Welcome! We are thrilled to have you discover our playwrights and theatre artists who offer deep and compelling performances ideal for development partnership, presentation, and touring.
These projects range from being production-ready to coming into development with us which are enticing for partners looking to be in connection with work for future presentations.
For further inquiries about a specific project and/or theatre artist, please contact Davey Calderon, Artistic Producer & Dramaturg (davey@playwrightstheatre.com) to liaise with the artist.
Double Vie by Anais West
Double Vie is a bilingual, text-based, multimedia performance. Using soundscape, projection, and prose-like narrative in English and French, the show will explore how fantasy, kink and language act as sites of rebirth, healing isolation and ancestral wounds.
In Double Vie, a nameless trans protagonist, plagued by paranoia and family ghosts, is mailed a cassette tape by a stranger. Through the explicit and transgressive instructions on the tape, they discover a portal to another self, existing in another timeline, in another culture. Infused with magical realism and analogue nostalgia, Double Vie probes the darkness in sexuality and cultural inheritance, asking if a new city, language, or erotic extreme can transform us.
The inception of Double Vie was ‘Nuits Claires,’ a country-wide writing project conceived by the National Arts Centre’s French Theatre (CNA) and Théâtre la Seizième, which commissioned twelve playwrights to respond to the theme of “the night”. Anais was selected as the BC playwright, and over the course of a month, they wrote a twenty-minute bilingual monodrama. They also received a one-week workshop in September 2024 with Théâtre la Seizième to experiment with collaborators Alexa Fraser (stage manager/co-leader), Joanna Garfinkel (dramaturg), Nancy Lee 李南屏 (projection designer), Matthew Tomkinson (sound designer), Rae Takei & Elio Zarrillo (performers.) He is now expanding Double Vie into a full-length performance. Double Vie is an incoming Company Collaboration with PTC, dramaturgy by Joanna Garfinkel.
Binary Star by José Teodoro
A young choreographer, freshly separated from her husband, struggles to traverse a province on fire in an attempt to see her long-estranged father before he dies. Seventeen years later, at the start of the pandemic, the choreographer’s ex, an architectural historian, finds himself marooned in Buenos Aires, in the company of a local curator haunted by memories of Argentina’s dictatorship. The two halves of Binary Star share no on-stage characters and are set decades and continents apart, yet they illuminate each other through echoes of words, ideas, stories, anxieties, sounds, and images. A mediation on art, ardour, and the places we inhabit, this dazzling diptych mirrors the ambivalence afflicting lovers unable to sacrifice solitude or ambition.
Eschewing conventional realist sets in favour of cinematic projection design, precise use of gesture and lyrical repetition, and open spaces where shared memories and fantasies are summoned to life, Binary Star will create a sense of amplitude and expansiveness, a palimpsest of time and space, fusing the intimacy of direct address with the allure of strangers flirting in the very moment that the world suddenly falls still.
It also served as a thematic anchor for the companion short film Binary Star (2023), which was written and directed by José, co-produced by PTC and Applied Silence, and features the work of a dozen cinematographers working in as many countries. The film Binary Star debuted at the 2023 Cali International Film Festival, where it was screened with live music by Applied Silence and live voiceover by Colombian actors Lucía Bedoya and Andrés Felipe Santacruz. It was awarded the Best Experimental Film prize at the 2024 Vancouver Shorts Fest and shortlisted for the same award at the 2024 İstanbul International Spring Film Festival and 2024 Berlin Indie Awards.
Binary Star was developed through the Associates (2021-24) program at PTC, with dramaturgy by Joanna Garfinkel.
Engkanto by Kamila Sediego
“I didn’t want you to be scared.” An outstretched hand, a dark fairytale, a ritual, and a romp. Engkanto tells of a daughter whose elderly father is haunted by malevolent human-like spirits of the Philippines, and whose long-lost sister is trapped in another realm. Together, a family sprawled across time, continents, and the supernatural collides with the everlasting effects of colonization, the inevitability of death, and the oscillating turnover of legacy. Pulling from Filipino folklore, first-person accounts, true family histories, and the patterns of our elders’ oral storytelling, Kamila Sediego makes an offering of a new hybrid folktale for the Filipinx-Canadian diaspora as an epic for the stage.
“Follow me. If you choose.” An audience experiencing Engkanto on the stage is stepping into a portal, through a winding tunnel, and entering a world of in-betweens. Inside: glamorous beings with floor-length white blonde hair, oozing jackfruit, the dense, green Philippine jungle, gold ribbon, Tiktok dances, and an East Van Filipino kitchen. Echoing around: a glimmering twinkle, a trickling creek, the slice of scissors, the squeal of a pig, a tik tik tik on the roof, an ancestor’s call, and a bat scream. “Gina protectahan namon ang kada isara. We protect each other.” Spiritual safety and protection in the forms of ritual and ceremony, offerings, and talismans for the audience and creative team are built-in ingredients to Engkanto’s creation, production, and performance processes. This play is dangerous if it isn’t approached with reverence and care. It is real, it is for fun, it is folklore, it is biography. It’s an invitation to see, to believe, and to trust.
Engkanto has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council. At various points of its development, it has been presented as part of the Halo-Halo: Filipino-Canadian Theatre in Development showcase at the Shadbolt Arts Centre (2022), PTC’s Unscripted: Engkanto (2023), and a public sharing and community event (2024). With Engkanto, Kamila was recently awarded the inaugural Joyce Lam award.
Engkanto was developed through the Associates (2021-24) program at PTC, with dramaturgy by Joanna Garfinkel.
Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self (or YTS) Ages 0 – 119 by Christina Cook
A beguiling and tender work of performance art features a trans woman of letters on a postcard-fragmented journey through time—referencing sci-fi radio dramas, theatrical magic, music, and poetic text, Postcards is a beautiful work centering trans joy.
Christina Cook’s playwriting has notably been nominated for a Governor’s General Award (Quick Bright Things) and Christina has been invited to share excerpts of Postcards in Melbourne, Toronto, Barcelona, and New York. This piece has been supported by funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, the City of Vancouver, the University of British Columbia Research-based Theatre Lab, and the frank theatre. Postcards will be featured in PTC’s UNSCRIPTED series and will be independently presented in 2025-2026.
Postcards is a play that is currently a Company Collaboration at PTC, dramaturgy with Joanna Garfinkel.
Lost Season by Conor Wylie
Lost Season is an experimental play that spans an entire season of a fictional TV procedural titled Agent Faraway: Ghost Detective, a cult hit in which a paranormal detective investigates souls stuck in limbo, and shepherds them to the afterlife. The play explores the nonlinear nature of grief and mourning.
The play unfolds the production’s backstory and the season’s narrative in different ways. Pre-show visual and printed media contextualize the plot and troubled production history of the show, leading to its cancellation. On stage, the actors play old dusty “auto star marionettes”, human-like androids with limited performance capabilities, collectively performing fragments of the lost season. The recitation may play with time and sense of space: looping, jumping forward, and flashing back, Lost Season brings audiences into an experience that explores the labyrinthine nature of grief and mourning, the interrelation of human and automated forms of creativity, and the ephemerality of artmaking.
Following the artist’s development of similar work: playing with genres of sci-fi and transposing narrative techniques from film and novels onto the stage. Foundational in this performance technique has been the creation of his titular multimedia theatre work and film, K BODY AND MIND, and his work with the interdisciplinary performance company, A Wake of Vultures.
Lost Season is an incoming play to be developed through the Associates (2025-28) program at PTC, dramaturgy with Davey Calderon.
