Lemonade is for people who use the front door.

It’s an exciting summer day in 1956 for Hilda and Sam Fluck. Newly on their own since their thirtysomething children Gary and Janey moved out, they are finally ready to relax. Hilda plans to hang her laundry while Sam goes to buy a shiny new television. What could disturb their simple peace?

Turns out doors are merely decoration as Gary and Janey literally fall over the fence into the backyard, looking for help out of sticky situations. Gary has lost his job, is enamoured with his new girlfriend, Bobbi, and running from a bookie named Beverly, while the ever-dependent Janey has unexpectedly left her husband. The family careens into an afternoon of calamity, showing them that ultimately they must celebrate how they can be together rather than apart.

Norm Foster’s heartwarming and relatable family comedy proves that there will always be a significant weight to an empty nest.

Norm Foster has been the most produced playwright in Canada every year for the past twenty years. His plays receive an average of one hundred and fifty productions annually. Norm has over sixty plays to his credit, including The Foursome, On a First Name Basis, and Hilda’s Yard. He is the recipient of the Los Angeles Drama-Logue Award for his play The Melville Boys and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. He lives in Fredericton.

A man earns. However little, however nefariously, he earns.

Oba, a middle-aged businessman, is torn between his pride and dignity. He’s obsessed with making deals in unidentified substances to stay afloat. A powerful client named Araf arrives, interested in Oba’s business, but also his fierce, inherited servant Femi. Oba’s young progeny Mabo is hungry and desperate, but still driven by his skills and sympathetic to the needs of others.

In this stark and poetic musing on the nature and poisons of survival, Cake humanizes the dynamic between Niger and Iran and their clandestine trade in uranium, presenting a dark and critical look at oppression, consumerism, and what happens when all of our resources are dried up.

Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, a.k.a. Belladonna the Blest, is an emcee, playwright, and agitator. Her main body of work, the 54ology, includes Cake, Sound of the Beast, A Man A Fish, Salome’s Clothes, Gas Girls, Give It Up, The Smell of Horses, and The First Stone. Works for young audiences include the META-nominated Reaching For Starlight, The Chariot, and Rabbit King of Kenya. Opera libretti include Forbidden (Afarin Mansouri/Tapestry Opera) and Oubliette (Ivan Barbotin/Tapestry Opera). She is co-editor with Yvette Nolan of the Playwrights Canada Press Refractions anthologies, and editor of Indian Act: Residential School Plays.

Nikki Shaffeeullah is a theatre artist, facilitator and activist. She has been Artistic Director of the AMY Project since 2015, and past work includes serving as Editor-?in-?Chief of alt.theatre magazine. Nikki believes art should disrupt the status quo, centre the margins, engage with the ancient, dream of the future and be for everyone.

Originally from Trinidad, Kern Albert sometimes reads books, sometimes writes things down, sometimes watches plays and most times sits in a corner and waits for something to happen. He likes doing all those things.

The point is that we started the conversation.

In 1971 Phillip was on the cusp of starting something big. Something that would make history. Now he’s an aging journalist trying to make sense of Grindr. Phillip was a founding member of The Body Politic, a gay-liberation newspaper based in Toronto. As he recounts memories of censorship battles, police raids, historic rallies, and the onset of HIV/AIDS during an intimate encounter with a younger man, their generational differences shine a light on the massive shifts in queer identity and politics over the last fifty years.

This historical drama reimagines the events surrounding the birth, life, and death of one of the most important journalistic forces in Canada, and the opportunities it created for the future.

Nick Green is a Dora and Sterling Award–winning playwright, and the creator of the Social Distancing Festival. Credits include Happy Birthday Baby J (Shadow Theatre); Every Day She Rose (Nightwood Theatre, co-written with Andrea Scott); Fangirl (book; Launch Pad at the Musical Stage Company); In Real Life (book; Canadian Music Theatre Projects); Dinner with the Duchess (Next Stage Festival, BroadwayWorld Toronto Award); Body Politic (Buddies in Bad Times/lemonTree Creations; Dora Award); Poof! The Musical (book and lyrics; Capitol Theatre, Sterling Award nomination); and The Fabulous Buddha Boi (Guys UnDisguised, Sterling Award). He lives in Toronto.

Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, a.k.a. Belladonna the Blest, is an emcee, playwright, and agitator. Her main body of work, the 54ology, includes Cake, Sound of the Beast, A Man A Fish, Salome’s Clothes, Gas Girls, Give It Up, The Smell of Horses, and The First Stone. Works for young audiences include the META-nominated Reaching For Starlight, The Chariot, and Rabbit King of Kenya. Opera libretti include Forbidden (Afarin Mansouri/Tapestry Opera) and Oubliette (Ivan Barbotin/Tapestry Opera). She is co-editor with Yvette Nolan of the Playwrights Canada Press Refractions anthologies, and editor of Indian Act: Residential School Plays.

I didn’t think we got to have names.

