When young orphans Mala and Chun Chun encounter brothers Prakash and Ojha on the busy streets of Kolkata, they are immediately at odds. The brothers come from a lower-middle-class family and spend their time flying kites instead of attending class, while Mala and Chun Chun can only dream of going to school, a goal Aunty promises will be fulfilled i …

Experienced tailor Norman Davenport has barely opened the doors to his new clothing store in downtown Halifax when Sophie, an exuberant young woman, barges in looking for work, followed by Patrick, a single father who claims to be handy. Hesitantly Norman hires them both to tie up the last few threads before the grand opening. And whether Norman re …

Bridget finds her brother Jeremy in a closet attempting suicide. Again. Determined to help him find some kind of happiness, she carts around grocery stores looking for his potential wife. Bridget’s search affirms what she already thinks: there are couples practically everywhere. Eventually finding her way into the aisle with the razor blades, she …

In Communion, a recovering alcoholic and her estranged daughter try to negotiate a new relationship in spite of vastly different lifestyles; Was Spring tells the story of three women who suffered a tragic accident years ago; and Small Things explores how the little differences keep us from understanding each other.

Jem is a self-described butch dyke from Montreal who always imagined spending her life in bars and having multiple flings. When she meets Freda, a woman who exposes Jem’s vulnerabilities, her preconceived notions of who she is become moot as she finds herself partnered in a long-term relationship with kids. Which she surprisingly loves—most of …

Concord Floral is a one-million-square-foot abandoned greenhouse and a refuge for neighbourhood kids; a place all to themselves in which to dream, dare, and come of age. But hidden there is a secret no one wants to confront, and when two friends stumble upon it they set off an unstoppable chain of events, from shadows in parking lots to phone calls …

A funny, satirical story, Never Swim Alone is about Frank and Bill, two egotisitical men locked in a ruthless competition of one-upmanship for seemingly no reason. A hilarious metaplay, This Is A Play follows three actors who, while performing, reveal their own thoughts and motivations as they struggle through crazy stage directions and an unorigin …

In this poignant meditation on the uneasy relationship between science and the human spirit, a group of women aged nineteen to sixty-three with HER2-related breast cancer are recruited for a clinical drug trial. For some of them the trial is renewed hope; others feel it’s a weary last resort. For Dr. Danielle Pearce, the research scientist in cha …

In the sleepy town of Pontypool, Ontario, no one is safe from an epidemic so devastating it will leave you literally speechless.

Rick, Ted, Donnie, and Cameron are home for their fifteen-year college reunion; a great time to go out for a game of golf and catch up on each other’s lives. Unlike their college days, the conversation doesn’t include talk of beer and final exams, but of colonoscopies, home-security systems, alcoholism, Buddhism, and more.

Three coming-of-age solo shows that follow the lives of teenage girls who attend the same high school and process their real-life dilemmas through dance, while exploring the heartaches of youth and the meaning of heritage.

Fish Eyes is the story of Meena, a classically trained Indian dancer who, despite being obsessed with Bollywood movies and her d …

At 4:00 a.m. on a secluded farm, a woman fights to take her life back from a serial killer as her desperate sister and a haunted police officer reach across time and distance in an attempt to rescue her.

When Joey enters puberty, his father Jake finds himself in a morally ambiguous position. Joey is severely disabled, but he still has the same sexual desires as any seventeen-year-old boy, only he can’t do anything to relieve the tension. Jake is a widower whose life is devoted to his son, but when he suddenly develops a serious medical condition, …

6 Essential Questions tells the story of Renata as she travels to Brazil to reunite with the mother who abandoned her when she was just five years old. In Rio, Renata discovers more than she bargained for in her quest to uncover the truth of who abandoned whom. She is continually tossed about by her undead grandmother and a semi-invisible uncle as …

Prosper is a fisherman trying to get by in the face of everyday problems: there’s the spectre of the baby his wife desires, the ghost of his dead mistress, his wife’s secret admirer, and the overwhelming lure of the village bar. When a slippery eel salesman arrives in town peddling progress to the rural community, Prosper’s list of problems o …

The day after their friend Cathy’s funeral, Margot, Tate, and Connie gather for a round of golf in honour of their recently departed fourth. There, they are joined by another woman, an old friend of Cathy’s they’d never met. Over the course of eighteen holes, secrets and confessions unravel as the women discuss love, sex, children, and everyt …

Concise and practical, Fundamentals of Directing is a distillation of Ric Knowles’s twenty-five years of experience as a director, teacher of directing, and dramaturge across Canada. Organized to reproduce the chronology of a play’s rehearsal, the book moves through the various stages of the directorial process, from selecting a project through …

