 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(June 2011) |
 | |
| Formation | 1972 |
|---|---|
| Type | Charity |
| Headquarters | Toronto |
| Website | https://playwrightsguild.ca |
Playwrights Guild of Canada (PGC) is a Canadian charity that works to advance the creative rights and interests of professional Canadian playwrights; promote Canadian plays, and foster community of writers. It was founded in 1972. [1]
PGC has its origins in a meeting held in 1971 by a Canada Council theatre officer, David Gardner, with Carol Bolt, Tom Hendry, and Len Peterson to discuss issues affecting English Canadian playwrights. Those present at the meeting determined that there was a need for a publishing house for Canadian plays. Following the meeting, Bolt, Hendry, and Peterson established the Toronto Playwrights Circle to obtain funding for the project. The next year, the group founded the Playwrights Co-operative, which published and distributed Canadian plays, arranged live readings by playwrights, and administered amateur rights. The Co-op became a non-profit in 1979, renamed Playwrights Canada Inc., and in 1982, it merged with the Guild of Canadian Playwrights (established in 1977 to lobby for suitable working conditions) to become the Playwrights Union of Canada (PUC). In 1986, PUC created the Canadian Drama Foundation (formerly known as the Foundation for Recognition of Excellence in Drama) [2] as its charitable arm.
Restructuring occurred once again in 2002, when the Playwrights Union of Canada divided into two new organizations:Playwrights Canada Press, a for-profit publishing imprint; and the Playwrights Guild of Canada (PGC), an arts service association advocating for playwrights in Canada. [3]
PGC is a registered charitable organization. Part of its funding comes from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council. [4]
PGC has a Women's Caucus, which supports intersectional feminism and performs interventions to help offset existing industry barriers. [5]
PGC celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2012 with a series of special events, such as a week-long play reading series in May that included Maja Ardal, Drew Hayden Taylor, Hannah Moscovitch, Brad Fraser, and Marcia Johnson. [6]
In May 2017, PGC opened the Canadian Play Outlet (CPO), originally located at 401 Richmond Street West, but now operating as an online bookstore with a selection of over 2000 published and unpublished plays by Canadian playwrights. [7]
The Playwrights Guild of Canada provides dozens of programs and services for emerging and professional Canadian playwrights. [8] PGC focuses primarily on promotion, protection, and pluralism, offering the following services to its members:
PGC also publishes a Community Newsletter, which includes a monthly listing of the most recent electronic copyscript plays added to the online bookstore, the Canadian Play Outlet (CPO). The CPO carries thousands of Canadian plays, and includes special curated collections pertaining to genre, geographical region, cast-size, and more. [10] This helps narrow the gap between a written work and a production, and allows members to send PGC plays that have not yet been produced, but are ready to be promoted for the stage.
PGC's Women's Caucus undertakes a number of equity-related initiatives to help rectify the industry's gender imbalances, such as the now defunct multi-stakeholder Equity in Theatre project (2014 - 2017); [11] the annual Bra d'Or Award, which celebrates people who support the work of women playwrights; [12] Gender-Based Production Authorship Surveys, conducted annually to measure gains in representation; [13] the Pledge Project, an educators' database with large-cast plays by Canadian women; SureFire, a community-generated resource of production-ready under- or un-produced plays by Canadian women, trans, and/or non-binary creators; [14] and the CASA Award, which supports an established South African playwright of an historically marginalized gender. [15]
PGC has an annual awards competition with several categories: Lifetime Membership, Honorary Membership, a Post-Secondary Competition, the Bra d'Or Award, the Carol Bolt Award, RBC Emerging Playwright Award, the Stage West Pechet Family Comedy Award, and the Stage West Pechet Family Musical Award. The awards were named the Tom Hendrys after Tom Hendry a founding member of PGC who died in 2012. The awards carry generous cash prizes, and winners are recognized in a ceremony occurring in the fall each year. Submissions open in January and are accepted through to May.
In 2018, a new award category was added for three years: The Sharon Enkin Plays for Young People. [16]
The sponsorship of PGC's Awards shifted somewhat in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19. The Pechet family withdrew its support, affecting two award categories, which were replaced by new award sponsorships: [Queen's University's] Dan School of Drama and Music Musical Award, and the Chris Tolley & Dharini Woollcombe Comedy Award. The Carol Bolt Award, also named after a PGC fore founder, Carol Bolt, was removed entirely, due to a live production component, and it was replaced by the Playwrights Guild Drama Award. [17]
George Elroy Boyd was a playwright and a former co-host of the CBC Morning News. He was the first black national news anchor in Canada, working as an original anchor of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Newsworld, which launched in 1989.
