Welcome to the Play Book Club! 

This exciting project, conceived and curated by our dedicated WWF Administrator, Ana Pitol, and the Playwriting Unit Facilitator and award-winning playwright, Santiago Guzmán, offers unique opportunities to engage with contemporary plays and the incredible minds behind them. 

The book club is open to everyone - playwrights, actors, theatre makers, theatre lovers! - and hosted monthly on Zoom. Keep an eye on our social media to hear about upcoming meetings, and read descriptions of past selected plays below. 

Play NO.1: "WOMEN OF THE FUR TRADE" BY Frances Koncan

Finalist for the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English
​Winner of the 2018 Toronto Fringe Best New Play Contest

In eighteen hundred and something something, somewhere upon the banks of a Reddish River in Treaty One Territory, three very different women with a preference for twenty-first century slang sit in a fort sharing their views on life, love, and the hot nerd Louis Riel.
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Marie-Angelique, a Metis Taurus, is determined to woo Louis (a Metis Libra)—who will be arriving soon—by sending him boldly flirtatious letters. Eugenia, an Ojibwe Sagittarius, brings news of rebellion back to the fort after trading, but isn’t impressed by Louis’s true mediocre nature. And Cecilia, a pregnant British Virgo, is anxiously waiting on her husband’s return from an expedition, but can’t resist pining over the heartthrob Thomas Scott (Irish Capricorn), who is actually the one secretly responding to Marie-Angelique’s letters. This will all go smoothly, right?
Updated after its sold-out run at the Stratford Festival and with a brand-new study guide, this lively historical satire of survival and cultural inheritance shifts perspectives from the male gaze onto women’s power in the past and present through the lens of the rapidly changing world of the Canadian fur trade.

Play NO.2: "THE REFugEE hotel" BY CArmen AGuiRRE

​Two events gave birth to this play: the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet by the spanish courts and the 1995 death of Aguirre’s uncle, who drank himself to death on Vancouver’s skid row, never living to make a victorious return to his country. It has taken decades of silence for Aguirre to understand and come to terms with her family’s experience as refugees and exiles: “The few times we spoke about it to other people, we were accused of being pathological liars and being crazy,” she says of those years. “We learned never to talk about what was happening in Chile. From the moment when I told some classmates very matter-of-factly in grade two that my stepfather and some of my family members had just come out of a concentration camp that was the national soccer stadium, I was Crazy Carmen.”

Laid bare in the ?ctionalized autobiographical details of The Refugee Hotel are the universal truths the victims and survivors of political oppression continue to experience everywhere: the terror of persecution, arrest and torture; the exhausted elation of escape; the trauma of learning to live again with the losses, betrayals and agonies of the past; the irrational guilt of the survivor—even the tragedy of surviving the nightmares of the past only to have them return to challenge any hope of a future.

Set in a run-down hotel in 1974, only months after the start of the infamous Pinochet regime, eight Chilean refugees struggle, at times haplessly, at times profoundly, to decide if ?eeing their homeland means they have abandoned their friends and responsibilities or not.

More than a dark comedy about a group of Chilean refugees who arrive in Vancouver after Pinochet’s coup, this play is Carmen Aguirre’s attempt to give voice to refugee communities from all corners of the globe.

Play NO.3: "REACHING FOR STARLIGHT" BY DONNA-MICHELLE St. BERNARD

Reenie wants to dance, following in her mother’s footsteps. Just like the rest of her ensemble, she believes she has what it takes to earn the coveted solo at the year-end recital. But when she notices that their strict maestra is not holding everyone to the same “traditional” standard—particularly Maia, the other Black girl in the class—Reenie is determined to stop her friend from being counted out of the competition. Frustrated with not being understood by her mother and filled with a new-found passion to fight a broken system, Reenie hatches a plan with her classmates but doesn’t realize where her quick journey towards justice missed the mark with her friend.
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Reaching for Starlight is a compassionate story about the way we are told to move through a world not made for us, whether together or alone.

Play NO.4: "THE FISH EYES TRILOGY" BY ANITA MAJUMDAR

Three coming-of-age solo shows that follow the lives of teenage girls who attend the same high school and process their real-life dilemmas through dance, while exploring the heartaches of youth and the meaning of heritage.
Fish Eyes is the story of Meena, a classically trained Indian dancer who, despite being obsessed with Bollywood movies and her dance career, just wants to be like the rest of her high-school friends. When she develops a massive crush on Buddy, the popular boy at school, Meena contemplates turning down an incredible opportunity to pursue him, even if he barely notices her.
Boys With Cars follows Naz, also a classically trained Indian dancer, who dreams of getting out of small town Port Moody to attend the University of British Columbia. But when Buddy causes a stir over Naz at school, Naz’s university plans begin to crumble quickly.
Let Me Borrow That Top centres on Candice, a girl who appropriates Meena’s Indian dance skills and bullies Naz after a nasty rumour spreads through the halls of their high school. But like her two enemies, Candice shares a passion for Indian dancing, and has just been accepted to the Conventry School of Bhangra. Will she leave behind the comforts of home to pursue her dreams?