Kate Parr is smart, confident, and passionate: a rising star in a world of intense competition. But her obligatory marriage to Henry is rife with the threat of violence and the lure of deceit; her secret liaisons with Thom, her husband’s former brother-in-law, could send her to an early grave; and her devotion to the education and equal rights of …

Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Canada is only thirty-three years old, if one begins counting from the premiere of Maria Campbell’s Jessica in Saskatoon and the establishment of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. Since those contemporaneous events in 1982, the Canadian community of Indigenous theatre artists has grown and inspired one an …

Einstein’s Gift follows the life and work of Nobel laureate Dr. Fritz Haber, a man who risked everything for a country that never accepted him. Haber, a chemist who worked hard to enhance life, discovered too late that when his knowledge was put in the hands of the wrong people, millions would die and that his efforts to serve humanity were futil …

"Man in Scrubs" follows the story of a queer black nurse who is getting awfully tired of being put in a box. He's queer, not gay, and he'll tell you the difference. He's always been an outcast, and constantly finds himself at the bottom of any and every hierarchy. With his patience waning, he confronts what it means to be an outsider, and, more imp …

Odette is a young Rwandan-born Canadian filmmaker who has travelled to Turkey to investigate stories of genocide and hidden identity for an upcoming film. When she interviews Sahana, an elderly Muslim woman who has spent her life assisting survivors of the Armenian genocide, she learns a devastating secret about Sahana, one that she resolves to sha …

Seventeen years ago, Isobel was murdered at the tender age of nine. Now she finds herself back in her previous life as a ghost searching for the person responsible for her untimely death. But this time she’s powerful, having the ability to watch over the living, observe them, and sometimes interact with them. Isobel has been paying attention to h …

In a sweaty hotel room, a lonely businessman and a young woman meet for sex. Somewhere between reality and fantasy, the sex becomes talk and the talk becomes dangerous. Nothing is off limits in this battle of morality, economics and desire. This witty, dark and sexually charged new play by Governor General's Award–winner Erin Shields shines a lig …

A chilling psychological thriller, Little One is the haunting story of adopted siblings Aaron and Claire—one the definition of normal, the other deeply disturbed and unpredictable—and the strange lives of their neighbours, a man and his mail-order bride.

In Other People’s Children, wealthy young power couple Ben and Ilana hire Sati, a live-in …

Iris Trimble is trying to hold it all together. She may very well fly off the face of the earth if she doesn't hang on to the kitchen counter. At least that's how she feels after her mother, Bernice, a lively, recently widowed fifty-nine-year-old breaks the news that she has Alzheimer's. In an effort to cope with the stress, Iris makes her mother's …

Elora Dixon is a vibrant, middle-aged lawyer and disability-rights activist who has never walked a step in her life. A neuromuscular disease left her with a curved spine and a reliance on around-the-clock care. Nonetheless, she is an inexorable force when chance pits her against the notorious Julian Summer, who is in town promoting his internationa …

Mahmoud is an exuberant, if overwhelmingly passionate, Iranian engineer-cum-taxi driver who relishes the chance to regale his passengers with his love of Persian culture. Emanuelos, a fabulously gay Spanish perfume salesman, can talk a mile-a-minute about his boyfriend, Behnam. And then there's Tara, an awkwardly charming Iranian Canadian preteen w …

Sixteen-year-old Dane and his mom have relocated to Nova Scotia hoping to flee an abusive relationship with Dane’s father. In the midst of this, Dane has been getting into trouble with the law. He’s been caught breaking into and vandalizing an elderly woman’s home and is about to be charged with a host of serious offences unless he participat …

Garin was two years old when his mother disappeared from a run-down East Vancouver neighbourhood. And now that the Robert Pickton trials are gaining national attention, Garin wonders if his mother, a First Nations woman, could be one of the unidentified victims. His ailing father isn't forthcoming with answers, and Garin's suspicions are at an all- …

Siblings Josh and Jennifer are coping with the loss of their father, who disappeared in a float plane accident on Christmas Eve one year ago. While Josh scours the Internet for proof that his father is still alive, Jennifer rebels against his denial and their mother Marcia's efforts to return the family to normalcy. When Marcia insists that Josh an …

Being a teenager is hard, especially if you're questioning your sexuality and growing up in rural Ontario in the mid '90s. Add to that a temperamental, homophobic father and a tenacious love for Madonna, and it's almost unbearable. Despite it all, Luke loves working on the family farm, and at least he has the support of a group of local outsiders w …

From the shore of Ko Phi Phi in Thailand to a suburb in Utah to a mysterious Kafkaesque hole in the ground, carried away on the crest of a wave gives us brief glimpses into the lives of a sphinx-like escort, a grieving father, a conflicted priest, brothers of legend, a felonious housewife, an accountant of time, an orphaned boy, a radio shock jock …

