Solo Show

Chronicles of a War Child

Solo Show

Lapine-Moi / Rabbit-I

The first instalment Rabbit-I (2005) is a free study about the forces opposing the multiple personalities that define us. The piece is built like a children’s fairytale but somehow a little distorted. A giant blue rabbit, transforms into a caricatural hunter, on the quest for hunting rabbits, but along the way transforms into a “Nathalie Claude” searching for herself, trying to catch her own tail, her own essence.

Solo Show

Dividing Lines | Líneas Divisorias

"The one thing everyone knows is that we’re all going to die. Which means our loved ones are going to die. So how can we prepare for, experience, and honour their deaths? And does that look different if we have to make the decision to end their lives for them if they’re suffering? Dividing Lines | Líneas Divisorias is one woman’s story that offers a space for communal grieving through a celebration of life. Traced by the historic world events that coincide with her memories of independence and immigration, Beatriz reflects on how she spent over a decade caring for her mother—the one person she promised she’d be there for all the way until the end—as she lost her more and more to Alzheimer’s, and ultimately had to make the tough call to end her mother’s pain. A meditation full of light that doesn’t shy away from fear of the unknown, Beatriz’s narrative comes from a vulnerable and recognizable place of love that will invite our memories and choices in to heal." - from the publisher

Historical

Masada

"A one-person play about the history of Zionism. The play is told as a monologue through the character of an Israeli history professor who begins the lecture as a critic of Zionism but moves into an emphatic pro-Zionist stance, shifting from reason to passion or to put it another way from the rational to the irrational." - Arab Digest

Solo Show

The Auden Test

"A play about a poem about a painting about a myth - and what it means to be human. A queer tale, interweaving the lives and works of the poet W.H. Auden and the mathematician Alan Turing." - fromt the publisher.

Realistic

The Good Bride

Every night from 3pm to midnight, 15 year old Quiverfull Christian Maranatha Graham puts on her wedding dress and hopes that today will be the day her 28 year old groom Pete comes to claim her. Daddy, the paster, sent her to the Pullmans’ house to wait until God tells him it’s time for her marriage. Maranatha is so excited to submit to Pete's godly leadership in marriage and fill his quiver with arrows for Christ. But as her pre-wedding wait wears on and on, Maranatha has an increasingly difficult time ignoring Satan's constant whispering. Is she making an idol of her nightly Chick-Fil-A shake? If she has "hot shivers" for someone other than her fiance, is that adultery? And what should she do about this card from her estranged mother, who abandoned the family seven years ago?

Solo Show

Bang! Boy Bang!

Bang! Boy Bang! is a multi-media one-person show. The play follows a teenager named Rod Clarke as he struggles to retrace his activities at a party that took place one drunken night. His distorted memory eventually reveals his relationship with his troubled family, his chauvinistic brother, and a girl named Laura he met at the party. Bang! Boy Bang! explores social and sexual mores and the explosive issue of date rape.

Solo Show

Boys

ARMY SLUT BOY just wants real love. HAM and CHEESE BOY just wants to change the world. And TAMBOURINE BOY? Well... he's got rhythm. Lotsa rhythm. A one-man show about three BOYS (sorry... young men) and their lives, loves or lack thereof. Paul Dunn's tour-de-force solo show - which features the favourite "Tambourine Boy at Christian Summer Youth Camp" monologue - is a look at three 20-somethings in the late 90's, seeking to come of age.

Solo Show

Altar

Eugenio is a queer young immigrant living in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador. Less than a year has passed since his move from Mexico, but in that time, he experienced deep love and deeper heartbreak when his new boyfriend, Benjamin, inexplicably “ghosted” him. No, Benjamin isn’t dead; he just stopped calling and texting. And the thing is…Eugenio’s still not over it. Looking to the traditional Mexican holiday Día de Muertos (The Day of The Dead) and his father's previous experience with paranormal activities, Eugenio decides to build an altar (a central part of the Día de Muertos ritual) in the hopes that he will be able to summon his boyfriend’s ‘ghost’ to sort out the end of their relationship once and for all. Through the altar, Eugenio realizes that he has been something of a ghost himself to the loved ones he left behind in Mexico. Will setting up an altar be enough for Eugenio to forgive, forget, and love again? Or enough to help him heal the relationships with his friends and family far away?

Solo Show

Secret Life of a Mother

The raw and untold secrets of pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, and mothering are revealed in this true story of motherhood for the twenty-first century. A playwright writes an exposé of modern motherhood full of her own darkly funny confessions and taboo-breaking truths. One of her real-life friends, an actress, performs the piece, and through it her own experiences of motherhood start to surface. These mothers are not the butts of jokes, the villains, or the perfect angels of a household. This empowered and relatable play was written collaboratively between award-winning theatre artists Hannah Moscovitch, Maev Beaty, and Ann-Marie Kerr, with co-creator Marinda de Beer. Uplifting and full of love, Secret Life of a Mother is a generous and powerful act of truth-telling for anyone who has thought about, been, loved, known—or come from—a mother.

