PLAYWRIGHTS THEATRE CENTRE

As the person who donated the most points to us, Therese Smortchesky is our prize winner and will be enjoying a spa  treatment at Phresh Spa, using the discount cards so kindly donated to us by Sandman Suites on Davie.

Lucia Frangione is an internationally produced and award winning playwright and actor, best known for performing in her own works: Paradise Garden, Espresso, MMM, Cariboo Magi, Chickens, and Holy Mo. Espresso toured Western Canada and ran for a year at teatr Jeleniogorski with a Polish translation then picked up by teatr Powszechny in Warsaw. A thirty-minute version of her new play Leave Of Absence won the Amnesty International contest through Activist theatre and was performed at the 2011 Vancouver Fringe. She is currently working on a new play about the Italian internment in BC called Fresco with Bella Luna for the Italian Cultural Centre. Her twenty plays have been produced by theatres such as The Arts Club, Belfry, Ruby Slippers, Solo Collective, Chemainus Theatre, Prairie Theatre Exchange and Lambs Players San Diego. Her debut short film, Pop Switch, is currently screening at international film festivals. She has been the recipient of two Gordon Armstrong writing awards, the Sydney Risk award and the CAEA Stage West emerging artist award. She is published by Talon books and is a proud member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada and Playwrights Theatre Centre. Lucia also teaches a popular on-line playwright course.

Award winning playwright and novelist Don Hannah is currently writer-in-residence at UBC’s Green College, where he is working on a play about revenge and restorative justice. His one woman show, The Cave Painter, (which he calls “Job, for atheists”) was recently produced in Edmonton. He was the inaugural Lee Playwright in Residence at the University of Alberta where he wrote While We’re Young, published by Playwrights Canada Press and produced across the country. In 2008, he directed his play There is a Land of Pure Delight at Live Bait Theatre. He has worked as a dramaturg with playwrights from all regions; for five years was on the faculty of the Banff Playwrights Colony. He’s very happy to be returning to PTC. His books include Shoreline, a collection of his plays, and the novels, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, and Ragged Islands, which received the Thomas H Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.

Greg MacArthur is a playwright, dramaturg, and, occasionally, a performer.  His plays have been produced extensively across Canada, as well as in South Africa, Germany, the UK, Hungary, and the United States. They have been translated into numerous languages.  Some of his work includes: Tyland; The Toxic Bus Incident; Recovery; Get Away; Snowman; and girls! girls! girls!. His plays are published by Coach House Books. He has been Artist-In-Residence at Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal for the past five years. Currently, he holds the position of Lee Playwright -In-Residence at The University of Alberta.

Robert Plowman is a playwright and collaborative theatre artist. He has worked with companies in Toronto and Halifax, including Zuppa Theatre, Small Wooden Shoe, Secret Theatre, and LoHiFi Productions. His play Radium City was published in volume nine of the New Canadian Drama anthology series. As well, his critical writing on collective creation has been featured in Theatre Research in Canada and Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. The audio performance/installation about stock car racing, folkloremobile, that Robert created in collaboration with Secret Theatre, will debut in Halifax in late 2011. Robert is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony. He is currently an MFA playwriting candidate at Hollins University in Virginia. For more information visit robertplowman.com.

José Teodoro is the author of the plays The Tourist, Steps, and Slowly, an exchange is taking place. He is co-author, with Mexican photographer Laura Barrón, of Cathedral, a three-meter-long text/photo accordion book and, with Mexican novelist Andrés Acosta, of ‘Mérida,’ a prose collaboration published both in dANDelion and as a stand-alone volume by La Mano Izquierda Press. He has written about films and literature for Film Comment, Brick, The National Post, Cinema Scope, subTerrain, Stop Smiling, The Globe and Mail and Cineaste. His 2007 interview with filmmaker Guy Maddin was recently included in the University Press of Mississippi’s book Guy Maddin: Interviews. José’s play Cloudless was given two workshops at Playwrights Theatre Centre and a staged reading at BC Buds, directed by Heidi Taylor, in 2010.

This year’s PTC Colony is supported by the Sandman Suites on Davie, the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver.

Block A has been a galvanizing experience for many playwrights who have gone on to write full length plays for production – notably Eric Rhys Miller, whose Sea of Sand was produced by The Only Animal at Spanish Banks in August, and Sean Devine, whose play Re: Union will be mounted in October in a co-production between Horseshoes and Hand Grenades and Pacific Theatre.

Block P, entering its third year, has had a visible impact on this year’s Fringe landscape. Block P alumni Loretta Seto and Lynna Goldhar Smith have turned The Cultch’s Studio into a BYOV where their plays Why Weight? and Sally Lives Here are in production; their Block P compatriot Susinn McFarlen premieres Since You Left Us at the Firehall Arts Centre.

Her residency coincides with the development of her new play, The Seventh Fire, which she is creating as a PTC Associate. This dramaturgical residency will offer space, consultation, practical expertise, and research mentorship as Ravensbergen investigates the space of hybridized dramaturgies – identifying and analyzing the variety of practices she employs in diverse theatre communities. She is engaging with our newest group of dramaturgs in Block D, a collegial dramaturgy discussion group, and will be attending the upcoming Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) conference with Literary Manager Martin Kinch and PTC Dramaturg Heidi Taylor.

PTC will draw on Ravensbergen’s expertise to re-examine our writer recruitment processes, and will benefit from her voice at on our summer selection committees and as a dramaturg at the November 2011 PTC Colony.

This residency and mentorship is made possible with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of Vancouver.

Jessica recently graduated from the University of Queensland in Australia with a Master's degree in public relations. She hopes to bring a fresh perspective to PTC and help it create a stronger and more close-knit community amongst its various supporters and participants.