Norm Foster Explores Love, Friendship, and the Danger of Getting Exactly What You Asked For in A Woman’s Love List.

July 6, 2026

By: Don Kearney-Bourque, Marketing & Communications Manager

Lighthouse Festival

There are few names in Canadian theatre as beloved, prolific, or instantly recognizable as Norm Foster. For decades, Foster has been delighting audiences across the country with plays that are funny, generous, heartfelt, and deeply human. His work has become a staple on stages from coast to coast, earning him a reputation as one of Canada’s most produced playwrights and one of the great chroniclers of ordinary people finding themselves in extraordinary, hilarious, and sometimes deeply revealing circumstances.

This summer, Lighthouse Festival is thrilled to close its 2026 season with Foster’s A Woman’s Love List, a delightful romantic comedy that asks one deceptively simple question: what if you could write down everything you wanted in the perfect partner, and that person actually appeared?

As Foster explains, A Woman’s Love List grew out of another one of his comedies, The Love List.

“This play is actually the female version of a play I wrote called The Love List,” says Foster. “In that play, two men accidentally conjure up the woman of their dreams.”

In A Woman’s Love List, the idea is turned on its head. The play follows Carly, a professional sportswriter, and Megan, her best friend, as they create a list of every quality Carly wants in the ideal man. Then, much to their surprise, Blaze Wilson walks into their lives. He seems charming, attractive, attentive, and almost too good to be true. Which, of course, is exactly where the trouble begins.

For all its laughs, mistaken expectations, and romantic chaos, the play is driven by a dramatic tension that has been around for centuries.

“The dramatic tension in this play hinges on that old expression ‘be careful what you wish for,’” says Foster.

That phrase sits at the heart of the comedy. Carly and Megan may think they know what perfection looks like on paper, but Foster’s play has great fun exploring what happens when an ideal becomes real. The result is a comedy about love, friendship, fantasy, and the complicated difference between what we think we want and what we actually need.

At first glance, Blaze may appear to be the answer to Carly’s romantic wish list. But for Foster, he was also the most challenging character to bring to life.

“The character of Blaze was the hardest one to write because he is supposed to be Carly’s dream fellow, but he turns out not to be,” says Foster. “He has many twists and turns.”

That complexity is part of what makes the play so funny. Blaze is not simply a punchline or a fantasy figure. He changes. He surprises. He complicates things. He forces Carly and Megan to confront the limits of their own assumptions. In true Foster fashion, the comedy comes not from mocking the characters, but from placing them in a situation where their desires, fears, and blind spots are all suddenly out in the open.

The result is a story with big laughs, but also real emotional stakes. Foster says the characters are searching for something deeply familiar.

“The characters want love,” he says. “They want to feel love. What’s stopping them from getting that love is the mystery of the man they have conjured up.”

That search for connection is one of the recurring themes in Foster’s work. His plays often revolve around people who are trying to understand themselves through their relationships with others. Whether they are looking for romance, friendship, forgiveness, courage, a second chance, or simply a way through the messiness of life, Foster’s characters tend to feel immediately recognizable. They are funny because they are human. They are moving because they are flawed. They make mistakes, say the wrong things, stumble into awkward moments, and sometimes discover something honest when they least expect it.

Again and again, Foster returns to themes of love, aging, friendship, loneliness, reinvention, and the quiet surprises hidden in everyday life. His plays often begin with a comic premise, but underneath the laughter is a sincere curiosity about people: what they want, what they hide, what they regret, and what they are brave enough to try. That balance has made his work resonate so strongly with audiences. He knows how to deliver a great joke, but he also knows that the best comedies are grounded in truth.

For Foster, that truth comes from experience.

“I think my relationship experiences help shape this play, and that is probably true with any writer,” he says. “We write what we know. If we haven’t had any life experiences, then how can we write about real people? Real life?”

That sense of lived experience gives A Woman’s Love List its warmth. The play may involve an almost magical romantic premise, but the emotions behind it are grounded and familiar. Most people have imagined an ideal partner at some point. Many have carried a mental checklist, whether they admit it or not. But Foster gently pokes fun at the idea that love can be assembled from a list of preferred traits, as though the perfect person could be ordered like a custom-made suit.

The physical world of the play adds to that feeling of intimacy. This is not a sweeping epic or a distant fantasy. It is a comedy that lives in recognizable rooms, in conversations between friends, in the private spaces where people confess their hopes and frustrations. The setting gives the characters room to be honest, impulsive, playful, and vulnerable. It suggests a contemporary world where independence, career, friendship, and romantic longing all exist side by side. Carly and Megan are modern women trying to make sense of love in a world that often promises easy answers, but rarely delivers them.

Foster was also conscious of the responsibility that came with writing this version of the story.

“I didn’t edit anything out of the play,” he says. “I just had to make sure that everything rang true. And being a man, writing for two women, I had to be careful not to make it feel that it was written by a man.”

That attention to authenticity is essential to the play’s success. Carly and Megan’s friendship is the emotional engine of the story. Their conversations are quick, funny, supportive, occasionally chaotic, and full of the kind of honesty that only close friends can get away with. While Blaze may be the mystery at the centre of the plot, the relationship between the two women gives the play its heart.

When asked why he needs to tell this story now, Foster offers an answer that speaks to both the play and his long career.

“I’m telling this story now because I am at an age where what’s gone before has added up and I think makes for a good story,” he says.

That accumulation of experience is part of what audiences have come to cherish in Foster’s writing. His plays are never cynical about love, but they are also not naïve. They recognize that relationships are complicated, that people are contradictory, and that the dream version of life rarely survives contact with the real thing. Still, Foster’s work keeps making room for hope. It suggests that even when we get things wrong, we may still learn something valuable.

Like many playwrights, Foster’s writing process is ongoing, layered, and full of revision.

“I am always rewriting,” he says. “When I complete the first draft, I read it over three or four or even five times. And every time I read it, I change something, until I decide, ‘Okay, that’s enough. It’s time to move on to the next play.’”

For him, the joy begins with the people on the page.

“My favourite part of writing is creating the characters,” he says. “The hardest part of writing is starting. Getting the idea for the play. Once I have the idea, then I’m off to the races.”

With A Woman’s Love List, Foster found an idea filled with comic possibility: two friends, one list, and a dream man who may not be so dreamy after all. But what makes the play truly sparkle is what lies beneath the premise. It is a comedy about expectations, friendship, and the strange bravery of wanting love in the first place.

As Lighthouse Festival brings its 2026 season to a close, A Woman’s Love List offers the perfect final note: big laughs, sharp dialogue, romantic mischief, and a whole lot of heart.

And if Foster gets his wish, audiences will leave the theatre smiling, laughing, and maybe asking each other a very revealing question on the ride home.

“I hope that on the way home in the car, audiences will ask each other, what would your dream mate be like?”

I can also make it a little more sales-focused for the Lighthouse website, or create a shorter e-blast version from this feature.

A Woman’s Love List is on stage this summer at Lighthouse Festival. Get your tickets now at lighthousetheatre.com or call the Box Office at 888-779-7703.