Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic voices shaping Canadian theatre today. The column invites artists to share nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of a glorious, frustrating art form.
I suspect every theatre-lover has that one play they’d go full Dr. Faustus to see revived at a playhouse near them. One of mine is The Verge, by Susan Glaspell. First produced in Provincetown in 1921, it’s a masterpiece of expressionist theatre, about a scientist named Clair Archer trying to create new forms of life in the aftermath of the First World War. Glaspell’s script is a rarely produced marvel that, to my knowledge, has never had a professional production in Canada. (Paging the Shaw Festival.)
When it comes to revivals of Canadian work, a 2021 report called Surveying the Landscape, created by Louise Casemore for Alberta Playwrights’ Network, includes these damning words: “[The] focus on the first run as the highest point of achievement presents a major dropoff in the lifespan of many Canadian plays, with new plays experiencing a triumphant rise toward the stage and then a steep descent to the shelf as they are shopped around for infinity as a less desirable property… For plays which have received a premiere, this attitude creates the unfortunate equation of: development + premiere + time = extinction.”
Many exceptions to this trend exist. Rose Napoli and Suzy Wilde’s musical After the Rain, Anosh Irani’s Behind the Moon, Nick Green’s Casey and Diana, and Zahida Rahemtulla’s The Wrong Bashir have all received multiple productions after premiering in recent years. A rise in co-productions means that premieres like Natasha Mumba’s Copperbelt can enjoy more than one run within the same season. CBC and Expect Theatre’s PlayME podcast offers new plays a second hearing as audio dramas. And a new Toronto-based indie company, Andrew Moodie’s Renaissance Canadian Theatre, is entirely dedicated to giving neglected scripts another chance. But across the country, second productions are still rare, especially for shows that premiered pre-pandemic.
(A note that it’s still an enormous feat to get a play — especially large-scale projects — to the premiere stage. Tomson Highway’s Rose, the third chapter in his acclaimed Rez cycle, is only receiving its professional premiere this year, over three decades after its completion.)
With this in mind, I spoke to five theatre folks one-on-one about the Canadian play that each of them thinks deserves another live production. There was only one rule: The interviewee couldn’t have been involved in the play’s premiere. Of the five selected pieces, two are musicals, all are text-based, and all had their first productions in Ontario. So they represent a small fraction of the Canadian works that could use more time in the limelight.
After reading this article, I hope you’ll be inspired to research these plays further, and to consider which stories you’d champion for revival at a theatre near you.
These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Speaker: Dr. Signy Lynch, assistant professor in english and drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research
Show: Dixon Road, book, music, and lyrics by Fatuma Adar
First production: A 2022 co-production between Musical Stage Company and Obsidian Theatre, at the High Park Amphitheatre. Directed and choreographed by Ray Hogg.
Why she loves the show: “It’s a musical about a family that moves to Canada during the Somali Civil War in the ‘90s, and their experience of being newcomers. It’s particularly about the relationship between the family’s father and daughter, Zaki and Batoul.
“On the one hand, the show is really specific. I think it’s at least partially based off Fatuma’s family’s own experience. But it’s also — I hate the word universal — but it does what musicals do best: this creation of shared feeling. I talk about Dixon Road as Canada’s answer to Hamilton, in its blend of musical genres, and the use of genre as a tool.”
Why it merits a new production: “I love Hamilton, in some ways, but it does have this — one might even say uncritical — celebration of U.S. nationalism and U.S. history. People have critiqued the erasure of context from the show, especially regarding slavery. Dixon Road doesn’t do that. It would be so easy to do a ‘rah-rah Canada!’ musical, but instead Dixon Road explores the complexities of what it means to be a newcomer in a country that has a lot of racism and discrimination.
“And so what actually emerges is a story of struggle and triumph, and one that celebrates community and belonging and the people who make up Canada, but necessarily the nation-state itself. And what a time to be staging a play about a family impacted by global conflicts. It’s so urgent in so many ways.”
