WWPT goes entirely PWYW for our 46th season! You might ask, "Why take the risk?" and we're here to tell you ..read more

Spenser Kells, a participant in last season's Springboards Festival, reflects on his journey bringing Sheep Play to life at the 2024 Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival and the importance of professional playwriting support ..read more

Workshop West’s 2023-24 season Borderlands – Encounters on Outskirts has been a year of heart-stopping theatre, buzzy openings, and luminescent performances. We’ve seen work by seasoned pros from across the country, new stars in the making, emerging artists just starting their journey, and Edmonton mainstays who we are fortunate live and work in our city. In Catherine Anne Toupin’s MOB — a slick, modern, nail-biting thriller from Quebec (translated by Chris Campbell) —loneliness was the match to the gasoline of the internet, leaving no one unscathed. This is the Story of a Child Ruled by Fear ..read more

We’ve reached the end of another season here at Workshop West and we wanted to shine the spotlight back on our incredible playwrights of our Borderlands season. Below you’ll find an interview with Catherine-Anne Toupin and Chris Campbell about Mob, and playwrights notes from David Gagnon Walker (This is the Story of the Child Ruled by Fear), and Conni Massing (Dead Letter). We hope you’ve enjoyed this season as much as we have. “MOB is a play about language, the way it is used online, and the new types of violence that the internet facilitates and enables via the words we write in the shadows ..read more

In celebration of our upcoming world premiere of Dead Letter by Conni Massing, the members of our Indigenous Playwrights’ Circle brought forth some ideas on "hidden meanings." My hidden meaning is above. Not space. Not the clouds. Not the wind. Not the sun, the moon, the sky. The birds. Their hidden presence becomes my greatest direction. -Josh Languedoc I asked for a sign and He gave me a feather. Those of us that have this lived experience know that we’re stumbling blind. -Monica Gate Do I need to go on such a grueling out-in-the-woods-starve-myself-in solitude journey just to find meaning i ..read more

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