Drawing on the preliminary findings of their PLEDGE@10 project, Rebecca Burton, Lisa Davenport, Barry Freeman, and Brenda Martinez Luna examine the impacts of programming and promotion choices tied to recent Decolonization, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (DEDI) initiatives at post-secondary theatre training and education institutions.
In this essay, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho takes stock of fifteen years of encounters, as a racialized student, actor, and writer-performer, with theatre institutions in Canada, arguing that restorative institutional change must contend with the ontological impacts of race on theatre’s fundamental directives: to take up space, to breathe.
Robin C. Whittaker’s Alumnae Theatre Company: Nonprofessionalizing Theatre in Canada is a resource-driven, primary-sourced history of North America’s longest-running theatre company led by women. The book is built on interviews, archival records, newspaper reports, reviews, and an incredible collection of production photographs. Central to the book’s case study of Toronto’s Alumnae Theatre Company is the question of professionalization, namely, what is the relationship between professional and non-professional theatres in North America, and how has that relationship changed over the past century? Whittaker expertly navigates historical records to share a compelling story of passion and commitment to theatre in an ever-shifting landscape of performance cultures and movements. Ultimately, this book becomes a lens through which the history of performance in Canada can be better understood and positioned, as we consider what the future may hold.
This article explores the creative and historical journeys behind two plays by playwright Sharon Bajer— Molly’s Veil and Let Them Howl —each rooted in the lives of influential Canadian women whose stories have been obscured or simplified by history. Bajer recounts her initial inspiration in 1999, when a newspaper headline about Ottawa mayor Charlotte Whitton revealed a sealed archive of personal letters that documented Whitton’s decades-long intimate relationship with Margaret Grier. Motivated by the political, emotional, and historical richness of this hidden narrative, Bajer undertook extensive archival research, uncovering Whitton’s private writings, including a grief-filled journal titled Molly Mugwump Makes Believe . These materials formed the basis for Molly’s Veil , her first full-length play, which dramatizes the deeply committed yet concealed partnership between Whitton and Grier against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Canadian social reform. A decade later, Bajer was commissioned by the Nellie McClung Foundation to create an accurate dramatization of the 1914 Mock Parliament—a landmark suffragist event staged by McClung and the Political Equality League. Working collaboratively with historians, she reconstructed the satirical performance in which women assumed parliamentary roles to critique and reverse the gendered political rhetoric of the era. The resulting script, Let Them Howl , was designed as an educational tool for schools and premiered in a celebratory staged reading featuring prominent community leaders. Together, these works illuminate how theatre can recover marginalized histories, amplify complex women’s voices, and reanimate pivotal moments in Canada’s social and political evolution.