Djanet Sears is a Canadian playwright, nationally recognized for her work in African-Canadian theatre. Sears has many credits in writing and editing highly acclaimed dramas such as Afrika Solo, the first stage play to be written by a Canadian woman of African descent; its sequel Harlem Duet; and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God. The complexities of intersecting identities of race and gender are central themes in her works, as well as inclusion of songs, rhythm, and choruses shaped from West African traditions. She is also passionate about "the preservation of Black theatre history," and involved in the creation of organizations like the Obsidian Theatre and AfriCanadian Playwrights Festival.
The Writers' Guild of Great Britain (WGGB), established in 1959, is a trade union for professional writers. It is affiliated with both the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds (IAWG).
Prairie Theatre Exchange (PTE) is a professional theatre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. It is located on the third floor of Portage Place mall in downtown Winnipeg. By the end of the 2016–17 season, PTE had presented 340 plays on its thrust stage over its 44-year history, 149 of which were world premieres, to an annual average attendance of 35,000 people.
Vern Thiessen is a Canadian playwright.
Carol Bolt was a Canadian playwright. She was a founding member and, for several years, president of the Playwrights Union of Canada.
Hannah Moscovitch is a Canadian playwright who rose to national prominence in the 2000s. She is best known for her plays East of Berlin, This Is War, "Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story", and Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, for which she received the 2021 Governor General's Award for English-language drama.
The Segal Centre for Performing Arts, formerly the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, is a theatre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is located at 5170 chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, in the borough of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
David Yee is a Canadian actor and playwright. His play lady in the red dress was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English language drama at the 2010 Governor General's Awards. His play carried away on the crest of a wave won this award at the 2015 Governor General's Awards. In 2023, David was named as the Laureate of the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, which recognizes artists whose groundbreaking work is advancing the art form. The Siminovitch jury praised David's unique and prolific voice as well as his advocacy in the Asian Canadian community.
The Equity Library Theatre (ELT) was a New York City theatre company active from 1943 until 1989.
Anusree Roy is a Canadian award-winning writer of plays, television, film and libretto. She is also an actress.
The Carol Bolt Award is an annual Canadian literary award. Presented by the Playwrights Guild of Canada, the award is bestowed for a theatrical play premiere by a PGC member, judged to be the year's best. The award is named in memory of Canadian playwright, Carol Bolt.
Howard Pechet is a Canadian hotelier and producer. Pechet graduated from Washington State University with a Master of Arts degree. He is non-executive producer of Stage West and chairman of Stagewest Hospitality, which includes several hotels, dinner theatres and casinos. Pechet started Stage West in Edmonton, Alberta. He expanded this to Calgary and Winnipeg and then to the Toronto region, with the Mississauga theatre on Dixie Road, which opened in 1986. The first show in Mississauga was a small-scale comedy, Social Security by Andrew Bergman. Pechet has produced almost 1,000 plays and has co-written 14 musical revues.
The RBC Emerging Playwright Award is a national playwriting competition in Canada which gives its winner a 6-month mentorship and cash prize. This award was created in 2015. It is sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada.
Cheryl Dawn Foggo is a Canadian author, documentary film director, screenwriter and playwright.
The Lilly Awards are an American awards ceremony recognizing extraordinary women in theatre. An annual celebration is held in New York to honor female writers, composers, directors, designers, producers and advocates. Some men have also been awarded the Miss Lilly, a prize in recognition of their advocacy for women in a male-dominated industry. Named after Lillian Hellman, the Lilly Awards were founded in 2010 by the playwrights Julia Jordan, Marsha Norman and Theresa Rebeck. Marsha Norman is a Pulitzer Prize and Tony-award winning playwright, whose work includes the book of the musical The Color Purple and book and lyrics of The Secret Garden.
Jennifer Wynne Webber is a Canadian writer, actor, dramaturge, journalist, and television producer currently living and working on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Britta Johnson is a Canadian-American composer, lyricist, and playwright. She is best known for her musical, Life After.
Natalie Meisner is a Canadian playwright, poet, and academic, known for her literary contributions and her role as the fifth Poet Laureate of Calgary. She is currently a professor in English and Creative Writing at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada.
Sara Farb is a Canadian actress, playwright, and singer.