Play Reading Week
Each year, the Tarragon invites six writers into its Playwrights Unit, where, with the support of artistic director Richard Rose and literary manager Andrea Romaldi, they work to develop a new play. After the first draft is read by professional actors in January, quarterly meetings follow where successive drafts are read by fellow unit members. Each playwright has the opportunity to hear his/her script read aloud several times, and receive constructive feedback following the reading from fellow writers as well as the artistic director and literary manager. Our annual Play Reading Week takes place in November or December of each year. Here, each play from the unit receives a public reading by professional actors.
Play Reading Week 2009
Tarragon is gearing up for our annual Play Reading Week, which runs from November 19 to 28, 2009. You might have noticed that this is slightly longer than a week, and that’s because this year’s lineup boasts a whopping nine readings
Many of our mainspace plays were first seen at Play Reading Week. Courageous by Michael Healey and Hush by Rosa Laborde enjoyed readings just last year, so if you want to be the first to have a sneak peek at exciting new work, join us this November!
All readings will take place in the Near Studio at 8 pm.
Admission is free, and no reservations are taken.
For more information, please contact our box office at 416-531-1827.
Beatrice Chancy
Beatrice, the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master, is sixteen and just returned from a convent school where she was sent “to copy white ladies ways”. She is the apple of her father’s eye until her declaration of love for a slave sparks a monstrous act.
Mother of Him
It could be a morning like any other as Brenda cooks breakfast for her two sons, but eight year-old Jason’s refusing to go to school and teenager Matthew is under house arrest upstairs. As Brenda struggles for justice for her son, she learns it’s the laws inside the house that matter most.
Winner of the inaugural RBC Tarragon Under 30 Playwriting Competition.
Smuggling Buddha
When Anna asks her children, Colin and Elizabeth, to return home right away, they expect the worst. As always, animosity between the siblings quickly surfaces, but after Anna's unexpected announcement, brother and sister must face some truths that have remained obscured for years — and deal with their mother's impossible decision.
Wide Awake Hearts
Wide Awake Hearts is a nightmare about love and fidelity set against the backdrop of the Toronto film industry. Four nameless characters are ripped from one scene into the next against their will and before they are ready, blurring the fine line between fiction and reality.
Spine
A family is caught in the crossfire of gang violence after a mother and son witness a stabbing outside Christie Subway Station. As threats and fears loom large inside and outside their urban home, it is clear their lives will never be the same again.
Carried Away On The Crest of a Wave
Set in the years following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave is a play about causality and the interconnectedness of things. From a hitman in Bangkok, to a priest in Tamil Nadu, to a housewife in Utah, it asks what happens when the events that tie us together are the same that tear us apart.
Incendiaries
He saves her, she burns him, he plays her a song he wrote, she teaches him all humans are capable of all things. And after a life altering irrevocable act, they divide on an issue. She realizes all humans are not capable of all things at the precise moment he realizes they definitely are.
The Attic Sequel
This follow up to the acclaimed The Attic, The Pearls and Three Fine Girls opens twenty years later as the sisters reconvene for a family crisis. Jayne and Jojo will do anything to rescue Jelly, but end up rescuing themselves instead in this painfully funny look at family intimacy and the surprising truths of middle age.
Bethlehem
Ari, who needs a better job to keep his wife in money, ends up being the foreclosure specialist for a bank only to foreclose on his wife’s ex-boyfriend – a man she never “got over”. A funny, dark comedy about betrayal and interest rates.