Workshop West Playwrights Theatre 2025-2026 season
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Three new Canadian plays premiere this season at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, as artistic producer Heather Inglis announced last week. The lineup that includes the company’s signature annual new play festival Springboards. And a return to this past season’s radical ticketing experiment in which all tickets are “pay what you will.”
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Devoted to expanding the Canadian repertoire and nurturing its writers, Workshop West turns 47 in 2025-2026, with a season dubbed ‘The Vile and the Vigilant’ in “honour” of the post-truth realities of the unstable and treacherous world in which we find ourselves. And the lineup includes a new play by a seasoned Edmonton playwriting star, one by a playwright/actor with a national profile, and one from an emerging Calgary-based award-winner.
playwright Nicole Moeller
With Wildcat, the season opener (Oct. 22 to Nov. 9), Edmonton’s Nicole Moeller (The Ballad of Peachtree Rose; The Mothers; The Preacher, The Princess, and a Crow) has fashioned a four-actor “crime caper” nail-biter set in the Edmonton in the “Smith Alberta” of 2025, as Inglis explains. “‘Caper’ describes the tone of it.” As billed it’s “a sure-fire antidote to the Alberta news cycle.”
The play has been in development at Workshop West since 2022, and a launch at Springboards (under the title The Resurrection of Dottie Reid). At the centre is a 65-year-old woman (Michelle Fleiger) who’s had enough of the dark, truth-resisting labyrinth of the internet, and fights back. Inglis calls it “a character piece with a crime attached.” The realism of Act I, as Inglis describes, gives way to a meta-theatrical experience in Act II. Her multi-generational cast includes Melissa Thingelstadt, returning to the live stage as the daughter, along with Maralyn Ryan and Graham Mothersill.
In Greg MacArthur’s intriguing two-hander My Testimonial, “a playwright invites you to a staged reading,” says Inglis of a conceit that has real-life traction at Workshop West, home of Springboards. He reads from his script with assistance from a guest actor. In this scenario, “very meta,” a theatre artist prepares a witness to testify in the case of a real Alberta crime. Or is it? How does truth get constructed? For the Inglis production that runs Feb. 11 to 15, 2026, the versatile MacArthur, a former Lee Playwright In Residence at the U of A and a visual artist, returns to Edmonton, and stars in his play as the playwright. The other actor has yet to be announced. “Because it’s so small and compact,” Inglis hopes that My Testimonial will tour.
playwright James Odin Wade
Everyone Is Doing Fine is by Calgary’s up-and-comer James Odin Wade, who’s doing fine, too. Among the awards he’s gathered are from the Alberta Playwriting Competition, the National One-Act Playwriting Competition, and a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award in 2024. And currently, he has a musical (Nowhere With You: An East Coast Musical in development at the Citadel (Mieko Ouchi directed a stage reading at the Collider Festival in June).
The three characters of the new Wade comedy-drama that got its first audience at the 2023 Springboards Festival area two art school friends get themselves employed by a hedge-fund manager. As described, the play, first submitted to Workshop West’s play-reading service, is something of an explosion at the intersection of commerce and ethics. Inglis, whose premiere production runs May 6 to 24, 2026, describes Everyone Is Doing Fine as “fast-faced, smart, sexy and sophisticated (she invokes Mamet and Neil LaBute) … where the characters are revealed to be people you never imagined them to be!”
Workshop West’s signature Springboards Festival returns March 22 to 29, 2026.
Tickets and subscriptions (all pay what you will, with a suggested price of $40 per single ticket and $150 per subscription): workshop west.org.
