Holiday Office Closure

Playwrights Canada Press will be closed for the holidays starting Monday, December 21, 2015 and will reopen on Monday, January 4, 2016.

Any orders placed via our website during this time will be shipped when the office reopens.

Please contact University of Toronto Press Distribution for large orders in Canada, or if you require a quicker service. US customers can contact Theatre Communications Group to place any orders.

Best wishes for a happy holiday season!

Two-Day Holiday Sale

Our office will be open on Friday, December 11 and Monday, December 14 for a book sale! In addition to our own large selection of plays and essay collections, we have books from BookThug, Coach House, NeWest Press, TCG, and Nick Hern Books for sale.

Come by 269 Richmond St. W., Suite 202 (one block west of John St.) in Toronto between 10-6! Feel free to call us (416-703-0013) if you require assistance with stairs (because there's a whole flight of them leading up to our office), and we'll accommodate.

We hope to see you!

Holiday Sale!

Get 20% off our entire selection of books until December 11. Just use promo code holidaydrama15 at checkout.

Review: Daniel MacIvor's I, Animal

Check out Savanna Harvey's review of Daniel MacIvor's I, Animal on her vlog, The Pretentious English Major.

Stay tuned for more reviews of our books on her channel. Coming soon!

David Yee wins the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award!

A warm congratulations to David Yee who won the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama for carried away on the crest of a wave!

Check out the full list of winners herehttp://ggbooks.ca/.

Fall Book Launch, Nov 2 in Toronto

Join us on Monday, November 2 for a book launch in Toronto! 

Hosted by Jon Kaplan and Susan G. Cole of NOW, the evening will include readings from
Maja Ardal, HER2 
Tony Burgess, Pontypool 
Brad Fraser, Kill Me Now 
Colleen Murphy, Pig Girl 
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, A Man A Fish 
Priscila Uppal, 6 Essential Questions 
Anita Majumdar, Boys with Cars (from Love, Loss, and Longing: South Asian Canadian Plays) 
Anusree Roy, Pyaasa (from Love, Loss, and Longing: South Asian Canadian Plays)

Where: The Garrison, 1197 Dundas St. W 
When: Monday, November 2, 7pm

Admission is free.

We hope to see you there!

Playwrights Canada Press Fall Book Launch, Nov 2

Join us on Monday, November 2 and help us celebrate our fall season with a launch party!

Hosted by Jon Kaplan and Susan G. Cole of NOW, the evening will include readings from
Maja Ardal, HER2 
Tony Burgess, Pontypool 
Brad Fraser, Kill Me Now 
Colleen Murphy, Pig Girl 
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, A Man A Fish 
Priscila Uppal, 6 Essential Questions 
Anita Majumdar, Boys with Cars (from Love, Loss, and Longing: South Asian Canadian Plays) 
Anusree Roy, Pyaasa (from Love, Loss, and Longing: South Asian Canadian Plays)

Where: The Garrison, 1197 Dundas St. W 
When: Monday, November 2, 7pm

Admission is free.

We hope to see you there!

Drama Workshop for High School Teachers, Nov 12 in Toronto

Join Debbie Nyman, co-editor of Truth in Play: Drama Strategies for Building Meaningful Performances for a practical, in-depth workshop exploring script using teaching and learning strategies you can take back to your classroom!

What will you learn? 

You will learn how to take students into a scene, explore, experiment, and re-visit the text to make meaning, develop authentic characters, and build multi-layered interpretations and deepened understandings of the works. You will investigate a variety of presentation modes designed to encourage all students to successfully reflect on and share meaningful work with an audience.

Hear from Gregory Hertel, a drama teacher with the TDSB, who will share his experiences working in this way with Truth in Play with his drama students. Learn how to apply the strategies and thinking behind Truth in Play to a variety of texts beginning with a scene from Leon Aureus’s Banana Boys to take you briefly inside the play before the performance.

Where: Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St., Toronto

When: 4 pm, Thursday, November 12, 2015 

Registration fee: $60.00

Purchase your ticket here: http://bit.ly/tipplcn

What does the registration fee include? 

1. One ticket to the workshop

2. A copy of Truth in Play

3. Dinner from Magic Oven

4. One ticket to Banana Boys by Leon Aureus at Factory Theatre 

Debbie Nyman is an instructor of the Dramatic Arts Additional Qualifications Program at OISE/UT. She was a classroom teacher and instructional leader with the Toronto District School Board. Debbie has written curriculum documents and resources for the Toronto District School Board and the Ministry of Education and is the co-author of Drama Schemes, Themes, and Dreams.

