My play WAVES will be staged in Spring 2027.  Details/announcements will follow in upcoming blog posts.

When I got back from Calgary in May after winning the Scripts on Fire Playwriting Competition, I talked to my friend Liz Best about how encouraged I felt following the workshop reading. The experience from Val Lieske who organized the event, to dramaturge Samantha MacDonald and the actors who worked on my script, convinced me more than ever the need to get WAVES on stage.

I’ve sent WAVES out to theatres; some I’m still waiting to hear back from while many have turned down the play. In talking to Liz about Calgary and the disappointment I felt from the rejections, she simply blurted out one day:  “Let’s just do it”.  From that point on, we searched for a theatre and landed on a space in Toronto which we felt would be the best option to stage the play.

This creative journey is always a challenge.  To balance the joy of writing with the frustration of hitting a wall of rejection can debilitate the creative soul. Writing is a great way to pass the time and it feeds my soul, especially when I sit around a table of actors who are reading my dialogue. But ultimately, every playwright wants to see their work on stage.  They want to see their characters come to life with an audience watching. They want to see the play transformed into something more than they imagined.

Liz Best

You come to the point in this often perplexing journey where you have no choice but to do it yourself. I still have high hopes that a company will come along and stage WAVES, but I can’t keep waiting for that to happen.  And so the heavy lifting begins of putting a team together.  Liz Best will direct.  She was instrumental in getting my play ANIMAL into the Fireworks Festival. Liz also organized two readings of WAVES last year which then lead to a third reading in Calgary that helped shape the play where it is today.

WAVES deals with a grandmother, mother and daughter who come to live together in a country house where their lives are forever changed as these strong-willed women wrestle with various levels of grief, incredible love, difficult partings, new romances, newborns and gardening! Stay tuned for future updates.

In the meantime, I’m on page 33 in my new play called THE ROCKER.  This play looks to be quite sprawling in length, but we’ll see. First drafts are always long.  I’m tapping into various themes with the focus on a family cleaning out an attic after the patriarch of the family has passed.  But the 18 year-old daughter of this family – a spunky woman on a spectrum – has other thoughts on her racing mind and brings about nothing but chaos, havoc, hilarity and hard truths to the proceedings. She challengers her family and ultimately becomes the defiant leader of this disconnected group. Unexpected revelations and hidden wounds surface as this family reckons with its shady, secretive past while desperately trying to define who they are or have become in the uncomfortable present.

I leave you with this quote below by American playwright Edward Albee.  Playwrights are observers – of their own life and the lives of those around them.  Art and life clash/come together.  Characters begin to take on a life of their own and that’s when something magical is created on the page.  Till next time…