David, a successful novelist with writer's block, has received some devastating news he's kept to himself. Lucy, his housekeeper of twenty-eight years, has her own secret that she's afraid to admit. As Lucy is getting ready to end her shift, David invites her to stay and have a drink, curious about the woman who's been tending to his house all thes …

Lately Cathy, a middle-aged comedian, has found very little to laugh about. Everything seems either tragic or frustrating, especially her eighteen-year marriage to Peter, a doctor at a local community clinic. Their list of complaints about one another grows day by day, and their teenage daughter is rarely anything but a handful. Despite a once soli …

After suffering a crippling injury during a tour of Afghanistan, Michael has returned home to a Canadian veteran's care facility. The last thing he wanted was to spend his time with a twelve-year-old girl, but Halley, a spirited, physically disabled Pathfinder, is eager to earn her volunteer badge. The pair is at odds from the start, but they find …

The moment Mark meets David his world is thrown off balance. Who could have predicted finding love in a furniture store, or finding it with an unemployed lifeguard? But despite their immediate connection, Mark isn’t sure if David is gay. Mark isn’t even sure if Mark is gay. As he falls deeper in love, Mark works desperately to make David nothin …

This book collects some of Judith Thompson’s earlier, hard-to-find plays, including White Biting Dog, a poetic black comedy about a divorced lawyer who prepares to kill himself by jumping off the Bloor Street Viaduct—until he encounters a small dog who sets him on a different path; I Am Yours, a harrowing story about a group of characters on th …

Most people hope for happy endings. For Warren, a gay divorcee, that means getting his stuff back; most importantly, his cherished John Denver CD. And then there's Warren's assortment of friends: Susan, a Percocet-fuelled divorce lawyer whose daughters are giving her a hard time; Tarot-reading Aaron, who is dating Susan and who secretly used to be …

Julius Rothstein and his granddaughter Abby have loved each other from opposite ends of Canada since Abby was born. But now, accepted as a freshman student at the university where Julius teaches, Abby is moving in with him to be close to school and to keep her newly widowed grandfather company. The two must negotiate a new relationship as housemate …

Theo has been named Time Magazine's Luckiest Man Alive. For twenty consecutive years he has successfully bet double or nothing on the Super Bowl coin toss. And he's getting ready to risk millions on the twenty-first when he is confronted by Cynthia, a young woman who claims to have figured out his mathematical secret. Stem-cell researcher and profe …

Neuropsychologist Helen Harlow is an expert at understanding the functions of the human brain, and yet her own remains a mystery. Turning her back on a once-brilliant future filled with scientific promise, Helen attempts to escape the mess of her life by diving headfirst into a new one: living in a frat-house basement, teaching Psych 101 to clueles …

Marion, a working mother with a special-needs child, has discovered a devastating secret: her husband Curtis has been engaging in a torrid love affair with none other than their son's young teacher, Teresa. Armed with love notes between Curtis and Teresa, Marion shows up to a parent-teacher interview to confront the woman who may be the thread that …

When Pierre and Simone planned a vacation to the Irish coast, they were hoping to revive their failing marriage. What they weren't expecting was to stumble upon the body of Mary, a drowned woman, during a walk along the beach. It's not long before curiosity and obsession take over, and the couple begin to piece together Mary's history using both fa …

Winner of the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award

Based on a true story, Get Yourself Home Skyler James follows the harrowing journey of a young lesbian who defects from the army when she is outed by fellow soldiers. The award-winning rihannaboi95 centres around a Toronto teen whose world comes crashing in when YouTube videos of him dancing to so …

On a publicity tour in Japan, Carl, a Canadian author, finds himself falling in love amidst the sacred stages of Noh theatre and the seedy dance clubs in Tokyo, wired on cocaine and sake. His object of affection is the young, seductive actor, Yori, but the affair becomes complicated when Carl's translator and Yori's sister, Nushi, becomes entranced …

This heartwarming and often hilarious play tells the story of Ernie and George, an estranged father and son who are reunited when a debilitating stroke leaves Ernie with a speech disorder and memory loss. While George is undeniably hurt and betrayed by the man who abandoned him as a child, Ernie can't remember his words, or where he lives. Together …

In this collection of short but powerful two-spirit plays, characters dispel conventional notions of gender and sexuality while celebrating Indigenous understandings. With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trick …

In the aftermath of a tragedy that ends Kim and Ben's marriage, Kim finds herself back in her childhood home, a quiet farm away from the city. Here, she invites Jim, a visiting musician, to stay with her in a bed-and-breakfast arrangement. It's not long before Kim becomes infatuated with Jim's sophistication and charm, and with his ability to make …

Set in Santiago, Chile, three young friends form a bittersweet love triangle during the political upheaval surrounding President Salvador Allende’s assassination.

Told through Leo’s memories, the play travels through childhood, first friends, and first loves. Passion and poetry weave together in this story of innocence disappeared.