Solo Show

Deafy

"Deaf public speaker Nathan Jesper has arrived at his venue desperately late. As he launches into his speech, he soon realizes that things are not what they seem. Written and performed by Deaf actor Chris Dodd, Deafy is a stand-up/sit-down tragicomedy blending ASL, the spoken word and surtitles which reflects on the experience of what it is like to be a Deaf person in a hearing world and leads you on an unexpected journey of what it really means to belong." - Pi Theatre

Realistic

Everybody Just C@lm the F#ck Down / Everybody Just Calm the Fuck Down

After an unexpected night in a Regina hospital emergency room, Robert Chafe can’t shake the burning question of whether he’s Tennessee Williams or Dorothy Zbornak. Are his symptoms a harbinger of a terrifying undiagnosed condition, or is it all just in his head? Frenetic, tender, and sometimes scary, Everybody Just C@lm the F#ck Down is a stumbling folly about the aging body, mid-life anxiety, and what it means to live when you can’t know what’s next.

Solo Show

Let’s Run Away

Peter is putting on a show. He’s a bit stressed. In the show, he will read from a manuscript. It’s a large manuscript, but don’t worry, he’s only going to read the parts about him, and there aren’t many. It’s a memoir written by someone who abandoned him twice—once as a baby and once when he was a young man of thirteen. This person has figured prominently in Peter’s life for over fifty years now, but judging by the memoir, he has not figured so much in theirs. So perhaps it’s going to be a very short show? Again, don’t worry, Peter has other skills which he will share. And if Peter can keep his cool, and if the people who work at the theatre can help him set everything up, and if the audience can just give him a little bit of their time and their attention and their silence, maybe he can tell everyone something about who we really are and who we are to others and who we might be to ourselves when we’re alone. And maybe that can make it all a little bit easier.

Realistic

Crybaby

"A young woman falls in love for the first time, opening up a well of feeling about her Blackness, her identity, her childhood, sexuality, and womanhood in a poetic performance that uses memory and projections to ask the question: How can we be whole when a part of us is missing?" - From a FB post from the Black theatre workshop in Montreal

Solo Show

The Sender

Cil Brown loves her work. Her job as a Sender on a global racism-elimination project has resulted in a peaceful, logical and sustainable world. However, she encounters technical difficulties when a Sendee objects to restrictions on the lives of residents of White Supremacist Island.

Historical

Cyrano de Bergerac

From the acclaimed author of The Last Wife and The Virgin Trial comes a new adaptation of one of the finest love stories ever told. Cyrano de Bergerac is a swashbuckling seventeenth-century swordsman who can do anything . . . except tell Roxane, the woman he loves, how he feels. He’s just too self-conscious about his unusually large nose. Roxane finds romance in words, and Cyrano is full of them, so when he sees the chance to ghostwrite love letters to her from an inarticulate, love-struck cadet, he takes it—but can he ever reveal himself? Could she ever love him for who he is? In turns funny, tender, and self-aware, this classic tale about the exquisite distress of loving from afar will find its way into the hearts of even the most skeptical.

Stylized

Pretty Goblins

From holding hands in the womb to holding each other’s hair back when they puked, twins Laura and Lizzie grew up only having each other. They couldn’t count on their practically feral mom, absent dad, or even the boys they liked. They’re polar opposites—Laura’s reserved while Lizzie’s reckless—but their shared mischievous giggles and dreams for the future kept them going. One day, Laura finds a familiar book of poems in Lizzie’s apartment and is dragged through their turbulent past. Together, the sisters relive their complicated history in an effort to make sense of the present. Framed by the beauty of a well-loved poem, this story of ferocious sisterhood, addiction, and the aftermath of trauma will leave howls echoing in your ears.

Stylized

Wildfire

In Wildfire, three odd triplets, two misfits, and one misunderstood woman are all burning with solitude and desire. Through an exploration of heredity and fate, these seemingly ordinary characters choose to struggle against their isolation in extraordinary yet relatable ways.

Musical

Suzie Goo: Private Secretary

Suzie Goo works for Corporeal Can Inc. in the early 1960s. As a modern-day career gal, the last thing she has time for is her "hands on" boss, Vincent Bag. When Suzie takes matters into her own hands, we all learn a thing or two about what it takes to climb the corporate ladder.