Two human test subjects—Corcoran, a half-blind paraplegic, and Filigree, a clinical psychopath—coexist in a laboratory cell. They are sterilized, property of the state, and utilized for the benefit of higher-valued citizens. In their cell are two beds and two chairs. But then Millet arrives. Within thirty-six hours there will only be two again. In the meantime, they play Monopoly, try to figure out who is next door, eat what is given to them, and do their best not to kill each other.

This black comedy takes a wry and unsentimental look at the cavalier cruelties of animal science and asks how we place value on life.

Belinda is an actor and playwright. Her last two plays, Little Elephants and Category E, both received Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Awards for Outstanding New Play. She is a core company member of Die-Nasty, the live improvised soap opera, a member of the acting ensemble with Teatro La Quindicina, and founder of her own company, Bright Young Things. She is the recipient of a Rosie Award and a Canadian Screen Award nomination for her performance in the sitcom Tiny Plastic Men, and she voices a variety of characters in BioWare’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age games. She lives in Edmonton in a Halloween house with her husband and two small but mighty dogs.

Ruth Bratt is a writer/performer/improviser. As an improviser, she is a regular guest with the Comedy Store Players; is one quarter of the Glenda J Collective with Josie Lawrence, Pippa Evans, and Cariad Lloyd; one half of A Very Serious Play with Lee Simpson; is often in The Actor’s Nightmare; and has guested on Whose Line Is It Anyway Live. She is a founding member of Showstopper! The Improvised Musical, with whom she has performed and taught all over the world, as they continue to tour worldwide and perform regularly in the West End following their Olivier AwardÐwinning run in 2015. She’s a regular player in the London 50-?hour Improvathons, and has done two with Die-?Nasty in Edmonton, where it all started! She plays Roche in the BAFTA-?winning show People Just Do Nothing (BBC), and was Carol in the last series of Man Down for Channel 4. She wrote and performed Trodd En Bratt Say Well Done You with Lucy Trodd (BBC Radio 4). Other credits include Derek (C4), Mongrels (BBC 3), and Sarah Millican’s Support Group (Radio 4). Ruth is an ambassador for World Animal Protection, and likes sitting on sofas with dogs and cats, and is obsessed with ceramics and becoming a part-?time potter.

Lila, a young Black ex-cop, has been on leave from the police force ever since she shot an unarmed Black youth. She’s moved back in with her mother, Karen, and is drinking beer for breakfast. So when Tim, a white playwright, shows up at her door to casually inform her that his play inspired by her experience is being adapted into a movie, Lila’s trauma is dragged out for speculation once again. The star of the film, their ex-cop bodyguard and Karen are pulled into the fight, leading to an epic metatheatrical standoff in a living room play about a living room play about gun violence, police, art and appropriation.

This dark, fast-paced dramedy by the author of Punch Up and Mustard traces the responsibility we have as artists in storytelling and the impact of what it means to be inspired by true events.

Kat Sandler is a playwright, director, screenwriter, and the artistic director of Theatre Brouhaha in Toronto. She has staged seventeen of her original plays in the last eight years, including Yaga and the concurrent double bill of The Party and The Candidate, where the same cast raced back and forth between two theatres to perform two simultaneous plays. Her play Mustard won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play and BANG BANG was nominated for the same award. Kat is a graduate of the Queen’s University Drama Program and is based in Toronto.

Just don’t lie down and no child will come.

It’s Ottawa in the 1920s, pre-legalized birth control. Sophie, a young working-class girl, falls madly in love with and marries a stable-hand named Jonny. After two difficult childbirths, doctors tell Sophie she shouldn’t have any more children, but don’t tell her how to prevent it. When Sophie inevitably becomes pregnant again, she faces a grim dilemma.

In an unflinching look at love, sex, and fertility, and inspired by real stories of mothers during the Canadian birth-control movement of the early twentieth century, one of Canada’s most celebrated playwrights vividly recreates a couple’s struggles with reproduction.

Hannah Moscovitch is an acclaimed Canadian playwright, TV writer, and librettist whose work has been widely produced in Canada and around the world. Recent stage work includes Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes and Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story (co-created with Christian Barry and Ben Caplan). Hannah has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Trillium Book Award, the Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award, the Scotsman Fringe First and the Herald Angel Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize administered by Yale University. She has been nominated for the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Drama Desk Award, Canada’s Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, and the Governor General’s Literary Award. She is a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. She lives in Halifax.

Is it really important to cling to our lost identities?

A terrorist attack in Jerusalem puts Eitan, a young Israeli-German genetic researcher, in a coma, while his girlfriend Wahida, a Moroccan graduate student, is left to uncover his family secret that brought them to Israel in the first place. Since Eitan’s parents erupted at a Passover meal when they realized Wahida was not Jewish, he has harboured a suspicion about his heritage that, if true, could change everything.

In this sweeping new drama from the prolific Wajdi Mouawad, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hits close to home as a straitlaced family is forced to confront everything they know about their identities.

