Jim DeFelice Edmonton’s Theatre Encyclopedia   The following article was published in the Fall 1985 edition of Canadian Theatre Review.   ..read more

David Gagnon Walker Writer, Producer, Performer On January 29, David Gagnon Walker sat down with Dr. Stefano Muneroni (Associate Professor; MA Program Coordinator; PhD Program Coordinator at the University of Alberta) to talk about his play This Is the Story of the Child Ruled By Fear. Below are two excerpts from the interview. The interview can be heard on Theatre Seen on CJSR (and will be linked when the link is available). Stefano: Tell us a little bit about your choice of playwriting or whether it was a choice? David: It was a horrible accident. In high school, I wanted to be a jazz musi ..read more

Heather Inglis Artistic Producer of Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre Why is it we can talk to some people for hours, while with others we run out of things to say in a matter of minutes? This question is at the heart of what makes theatre work as an art form. Whether monologue or dialogue, theatre is a conversation. Words emulating speech are spoken by actors in real-time and space in front of an audience. The conversation at its heart is both spoken and unspoken and has the drive and energy to be sustained over a duration of time. Audiences conspire with artists to solve the mystery of wha ..read more

Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell by Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell   No Woman’s Land comes from the friendship between two women who met while living in the Middle East while working for Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s major media network.    We met while living on the same compound and became close friends fast! Anyone who knows Amena knows this is how it goes! After six months of Arabic lessons, and lots of Google translate, we went to Syria together with Amena’s one-year-old daughter in tow. We visited the ancient Roman cities of Busra and Palmyra, a Christian nunnery and man ..read more

Amanda Samuelson Playwright Featured in Springboards A bake-off is “a quickly written exercise on an assigned theme with assigned elements” (or ingredients) that is usually done within a small period of time. The bake-off was created by playwright Paula Vogel, and it’s how I first started writing plays.    When I arrived at university in 2015, I had never written a play before. My classmates and I had come into the program as either actors or directors, but we all had to take a mandatory playwriting class. Some weren’t too stoked about this, but for me it ended up being a blessing i ..read more

Trevor Schmidt Playwright Featured in the ‘Alive and Kicking Cabaret’ at the Springboards New Play Festival. I don’t remember what got me interested in the subject matter for this new work, but I tend to do deep dives on Google looking for inspiration and I came across a single, slight reference to ladies’ bare-knuckle boxing in Victorian London - which in turn led me to the little bit I could turn up on Liz Stokes, the undisputed Queen Of The Ring in a ladies’ underground Fight Club over a century earlier. I love historical drama, love research. Loved this story of a woman, an underdog who ..read more

Liam Salmon (They/Them) Playwright in the Springboards Festival I get bored incredibly easily. So, if I ever feel like I’m treading too close to something I’ve already written chances are I’ll lose interest. One way I try to keep my plays fresh is by investigating different kinds of structures or ways of telling a story. You know, to challenge myself, keep myself on my toes, or just to make the whole process a lot harder than it needs to be.   I believe a fundamental way meaning is conveyed in plays is the piece’s structure. I think this is also true for other forms of media. A conventio ..read more

Cat Walsh Playwright in the Springboards Festival When I was five, my father let me watch The Creature From The Black Lagoon. It was the middle of the afternoon, and not a particularly scary movie, so I imagine he thought “How traumatized could she be?” As I’m told the young people say: hold my beer. For weeks after watching it, I’d be curled up in bed, my eyes squeezed shut, imagining what I’d see if I opened them— a pair of scaly legs standing right next to my bed, dramatically side-lit by my nightlight. And although I could never bring myself to do it, I knew what I’d see if I looked up: t ..read more

Leslea Kroll, Playwright in SPRINGBOARDS Sometimes retracing the early stages of a creative project can be foggy business…not quite knowing what the first sparks were or when they were ignited. For my play The Light Fishers, I recall the moment of initial inspiration vividly.   A few years ago, I was watching the televised BBC news program ‘Dateline’, a meeting of guest journalists discussing notable events of the previous week. On this particular episode, news of the world included the plight of refugees making perilous journeys crossing the Mediterranean. One of the journalists comment ..read more