National Network for Equitable Library Service

In this original and poetic new work, Lara Rae tells the raw and heartfelt story of her half-century long (and counting) gender odyssey. Dragonfly presents us with two actors, one male, one female, who illuminate the inner life of a trans woman from her Scottish childhood in the 1960s to the present day. Matching our inside to our outside is always hard, but for trans people it’s often a matter of life and death. Stripping away the visual cues that both define and imprison transgender people, Dragonfly is a call to all of us to forge creativity from chaos.

Reckoning is a triptych of three short plays: Witness is a dance-movement piece featuring a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner who unravels as he confronts the brutal testimony of residential school survivors. In Daughter, the daughter of a teacher who was accused of rape seduces her father's accuser. And Survivor is a virtuoso solo piece about a man preparing to commit suicide as a protest against the insufficiencies of the reconciliation process.

Serving Elizabeth begins in Kenya in 1952, during the fateful royal visit of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Mercy, a restaurant owner, is approached to cook for the royal couple. Though she could use the money, she is a staunch anti-monarchist. She vows to stick to her principles, but her daughter Faith keeps trying to convince her to take the job. In London in 2015, in the production offices of a series about Queen Elizabeth, a Kenyan-Canadian film student, Tia, serves as an intern on the project.

Set in modern day Winnipeg, Gray’s inspired version of Moliere’s classic satire is part sex farce and part screwball comedy. Exploring family, love and money, The Miser of Middlegate sharply critiques our culture obsessed with acquisition and never loses its sense of humour. A cheeky and irreverent romp into the lives of one entrepreneurial Winnipeg family.

When Jackie comes back to her childhood home after separating from her husband, she thinks her biggest problem will be readjusting to life on a smaller bed. She's surprised to learn, however, that her mother has given that bed away to a Sudanese refugee! Cultural differences, language barriers, and the self-conscious earnestness of good intentions combine to deliver a scathingly comic look at Canadian values.

Inspired by a quote from the I Ching about how we respond to tragedy - "Some weep, some blow upon flutes" - Mary Vingoe's play is the story of Costas, an elderly Greek shoe repairman whose wife Elena suffers from dementia and whose marriage has been eroded by a family secret. Costas is in denial of his wife's illness, but Lia, their teenage granddaughter who cares for her grandmother, is not. Costas' life is altered when Sandra, a professional organizer who cannot begin to organize her own life, enters his shop.

A symbolically nameless couple chart their 50-year relationship by recreating their first encounter on every anniversary. Madame has carefully written the script of their original encounter and they believe they can recreate the intoxicating feeling of falling in love by saying the same lines year after year but always fall short of this goal and are doomed to disappointment.

The tale of a mother and daughter dealing with grief and teen angst in small town Ontario. Late night, on a lonely Huron County road, fifteen year old Eloise Bernhardt has an extraordinary supernatural encounter. What she sees changes her life forever. This is a story of a mother and her teenaged daughter who have lost their way, and how they are fighting their way back to loving each other.

Z.A.K.A is an Orthodox Jewish volunteer force in Israel that collects the remains of Jews killed in accidents. When Jacob, a Z.A.K.A volunteer, makes the split-second decision to treat a young Palestinian woman instead of the soldier she may have killed, his world is changed forever. The Runner is a powerful thriller that explores the beleaguered psyche of a noble man charged with attending to the remains of harrowing acts of savagery.

Les Filles du Roi (The King's Daughters), a gorgeous new trilingual musical written in English, French, and Kanien'kéha (Mohawk), is the powerful story of Kateri, a young Kanien'kehá:ka girl, and her brother Jean-Baptiste, whose lives are disrupted upon the arrival of les filles du roi in 1665. They forge an unlikely relationship with young fille Marie-Jeanne Lespérance, whose dreams of a new life are more complicated than she could have imagined.