Drama

Redheaded Stepchild, by Johnnie Walker, opens with twelve-year-old Nicolas quoting his father who says that "stories inform our lives and stories are how we make sense of our world." The comment may seem obvious, but the obviousness does not negate the validity of the comment. The Canadian plays published in 2016 in English address a wide range of subjects. They attest to the wealth of experience that playwrights want to explore and then share with their audiences. This year's plays include a number for young audiences, and three of them are directed towards a teenaged audience. They focus on feelings of not belonging. Matthew Heiti's Black Dog: 4 Vs the Wrld is about a group of teenagers dealing with mental health issues; the title of Jordan Tannahill's play, Concord Floral, refers to an abandoned greenhouse where teenagers go to be free from the scrutiny of adults; I Am for You by Mieko Ouchi is about two teenaged girls who despise each other but who eventually come to share trust through learning to do stage combat. Anusree Roy wrote Sultans of the Street, a play about children begging on the streets of Kolkata, for grade-school children. In My Family and Other Endangered Species, Ellen Close and Braden Griffiths tell the story of Phin, a precocious nine year old who is concerned with the degradation of the planet and its impact on animals, and two actors play all of the roles.

The tendency towards plays with smaller casts is pronounced in this year's works. Several plays published in 2016 are for solo performers: Redhead Stepchild by Johnnie Walker, Vitals by Rosamund Small, Watching Glory Die by Judith Thompson, Linda Griffiths's The Last Dog of War, and Tetsuro Shigematsu's Empire of the Son. Of the plays for solo performers, all but Vitals deal with family, and all but The Last Dog of War deal with death. Lois Fine's Freda and Jem's Best of the Week is about the dissolution of the partnership of Freda and Jem, a lesbian couple who have a son and a daughter. In a Blue Moon by Lucia Frangione is about a woman coping with the death of her husband and its impact on her twelve-year-old daughter. In The Waiting Room, Diane Flacks draws on her own experience of spending months in the hospital, tending to her son when he was a baby. She portrays a couple that faces a different outcome than did Flacks in her own life. The child in The Waiting Room dies. Tanisha Tait's play Keeper explores what constitutes a family: is it biological ties or love?

Rosa Labordé's play, True, deals with the return of a father into the lives of his three daughters. The daughters, all adults, have been estranged from him for many years because he was a heavy drinker and a womanizer who neglected them. Do they have obligations to him because he is now old and frail? Labordé's play is an adaptation of King Lear. Like Labordé's True, Jason Patrick Rothery's Inside the Seed is an adaptation – in this case, of Oedipus Rex – in which the owner of a multinational company producing genetically modified food is unaware that there was tampering with the test results; the food that is being produced is unsafe and will cause devastation in Africa, to which is it being sent. Hiro Kanagawa's Indian Arm explores relations between Indigenous people and those of settler descent using Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf as the source that the playwright adapts. Reckoning, by Tara Beagan and Andy Moro, comprises three pieces that address the effects of residential schools on their survivors.

The remaining plays do not fall easily into these categories. Oil and Water, by Robert Chafe, is based on a historic incident: the sinking of the USS Truxtun, which ran aground off the Burin Peninsula on 18 February 1942. The people from the village on the coast rushed to rescue the seamen who were struggling to remain alive in the frigid waters. Vittorio Rossi's The Envelope deals with the subsidization of the...