Realistic

True Love Lies

Sparking a series of further revelations, the sudden reappearance of David exposes suppressed emotions and desires in everyone and the family must renegotiate their relationships with each other and, ultimately, redefine their family. In sharp, non-stop dialogue, Brad Fraser brings each of his characters to life with a depth, humour, and emotion that tears open the nuclear family and finds the heart that is often lost and forgotten.

Realistic

The Best Brothers

Bunny Best has met her unfortunate end after a mishap at a Gay Days parade. Now her two sons, Kyle and Hamilton, have the task of arranging her funeral and caring for her most beloved companion, a troublesome Italian greyhound named Enzo. In the bustle of obituary-writing, eulogy-giving, and dog-sitting, sibling rivalry quickly reaches its peak and years of buried contentions surface.

Stylized

Under Wraps

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 nothing more than a friend and to make that enough. Filled with hopeful exhilaration and devastating missed opportunities, Under Wraps nimbly tracks one man’s tumultuous quest to finally love himself and let it all out.

Solo shown

Dirty Plötz: Witness the Hidden Vagenda

"Tricksters, witches, whores, hags and the Holy Bitch all feature prominently in Dirty Plötz. “Anasyrma” is a word you will hear in this work. The definition of this word is to lift one skirt’s to curse the viewer. There is no similar word for men – men cannot curse people with their genitals. Syrma herself is the star at the hem of the constellation Virgo’s skirt. You will meet her and she will tell you her own story. You will also meet a live embodiment of the Sheela na gig, a small sculpture found on churches in Ireland and an expression of a pre-puritanical female empowerment. And of course, The Designated Hand Wringer will be available to be outraged on behalf of your oppression." - buddies in bad times theatre

Solo Show

Lapine-Moi / Rabbit-I

The first instalment Rabbit-I (2005) is a free study about the forces opposing the multiple personalities that define us. The piece is built like a children’s fairytale but somehow a little distorted. A giant blue rabbit, transforms into a caricatural hunter, on the quest for hunting rabbits, but along the way transforms into a “Nathalie Claude” searching for herself, trying to catch her own tail, her own essence.

Realistic

Graceful Rebellions

"Graceful Rebellions, playing in the SummerWorks Festival, tracks experiences of (and with) queerness in war-torn Afghanistan to Canada through two generations and four characters. We start with an idealistic fourteen year old, probably around sixty years ago, imagining her own future wedding on the eve of her sister’s. She is so good-natured and naïve that it is hard for us, the audience, who know her reality will not be able to meet her fantasy." - Mooneyonthetheatre.com "In this brilliant and engaging one-woman show, playwright and performer SHAISTA LATIF transitions seamlessly between distinctly complex characters in a deeply personal work. Moving across cultures and generations, Graceful Rebellions tells the stories of three Afghan women, each bartering for small joys and challenging the cultural norms that exist under Afghanistan’s patriarchal rule. Shaista lovingly portrays characters, by turns funny and heartbreaking, who struggle in a world where women commonly have no power, in a culture that has long been dominated by war." - National Arts Centre, Ottawa

Docudrama

Reading Hebron

A Toronto Jew named Nathan Abramowitz investigates the Hebron Massacre—in which a Jewish settler murdered 29 Muslims at prayer—as a way of questioning his own responsibility for the oppression of Palestinians.

Stylized

The League of Nathans

Nathan Abramowitz, Nathan Glass and Nathan Isaacs form a boyhood club and together grapple with their Jewish faith and identity, until Glass suddenly moves to Israel. Many years later, a telegram summons Abramowitz and Isaacs to a synagogue in Spain for one last meeting of the League of Nathans.

Realistic

And then there was you

A mother addresses her child as they both visit milestones that offered them each independence, and in the process explores how the profound connection between mother and child evolves.

Realistic

Bears

As the prime suspect in a workplace accident, Floyd has to get out of town fast. Pursued by the RCMP, he heads through the Rockies for Burnaby, BC, along the route of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. By the time he reaches the Pacific, Floyd has experienced changes: his gait widening, muscles bulging, sense of smell heightening…

Stylized

Go West, Young Man

Based on the true story of the summer in the 1960's that Craig Russell spent living with Mae West as her personal secretary, Go West, Young Man explores both the spark behind the creation of a unique Canadian superstar, and the long slow fading of an equally unique American Movie Goddess. Russell Edie is a 15-year-old teenage boy that leaves behind his drab Ontario life and gets on a Greyhound to Hollywood, where he seeks out the faded 70-year-old legend Mae West, carrying hundreds of forged fan letters that he uses to leverage a summer position as her personal secretary. Ambition collides with faded grandeur when Mae learns that Russell has been studying her every move in order to become the world's leading Mae West impersonator.