Past Productions | 2022 Season
Ale Wives
by Mark Weatherley
Sponsored by Jobsite Brewing Co.
Beer Brewers.
700 years ago.
Almost exclusively women.
These were the Alewives. Inventive, industrious, and determined women, always having to kick back at a society that distrusted and dismissed female entrepreneurs.
This is the story of two of them.
Agnes and Margaret are two brewers in a small English village in the 1300s, forced to fight the Reeve, the priest, the Aletaster (yeah that really was a thing) and the Bailiff for the right to chart their own destiny.
Raucous, raunchy, witty, thought provoking, and oddly timely considering it takes place in the middle ages
Cast and Creative
Directed by: Sara-Jeanne Hosie
Cast: Lauren Bowler, Daniela Vlaskalic and Mark Weatherley
Stage Management: Patrice Bowler
Joyful Little Noise
by Devan Ballagh, Paige Ballagh and Stephen Ingram
Kids show: performed by kids, for kids!
Sponsored by Pazzo Pizzeria
Studio 410’s brilliantly inspiring take on how we can all make a difference by using our own “Joyful Little Noise” will leave you full of hope! Featuring beautiful original music by London composer, Stephen Ingram, the talented youth cast chronicles the importance of the “little” things; all the things that remain when all else falls away. The last couple of years have been hard, but we can take the dark and make it art…we can celebrate and lean into things that are always there for us; love, music, dance, kindness. “Joyful Little Noise” is fun for the whole family, and is sure to touch everyone in a personal and meaningful way.
Cast and Creative
Directed by: Devan Ballagh and Paige Ballagh
Cast: Studio 410 Kids
Forty-Seven
by Deanna Kruger
One birthday. Two sisters. Forty-seven photographs. A decades-long family tradition is coming to an end. Forty-Seven is a funny and tender new play about grief, sibling love, nocturnal animals, surviving the saddest year of life, and figuring out who you really are.
Cast and Creative
Directed by: Rebecca Cuthbertson
Cast: Martha Farrell and Kristin Gauthier
Stage Management: Patrice Bowler
Dramatugy by: Joanna Falck
Girls & Boys
by Dennis Kelly
An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family.
But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn.
Cast and Creative
Directed by: Lucy Jane Atkinson
Cast: Fiona Mongillo
Stage Management: Emma Marcy
Every Day She Rose
by Andrea Scott and Nick Green
After the Black Lives Matter protest at the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade, two friends find their racial and queer politics aren’t as aligned as they thought, and the playwrights behind them must figure out how to write about the fallout.
Cathy Ann, a straight Black woman, and her roommate Mark, a gay white man, came home from the parade with such differing views of what happened and how it affected their own communities. Cathy Ann agrees with the protest that the police presence at the parade doesn’t make her feel safe, while Mark felt safer with them there, especially in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Frustrated he can’t see the bigger issue, Cathy Ann questions if she can continue living with Mark. Simultaneously, playwrights Andrea and Nick—who share the same identities as their characters—pause throughout the show to figure out how to work together to tell the story of a significant turning point in a friendship.
Through both sets of dialogue, Every Day She Rose is a powerful exploration of white supremacy, privilege, and patriarchy in supposed safe spaces.
First produced by Nightwood Theatre, Toronto, 2019
Cast and Creative
Directed by: Monique Lund with Associate Director Tiffany Deriveau
Cast: Jenni Burke and Robbie Towns
Take Care
by Ellen Denny
“Artist moms are different cause they need lots of sleep, except at night.”
Having paused her career to raise her daughter, 42 year old writer Johanna Dunham is finally plotting her grand return. She’s even one-upped Virginia Woolf and found the perfect 'house of one's own’ where she can write. But when her husband suffers a stroke, Johanna is thrust into life as a caregiver spouse and single mom to Lucy. After a disastrous visit to a caregivers’ support group, Johanna is on the brink of driving off into the night, when she nearly runs over Len, the handsome young firefighter-next-door longing for an escape of his own…
A funny, messy, honest look at surviving life’s curveballs.
Cast and Creative
Directed by: Jan Alexandra Smith
Cast: Tenaj Williams, Sara-Jeanne Hosie and Emma Cuzzocrea
Movement Direction and Stage Management: Patrice Bowler
The Pomegranate Project (Reading)
Co-created by Jessica B Hill and Marion Adler
Somewhere, somehow three women are living together underground. Are they in a cave, or a psychiatric institution or perhaps the mysterious kingdom of Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology? They bicker and gossip. They reminisce and repine. And they plot their impossible escape. But they are helpless until the arrival of a very experienced but very bewildered world famous spelunker.
The Pomegranate Project is an exploration of a variety of real and mythic underworlds, and the women who inhabit them, willingly or otherwise.
Cast and Creative
Cast: Jessica B Hill, Marion Adler, Laura Condlln and Evangelia Kambites with Rosemary Dunsmore
Stage Manager: Emma Marcy
Spit
By Noelle Brown
We can choose our friends, but not our families.
Nicole loves yoga, her sister Jessica loves red wine. Heartbroken at the death of their mother, the sisters lives are suddenly impacted by the arrival of a stranger searching for answers. Unravelling a complex legacy, the sisters are forced to confront their grief against a backdrop of shame. Spit by Noelle Brown, co-writer of the critically acclaimed POSTSCRIPT, is a funny and moving play about siblings, secrets and what it means to be a family.
Cast and Creative
Directed by: Seana McKenna
Cast: Seána O’Hanlon, Siobhan O’Malley and Fiona Mongillo
Stage Management: Patrice Bowler
The Real Poems
by Robert McQueen
When our world went into lockdown in March of 2020, the air outside my apartment was suddenly still and my calendar was suddenly empty.
From inside that still~emptiness I sat at my kitchen table and began to write out my experiences as a young queer man, living between Vancouver and New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and 90’s.
The Real Poems is spoken witness to the joy of youth, discovery and wild adventure. It is memorial to the lives of colleagues, lovers and friends lost.
Cast and Creative
Composed by: Laura Burton
Co-Directed by: Damien Atkins and Andrew Kushnir
Cast: Robert McQueen
Stage Management: Sarah Lappano
2022 Season Staff
Lighting and Sound Design: Stephen Degenstein
Costume and Set Design: Bonnie Deakin and Monique Lund
Technicians: Sarah Lappano and Ethan Weber
Front of House: Emma Marcy, Charlotte Weatherley and Taite Marsden
2022 Season Artwork by Marion Adler