We are pleased to announce that we have chosen two playwrights as PTC Associates 2025-28: Christina Cook and Conor Wylie. PTC is proud to support these two playwrights in creating work that strives to advance evocative theatre, with their expansive visions for Canadian stages that audiences want and need. They will be in residence with us for three years starting this Spring of 2025, developing a central project – and their practice – with PTC dramaturgs. As an Associate, they will receive in-depth dramaturgy, space, payment, and many company resources to allow them to thrive within their creation time, and key connections to future partners, audiences, and communities that will uplift their work. Here is a taste of Christina and Conor’s Associate projects:

Christina Cook’s Proof Enough pays tribute to the authors who created mail-order newsletters like ‘Transvestia’ and ‘TV Tapestry’ in the 1960s and 1970s. This new play asks: What would have happened if the publisher of one of these early community-led publications suddenly gained control of a newspaper available on news racks coast to coast? Proof Enough aims to bring a significant cast of characters to centre Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender non-conforming experience onto Canadian stages. 

Conor Wylie’s Lost Season is an experimental play that spans an entire season of a fictional TV procedural titled Agent Faraway: Ghost Detective, a cult hit where 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 narrative unfolds through consecutive stages of shifting forms and media: a fan museum with artifacts and merchandise, followed by a  performance from six disintegrating “Auto Star Marionettes.” Lost Season invites audiences to a multiplicity of ways to piece together the mysterious story of the show’s lost season.

“These are two seeds of the kind of curious and brilliant work The Associates is designed for—future plays that will shift understanding in both form and content. ” – Joanna Garfinkel, PTC Artistic Director & Dramaturg

Past Associates have gone on to notable world premieres, such as Jovanni Sy and Leanna Brodie’s Salesman in China 推销员在中国 (2017-20 Associates, presented at 2024 Stratford Festival & 2025 National Arts Centre), Tetsuro Shigematsu’s Koroko (2019 The Cultch), and Carmen Aguirre’s Anywhere But Here (2020 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival).

We’d like to thank our outgoing 2021-24 Associates, Mily Mumford, Kamila Sediego, and José Teodoro, and their projects as they go into the next stages of their journey. 

We are deeply grateful for the many high-quality applications we received from playwrights from across the country.