Toronto Playwrights Union of Canada and Playwrights Canada Press: A Profile

Abstract

In the late 1960s, Canada’s regional theatres – those established by the federal government to celebrate the 1967 Centennial – had a general reputation for offering few opportunities for Canadian work to appear. Artistic directors of these houses tended to be primarily European-born – Christopher Newton at Theatre Calgary and Heiner Piller at Neptune Theatre, for example – and were inclined to produce remounted Broadway hits and musicals or popular foreign-stage classics. Theatre companies like Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, Winnipeg’s Manitoba Theatre Centre and Nova Scotia’s Neptune Theatre were ostensibly created to present Canadian theatre, but the repertories broadened and playbills often told a different story, listing productions by Shaw, Miller, Wilde, Chekhov and Shakespeare with the rare Canadian play. As a result, there was virtually no space on our regional stages for new Canadian works and little interest on the part of Artistic Directors to actively search out and develop this genre.