Amplifying female voices and supporting new local plays is at the heart of this festival and WCT. We are exciting to offer a Playwriting Workshop as part of this year’s A Broad’s Way Festival – pairing up two local writers with playwriting mentors and TRU Theatre Professors, Robin Nichol and Catriona Leger, as well as a cast of actors to workshop a short piece.
This event is not open to the general public but stay tuned to WCT’s social media and E-news for updates and artist announcement.
Click on the artist's name to see a headshot and bio:
CATRIONA LEGER Playwriting Mentor ROBIN NICHOL Playwriting Mentor TANIA MCCARTNEY Featured Playwright CORRIE SHOEMAKER Featured Playwright
Catriona has worked across Canada as a professional actor, director, movement coach, producer and creator for over twenty-five years. She directed and co-created Push Up Bar, as seen at this year's A Broad's Way Festival. Catriona also currently teaches in the Theatre Program at TRU, and loves movement-based collaboration. She is thrilled to be working with WCT. Learn more at catrionaleger.com.
Robin has worked professionally as a stage-manager, lighting designer, dramaturge, actor, director, and playwright and has worked for companies across Canada. She received her BFA in theatre from UVic and her MFA in directing from UBC and has been a faculty member in the theatre program at TRU since 2004. In 1995 She, along with 5 other actors in Vancouver who had all recently become mothers, created a show about motherhood called Mom’s the Word which has been produced in over a dozen other countries, translated into as many other languages, is still touring and has played to over 2 million people across Canada and internationally. It was followed in 2005 by Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged and in 2009 by Mom’s the Word: Remixed, and 2016 by Mom’s the Word: Nest Half Empty which has played in Vancouver, Victoria, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and Kamloops.
Tania McCartney has been exploring movement in some way for the last 35 years. She completed a BFA in Acting at York University in Toronto and spent time creating collective movement-based theatre. She has been teaching yoga and movement from a trauma-informed perspective with diverse populations for 15 years. Tania will complete a Bachelor of Social Work this summer and is passionate about research and policy regarding older adults. Her most current work is on a collaborative anthology about mothers and daughters and the sandwich generation with Toronto actor/writer Dharini Woolcombe and local writer Tamara Macpherson Vukusic. If you have any questions about contributing to this project, please email Tania at tania.mccartney@gmail.com.
Corrie Shoemaker is a professor (TRU), author (historical fiction, mystery, children’s lit, poetry) and playwright with an undying love for theatre. She grew up steeped in the works of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She was thrilled to work with the Stratford Festival of Canada and Bard on the Beach (Vancouver) when researching Canadian identity on the Shakespeare stage for her PhD. Corrie has written for The Stratford Festival Reviews, Vocamus Press, Guelph Mercury Tribune and Marjorie Magazine. Her children’s fairy tale “Penelope Aurora” was published with MacroMicrocosm (2014) and her sci-fi story “Operation Reflection” received honours mentioned with the Writers of The Future Contest (2018). Her poetry has been showcased on Canadian radio. She’s currently writing for AO1 Theatre (Guelph) and will be speaking at Stratford’s Shakespeare Conference in June (UWaterloo). You can follow Corrie at The Write Stuff: Literature with Charm or on Facebook at C.L.Shoemaker.
Thank you to our partners and donors for their generous support of WCT's A Broad's Way Festival