Where to find the script: Although the full script and score of Dixon Road aren’t publicly available, an excerpt of the script appears in the anthology Testifyin’: Contemporary African-Canadian Drama, Vol. 3, which Lynch is co-editing with Djanet Sears. The anthology will be released in 2027.
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Speaker: Martin Julien, multi-hyphenate theatre artist, who recently portrayed Man in Chair in Shifting Ground Collective’s production of The Drowsy Chaperone
Show: The Orange Dot, by Sean Dixon
First production: A 2017 Theatrefront production at Streetcar Crowsnest. Directed by Vikki Anderson. Note from Nathaniel: after our conversation, I found out that The Orange Dot has in fact had more life on a Canadian stage. It was put on by Calgary’s Sage Theatre in 2024.
Why he loves the show: “It’s about two city workers who arrive at a massive tree that’s going to be cut down because it’s old and diseased. In the original production it was a very spare set design, and the tree had this almost brutalist architecture aspect to it. The rest of the team is late, so the characters have to wait there. It’s very much like Waiting for Godot.
“The dialogue was contemporary and naturalistic in a way that I had never seen in Sean’s work before. The two characters banter, get to know each other, flirt, argue. But in the last 20 minutes, it veered into this other gothic, avant-garde world, and became really wild and gory.”
Why it merits a new production: “The play reflected conversations that were happening in 2017 about online magazines like Buzzfeed, online radicalization, and also gender and feminism. At the time, the #MeToo movement had just exploded on social media. Sean’s play was addressing things like mansplaining and gaslighting. Now, I think it would be almost a period piece: an intelligent and human exploration of what the world was like 10 years ago.”
Where to find the script: As of March 2026, the script of The Orange Dot has not been published and is not publicly available.
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Speaker: Anita Majumdar, actor, playwright, dramaturg, trained classical Indian dancer, and illustrator. A remount of her one-woman play Boys With Cars is coming to Young People’s Theatre this April.
Show: Shakespeare’s Nigga, by Joseph Jomo Pierre
First production: A 2013 Obsidian Theatre production, produced in association with Theatre Passe Muraille (TPM) and 3D Atomic at TPM. Directed by Philip Akin. Note from Nathaniel: In 2022, the company I now co-run, Shakespeare in the Ruff, put on a staged reading of the play (directed by Kwaku Okyere), but there hasn’t yet been a fully realized revival.
Why she loves the show: “I had the great privilege of being there on closing night. A friend brought me. I hadn’t researched anything about it. It’s one of the most astonishing plays I’ve seen. Joe played the main character, sort of the embodiment of Aaron from Titus Andronicus. André Sills’ character had shades of Othello. So you had these two Black men who are juxtaposed to each other. André’s character was in a sense the model minority, playing within the rules, while Joe’s character was having an affair with Shakespeare’s — very white — daughter in secrecy.
“Joe’s work is so imaginative: anchored in reality, but a reality dreamed in poetry. If memory serves, the play was in verse and incorporated iambic pentameter. It was great to see Joe work with a kind of heartbeat structure, to speak to things that I think were in his own heart regarding: ‘What role do Black people play in Shakespeare?’ Because it’s not like Shakespeare didn’t write about them.
“Joe, if you’re reading this, please write more plays!”
Why it merits a new production: “We often situate our retellings of Shakespeare inside a colourless, raceless context. The presence of Black people in Shakespeare often gets left out of the conversation, and the topic only re-emerges when we have incidents like the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, even though it’s been there for 100s of years.
“The premiere happened before there was a [mainstream] detailed conversation about who gets to say the N-word. Not that everyone thought they could say that word prior to 2013 — but later conversations really anchored the idea that this is not a word for non-Black people to say, and you should really ask yourself why you want to say it so badly. Joe’s show was just before that cusp. It cracked open an invisible debate, because now there was something people could point to and say, ‘That’s what that feeling is. That’s what that discomfort was in me.’”
