pansexual in 2017. Last year, he debuted his solo clown show, Fairy Fails at the Montreal Fringe Festival and is excited to learn and further develop the play with the Young Creator’s Unit!
This magical and whimsical tale about a gentle fairy who cannot fly explores the themes of self-love, failure, and embracing our imperfections.
Full of big and small mistakes, this deeply playful physical theatre piece with drag and cabaret influences, features a generous serving of dance, costume changes and audience interaction as this tender fairy discovers his true destiny as the Prince of Prance.
Steven Greenwood is a writer and director whose works are often focused on genre, fantasy and fairy tales, and all things geek.
He is also strongly invested in LGBTQ+ storytelling and culture. He is the artistic director of Home Theatre Productions, and is currently finishing his PhD at McGill with a focus on musicals and queer audiences.
8 of the 12 constellations of the Zodiac have disappeared from the sky; the remaining four take on human form and descend to earth to investigate the disappearances.
In this immersive experience, audience members take on the role of the scholars who must work together with these four Zodiacs to help them solve the mystery of where the others have gone. Though completing challenges and solving clues, audience members will be able to put together the pieces and uncover the secrets, stories, and scandals of all 8 of the rogue constellations.
Megan Hunt is an Ontarian by birth, a Montrealer by choice, and a storyteller by nature.
She is a Leo, a graduating Concordia student, a fan of oversized cable knits, a former high school theatre nerd, a recovering contrarian and a writer.
Fifteen-year-old Eliza sees the apocalypse everywhere: in school locker rooms, in the moths that get caught in her hair, in the rotting jack-o-lanterns on the veranda. Peter thinks that’s just how every teenager feels, and he might be right. Late one night they discuss Indian summers, divorce, bad dreams, the sticky residue from nicotine patches, Southern Ontario cults, the weight of the world, the end of it.
Arianne is an emerging playwright and cat herder, I mean creative project manager, working in the game industry.
She studied management and communication though her passion for theater, improv, and writing spurred her to pursue artistic creation.
Her topics of focus are memories and the beauty in the mundane.
Young workers try to balance their dreams and responsibilities as the first generation set to be less wealthy than that of their parents. An exploration of the meaning of happiness and the effects of comparing your life to the lives of others.
Calder is an actor/creator, a graduate of John Abbott College (Professional Theatre: Acting) and Concordia University (B. Ed.).
He has directed two theatre pieces and produced one short film, Sin Eater, which was nominated as part of the 100-Hour Film Fest.
Recently, he has played in Blue Stockings with Persephone Productions ; a touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for young audiences; and Genius, a podcast play spin-off of Sherlock Holmes. His favourite roles include Rooster in Annie and Ariel in The Tempest.
On the eve before his last flight, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, recollects on the highs and lows of his life.
Camille Deslauriers Ménard studied first in acting.
She’s now also a storyteller, a writer, a director, a teacher, a (future) puppeteer, an historical interpreter, a cultural mediator…
She’s basically doing everything she finds interesting.
She’s there. With a unicorn. Alone. Asking herself what the hell love, sex and shit. Hopefully, she will figure out something before the end of the play.
Christine ML Lee is a writer/composer/lyricist based in Montreal.
Following her final year as the composer-in-residence at the University of Montreal Choir, she completed the Songwriting Workshop at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA.
She continued her exploration of the dynamics between words and music with the Canadian Musical Theatre Workshop in Montreal where she wrote the music, book and lyrics to Game On!, an original ten-minute musical that was showcased at the NTS and at the Segal Centre in 2019. Working with dance and spoken word, Christine’s work has been performed in at Festival Quartiers Danses and in Montreal Botanical Gardens.
Her choir piece, Bloom, was premiered in Montreal in June 2019 by the Choeur du Brouhaha. Look forward to her musical theatre piece Just a Note!
Follow the adventure on Instagram @kris.mllee !!
As part of the Young Creators’ Unit (Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal) and of the Canadian Musical Theatre Workshop, Just a note is a 45min musical about a young Hong-Kong-Canadian university student in her last year who lies to her immigrant parents about getting into medical school and secretly pursues her passion in music instead.
Set in Canada, before and during the Hong Kong protest in the summer 2019, the story explores the dynamics between a daughter too ashamed to be selfish to pursue her own ambitions, and her parents who have done everything to give their daughter what they wished they could have received from their own parents.
Torn between what she feels she owes her parents and what she owes herself, Leah must find out how she will be able to repay, in her own way, the sacrifices made by her parents while also allowing herself to live her own life.
Actor, writer and producer, Darragh is the founder of Heart of Gold Productions,
which has been behind the prize-winning short film Sin Eater, and last summer’s world premiere of Burning Bridget Cleary at Montreal’s St Ambroise Fringe Festival. Her company’s mandate is to focus on Irish historical and mythical stories with relevance to today’s calls to social justice.
An adaptation of Kafka’s short story that explores the Irish legacy of hunger and the canvas of a woman’s body.
Josh is a punk theatre artist born in Toronto and recently moved to Montreal.
He holds a BFA in Acting from York University and is an Alumnus of Stratford’s Birmingham Conservatory. As a playwright, he has developed his craft through Tarragon Theatre’s Paprika Festival and PWM’s Young Creators Unit.
Josh is an artistic leader on multiple independent theatre projects, including Endless Love, who’s first show played in Montreal, Toronto and Brooklyn, RANT, a developing Playback Theatre experience and Hooks and Crooks who are working on creating a carbon-negative theatre production model, to help curve the dire impacts of climate change.
On the payroll of the 1%, genius engineer Samhill has constructed his dream project: Molten Facility End, a monitoring facility that is a game changer in hacking technology. But what will this scientific brilliance be used for? Freeing humanity from the dominance of megalomaniacs or locking us in homogeneity?
Alice Wu is a first-year McGill student originally from Waterloo, Ontario.
Growing up as a second-generation Chinese immigrant, she has long found comfort in the similarities between western and Chinese folklore. Stories helped her grasp her dual identity, and they made her feel less alone.
Now, she is excited to spin her own narratives through the medium of theatre. She’d like to thank the rest of this year’s YCU cohort and Jesse Strong for creating such a special space full of humour and heart.
Once a formidable matriarch, an elderly woman in Beijing clings onto her sense of control. As she prepares for her son’s upcoming visit from Canada, illusions crumble and family secrets are brought to light.
The play is a captivating meditation on immigration, loss, and the life-giving power of imagination.
PWM est situé en territoire autochtone, lequel n’a jamais été cédé. Nous reconnaissons la nation Kanien'kehá: ka comme gardienne des terres et des eaux sur lesquelles nous exerçons. Tiohtiá:ke / Montréal est historiquement reconnu comme un lieu de rassemblement pour de nombreuses Premières Nations. Aujourd'hui, une population autochtone diversifiée, ainsi que d'autres peuples, y résident. C’est dans le respect des liens passés, présents et futurs que nous reconnaissons les relations continues entre les Peuples Autochtones et autres personnes de la communauté montréalaise.