Gregory Hertel is the A.C.L. for the Arts at Agincourt C.I. and has taught Dramatic Arts, Photography, and Visual Arts for over 25 years. (Yikes!) He has directed and produced over sixty high-school plays, given professional workshops to educators, and written Dramatic Arts curriculum for CanStage, the TDSB, the Ministry of Education, and the Faculty of Education at York University. Earlier this spring he appeared in the Scarborough Theatre Guild’s production of The Mumberley Inheritance as Sir Roger Mumberley.

The book: Geared towards high-school students, Truth in Play: Drama Strategies for Building Meaningful Performances features a curated collection of short scenes and monologues from Canadian plays, complete with teaching and learning strategies. The strategies invite students to step inside the text and empathize with the characters to further their understanding of motivations and feelings and themes of the plays. As a vehicle for deepening comprehension and exploring relevant themes and issues in Canadian plays, Truth in Play creates a shared experience to build meaningful relationships and to allow students to connect authentically with their characters in performance.

The 2015 GG Books Finalists!

The Canada Council for the Arts has announced the finalists for the 2015 Governor General's Literary Awards. And three Playwrights Canada Press titles are among the finalists in the drama category, including carried away on the crest of a wave by David Yee; The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble by Beth Graham; and Mahmoud by Tara Grammy and Tom Arthur Davis! 

For a limited time we have all three plays available in one bundle for only $30. Read them all before the winner is announced on October 28!

A hearty congratulations to our authors, and all the nominees!

Beth Graham reads from The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble

If you missed the launch of The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble by Beth Graham at Audreys Books this week, don't fret! The Pretentious English Major has the whole event on her vlog!

Hear Beth Graham's inspiration behind the play!

Beth Graham at Audreys Books, June 15!

Edmonton! Beth Graham, the co-author of the wildly successful The Drowning Girls and Comrades will be at Audreys Books reading from her latest work, The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble!

Check out a preview of the book here. 

Where: Audreys Books, 10702 Jasper Ave NW (Jasper Ave NW / 109 St NW)
When: Monday, June 15, 7pm

Rick Chafe's The Secret Mask wins the Chris Johnson Award

Rick Chafe's The Secret Mask has won the first Chris Johnson Award for Best Play by a Manitoba Playwright!

The award is presented by the Manitoba Writers' Guild and the Association of Manitoba Book Publishers.

Click here for a full list of winners.

Mahmoud is back in Toronto, May 13!

After award-winning runs in Toronto and New York City and sold-out runs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Mahmoud is back in Toronto for a final run at The Theatre Centre from May 13 - 24, 2015!

Get your tickets here.

(Mahmoud can also be on your bookshelf.)

Erin Shields in Montreal, April 20

Meet Erin Shields, the Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of If We Were Birds, in Montreal on April 20 when she reads from her latest work, Soliciting Temptation. Check out a preview of the book here. 

Where: Argo Bookshop, 1915 Ste Catherine W (Ste Catherine/Saint Marc)
When: Monday, April 20, 7pm

Print + ebook bundles!

We've partnered with BitLit, a free ebook bundling app for iOS and Android that allows you to bundle p+e.

Browse here for books that are available electronically on BitLit, and you can get them for $4.99 each as long as you already have the print edition!

How does it work?

World Theatre Day 2015

Happy World Theatre Day! Today is a celebration of the power of theatre and its ability to cross borders and to promote and protect cultural diversity and identity in communities around the world. 

Check out these messages from acclaimed Canadian playwrights for World Theatre Day:

Mieko Ouchi's Canadian World Theatre Day message.

Colleen Murphy discusses the act of reading a play versus seeing it performed. 

Spring 2015

It's raining books this spring at Playwrights Canada Press! 

Here are just some of the upcoming books to whet your reading appetite: Daniel MacIvor's I, Animal, a collection of three riveting monologues; Hannah Moscovitch's Little One and Other Plays, three must-read one-act plays; Anita Majumdar's Fish Eyes, an illustrated collection of three coming-of-age plays; and Judith Thompson's The Thrill, a meditation on euthanasia. If non-fiction is more your thing, we have two exciting books coming out in the spring, including Yvette Nolan's Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture, an examination of how theatre has been used to reconnect individuals and communities; and Daniel MacIvor: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Vol. 5, the first collection of critical essays dedicated to contextualizing and analyzing the work of Daniel MacIvor, edited by Richie Wilcox.   

Click here for the full list of spring 2015 titles!