Where to find the script: Shakespeare’s Nigga was originally published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2013, but is now out of print. It’s currently available as an e-publication through various bookseller websites.
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Speaker: Derrick Chua, theatre producer and entertainment lawyer
Show: Brantwood, created by Mitchell Cushman and Julie Tepperman, with music and lyrics by Bram Gielen, Anika Johnson, and Britta Johnson
First production: A 2015 Michael Rubinoff and Sheridan College Canadian Music Theatre Project production at Brantwood Public School. Directed by Cushman and Tepperman.
Why he loves the show: “Brantwood was this crazy, immersive musical theatre experience that took place at an actual school, which had been slated to become condos, in Oakville. The team got permission to reopen it for the show. The premise was that you were alumni returning to the school for a final celebration before it was shut down. The characters discover a time capsule that was buried decades ago. Then all of a sudden, the high school transforms, and all of those decades become present, from 1920 to 2020.
“The show took place all over different rooms in the high school, over three hours. Scenes explored a range of topics: racism, sexism, abuse, homosexuality, antisemitism. There were 40 to 50 student performers, plus some professionals playing teachers and older characters. You could wander off on your own and choose your own adventure. I went back a second time because I was so enthralled.”
Why it merits a new production: “It’s in the vein of Sleep No More in the U.S., and some of Punchdrunk’s shows in the U.K. I think people are looking for experiences. Think about the success of these immersive events that are a little bit outside the box — Immersive Van Gogh, for example. You could come back to Brantwood easily three or four times and not see the same show. I think the team figured out that it would take you at least six visits to see everything.”
Where to find the script: As of March 2026, the script and score of Brantwood have never been published and are not publicly available.
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Speaker: Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, a.k.a. Belladonna the Blest, emcee, playwright, and agitator
Show: Cast Iron, by Lisa Codrington
First production: A 2005 Nightwood Theatre production in association with Obsidian Theatre at the Tarragon Theatre Extraspace. Directed by ahdri zhina mandiela. Note from Nathaniel: Factory Theatre produced a binaural audio version of the piece in 2021, but there hasn’t yet been a live, fully staged revival.
Why she loves the show: “The central teller of the story is an elderly woman, Libya, in a Winnipeg nursing home. She’s triggered into [memories of her childhood in Barbados, and the story] of a ‘red woman’ who runs through the sugar cane: If you’re out after dark, she’ll get you. There’s a mystery around who Libya’s speaking to — there’s this shadowy figure in the room. The suspense of it is something I’m actually just trying to learn how to do. The care with which Lisa crafts, not just the story, but the moment, puts you on the edge of your seat.
“The original production of Cast Iron with actor Alison Sealy-Smith deeply affected me as a playwright and as an audience member, and as an immigrant. I’d never heard a piece so deeply rooted in home, and a home that I recognized. The unshrinking use of the Bajan dialect, even though that’s not where I’m from, took me home. Cast Iron is a solo show with a number of different characters, of different ages, classes, and social dynamics. It’s not a gesture toward culture. It’s a loving portrayal of a breadth of Bajan people.”
Why it merits a new production: “Right now, there’s a strong desire for horror as a genre. Everyone wants to experience terror in a safe environment, because we’re going to experience terror anyway, so this play would be really timely right now. Also, we as a community have more cultural care for the play’s themes around elder care, aging minds, and mental health.
“In 2005, the play was produced into a community that hadn’t actually heard that specific accent, or the idiom of that place, very much. In the two decades that have passed, we as a community are more ready to receive the play in the way that it was originally offered. There’s so much more of a sense that we don’t need permission to tell our stories in the way they come to us. Lisa has always been doing that. I want to see this play again. I want to see it done as deeply Bajan as possible.”
Where to find the script: Cast Iron was published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2007. As of March 2026, it is out of print.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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