Women Playwrights and the News: Colleen Murphy and Judith Thompson on "Fact-Inspired" Drama

In these interviews, Canadian playwrights Colleen Murphy and Judith Thompson discuss their respective plays Pig Girl (2013) and Watching Glory Die (2014), both of which were written in response to high-profile news stories that shocked the public in Canada and beyond. The interviews illuminate the plays themselves, but also the playwrights' sense of their relation to their source materials and to their audiences, as well as of the distinctions between their "fact-inspired" dramatic work and other representational forms. Together, the interviews foreground the imaginative, "feeling" work of the dramatists in mediating the news stories that sparked the plays and speak to the experiential, affective power of live theatre to engage and activate audiences.