Wajdi Mouawad (author of Scorched, Tideline, Forests and Heavens, among others) has established himself as a uniquely original player on the contemporary theatre scene. His plays have been translated into more than twenty languages and presented all over the world. In all his work, from his own plays and adaptations, from the productions he has directed to the novels he wrote, Wajdi Mouawad expresses the conviction that “art bears witness to human existence through the prism of beauty.” He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours for his work. He is currently Artistic Director of Théatre de la Colline—théâtre national in Paris.

Linda Gaboriau is a literary translator and dramaturg based in Montreal. She has specialized in translating drama and has translated more than 125 plays, including the works of some of Québec’s most prominent playwrights. Her translations have been published and widely produced across Canada and abroad. Her work has garnered many awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation in 1996 and again in 2010 for Forests. She was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2015.

I don’t think you can expect society to change if you’re not ready to take the first step.

In the 1970s Beverly walks into an office of Black activists, wanting to join the Movement, and has to prove she’s committed enough to fight. Some forty years later, in the Hip Hop Generation, Nicole reunites with her ex-boyfriend on a basketball court, wondering where he’s been, when a police officer stops them.

In this striking debut, Amanda Parris turns the spotlight on the Black women who organize communities, support their incarcerated loved ones, and battle institutions, living each day by a ride-or-die philosophy, strengthening their voices and demanding to be heard.

By day, Amanda Parris is a television and radio host and writes a weekly column. By night, she writes stories for the stage and screen. Other Side of the Game is her first published play. In Amanda’s past lives she was an educator who wrote arts-based curricula, attended numerous acting auditions and dreamed of opening a school that Blue Ivy Carter would attend. Over the course of her career, Amanda has worn a variety of hats, working as an educator, a researcher, an actor and a community organizer. She is the co-founder of the award-winning alternative education organization Lost Lyrics and worked with the Remix Project and the Manifesto Festival. She has spoken about her work at United Nations conferences around the world. Parris completed her Honours B.A. degree in Political Science and Women’s Studies at York University and her M.A. degree in Sociology of Education at the University of Toronto. She was a playwright-in-residence at Cahoots Theatre Company and Alameda Theatre Company and studied writing and acting at b current performing arts, anitafrika dub theatre and the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute.

Their whole bodies are ready for sleep, but sleep doesn’t come.

The cold has deserted winter, causing the polar bears in the zoo to pace in an endless quest for sleep. Their caretaker, Sasha, will do anything to bring them slumber. But when a boy named Marcus suddenly appears at his window, bringing a different outlook on the meaning of family, Sasha finds himself buried under new responsibilities—such as packing lunches and reading bedtime stories—rather than snow. And so he keeps going back to the bears, believing that he’ll find relief by the day that’s circled on the calendar, but missing Marcus’s pleas for attention and care.

Woven through a delicate and charming balance of the unique and familiar, this ethereal, melancholy play for young audiences brings light and warmth to wintering hearts.

Geneviève Billette holds a degree in French Studies from the University of Montreal and is a dramatist from the National Theatre School of Canada. She devotes herself to writing and translating and is a professor at the Graduate School of Theatre at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Le pays des mains, published by Leméac in 2004, is the recipient of the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Grand Prix Paul-?Gilson, and the Prix Gratien-?Gélinas. Her many plays have been performed in Switzerland, Canada, France, Martinique, Germany, and Mexico. Many have been translated into several languages. She lives in Montreal.

Translations by Nadine Desrochers include four plays by Sarah Berthiaume, two of which, The Flood Thereafter (Talisman Theatre, 2010) and Yukonstyle (Playwrights Canada Press, 2014), were part of Canadian Stage’s 2013/2014 season; Marilyn Perreault’s Rock, Paper, Jackknife . . . (Talisman Theatre, 2009; Playwrights Canada Press, 2010) and BUS STOPS (Théâtre I.N.K./Centaur Theatre, 2016); and Billy (The Days of Howling) by Fabien Cloutier (Talisman, 2014; A Play, A Pie and a Pint, Traverse Theatre/Òran Mór, Scotland). Her translation of The Medea Effect by Suzie Bastien (hotINK festival, New York, and Talisman Theatre, 2012) won the 2013 META Award for Outstanding New Translation.

Put away the knives because tensions are rising in this kitchen renovation.

What could help patch up a marriage better than a home renovation? Wayne thinks he’s doing his wife Julie a favour by hiring a young couple to help redo the kitchen (at a fraction of the cost she’d hoped for). But Julie has higher standards in mind. John and Maggie think they’ve found a way to make some quick money to pay off the land John bought. John just proposed, but Maggie hasn’t given her answer yet. With both couples on edge amongst themselves and with each other, everything from kitchen cabinets and coffee makers to generational differences and life choices are cause for ridicule, making a play that’s hilarious and relatable.

Rick Chafe’s plays include Governor General’s Literary Award finalist The Secret Mask, Shakespeare’s Dog (adapted from the novel by Leon Rooke), Strike! and its film adaptation Stand! (both co-written with Danny Schur), Red Earth (co-written with Kristian Jordan), Beowulf, and The Odyssey. Rick lives in Winnipeg with his wife, Martine; their daughter, Charlotte; two cats; and their new kitchen.