France, 1917. Four wounded Canadian soldiers recover in a field hospital in the wake of the battle for Vimy Ridge, waiting to find out where they'll be sent next: back home or back to the front. Along with a young nurse from Nova Scotia, they share their stories, reasons for fighting, and treasured memories. In Vimy, Governor General's Literary Award-winner Vern Thiessen brings us a classic play that is not about war, but a reflection of the everyday lives of soldiers-their hopes and their dreams-and how actions can define individuals and nations. In the brand-new piece Bluebirds, Thiessen brings to light the stories of three Canadian nurses who crossed oceans to take care of others in the war. Bonding over their duties and patients, the nurses keep up a positive atmosphere, even as the front line draws closer to their field hospital.

In Up the Garden Path, a young Barbadian seamstress is coerced into posing as her half-brother to go to the Niagara region in Ontario and work on a vineyard. There, she meets an aspiring actress obsessed with Joan of Arc, the ghost of a Black Loyalist soldier who wants to die, and a boss who can't keep the starlings away from his failing vineyard. Finding it impossible to ignore their demands, but not wanting to be found out and sent home, Rosa has to stop and figure out what she really wants instead of what everyone around her needs. Based on Bernard Shaw's short story, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God follows a young African girl who is abandoned by a white missionary for asking too many questions about God. Taking matters into her own hands, the Black Girl sets off on her own to find out who or what God really is. Along the way she meets a number of characters who have very different views on God, but the Black Girl's unrelenting questions create conflict, and in the end she's forced to make her own decisions on God and her search.

Should women abandon religion? Four female panellists face off in a wild, whip-smart televised debate about the intersection of religion and misogyny. On one side, there's Maryam, a progressive Muslim lawyer, and Yehudit, an Orthodox Jewish spiritual leader. The other has Liz, a lesbian antitheist pundit, and Margaret, an excommunicated nun. The debaters wrestle with themselves and with each other: Can you be a feminist and believe in religion? What can or can't be forgiven? Why do we have faith to begin with? Between the arguments, each of the debaters return to a seminal and secret moment in their past that represents a crisis of faith, leading the debate to become more and more personally charged, until it climaxes in an epic battle. Unholy delves into the biblical struggles that tear us apart and make us who we are. It's about having the courage to take the leap in life and into love. What is more holy than that?

With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.

Growing up, Nancy believed in magic despite a hand-me-down life in a small town. So it’s no wonder the buzzing excitement of Toronto and its allure of freedom was a likely choice for her new home, the place she finds herself years later selling her body for drugs. Nancy is further from freedom than ever under the wings of Sikes, a drug dealer and pimp. When she meets Oliver, a seventeen-year-old who lands at Sikes’s feet after a life of foster care and shelters, the two find unlikely solace in each other. As text messages are exchanged by the instant, and truths are revealed, Nancy and Oliver form an unbreakable bond in order to write a new story together.

In Communion, a recovering alcoholic and her estranged daughter try to negotiate a new relationship in spite of vastly different lifestyles; Was Spring tells the story of three women who suffered a tragic accident years ago; and Small Things explores how the little differences keep us from understanding each other.

Sisters Marie, Cece, and Anita run a small coffee-and-clothes shop on Toronto's trendy Queen Street West. One evening their estranged father, Roy, wanders in, in his pyjamas. He is clutching a note explaining that he has Alzheimer's and admonishing his daughters for abandoning their parent in his time of need. But it quickly becomes clear that Roy was a drunk and a philanderer - and perhaps worse. Should his parental sins be forgiven just because he has now forgotten them?

Described by Variety as 'Yukon Gothic,' Claudia Dey's acclaimed play Trout Stanley is set in northern British Columbia, on the outskirts of a mining town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley. In this inhospitable setting live a pair of sisters, twins who are not identical in any way: Sugar, a complicated, insecure waif who still wears the tracksuit her mother died in ten years prior, and Grace, a rough-and-tumble hellcat who owns the local dump. At the play's opening, it is their thirtieth birthday, and the TV news has announced the disappearance of a local Scrabble-champ stripper. While Grace is at the dump, housebound Sugar is surprised by a mysterious drifter, one Trout Stanley, foot fetishist and fake cop, who is searching for the lake where his parents drowned - a fishy story if there ever was one. He quickly becomes mired in a surreal love triangle with the two sisters. Trout Stanley is about three people who confuse codependence for co-operation and affliction for affection. An eccentric, captivating story in which the biggest catch of all is love. Lavishly illustrated by Jason Logan.

With an introduction by Sara Tilley
From playwright and poet Shannon Bramer comes Trapsongs, a collection of three dark comedies that navigate the realm of the surreal and absurd.
In "Monarita," an intimate friendship between Mona, a frazzled new mother, and Rita, her beloved, estranged friend, is explored. Their interaction is a dance—part ballet, part mud-fight. In "The Collectors," Hanna Parson is being harassed by three ghastly collection agents who force her to confront her debt and isolation as she struggles to create meaningful art in her dishevelled apartment. And in the tragicomedy "The Hungriest Woman in the World," Aimee, a former artist, invites her preoccupied, workaholic husband, Robert, to the theatre to see a play about a sad octopus. His refusal sends her on a dark and playful journey into the topsy-turvy world of theatre itself.
Trapsongs is by turns comedic, grotesque, and profane, but is all the while a tender exploration of the human condition in all its hilarious and humbling glory. Although each of these plays is a discrete creation, they contain and hold each other like a Matryoshka doll; all of the main characters are trapped within the song of their own lives.
Prasie for Trapsongs:
"Bramer's writing for the stage is magical. It slips the bounds of the real while being so real. What happens to the characters happens to us; we become them." —Karen Connelly