2025 THA Theatre for Young Audiences Award Finalists
Supported by the Estate of Rachel Wyatt
A Boy, a Horse, & the North Wind by Sean Dixon (ON)
It’s an adaptation of a novel from the 1880’s, George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind. The novel (as distinct from this adaptation) is about an asthmatic boy who is befriended by the North Wind and who inevitably dies at the end. The story is told in a manner that is meant to bring comfort to readers of the time who were in perpetual mourning due to high infant mortality rates. My adaptation changes the story, moving it up to Toronto in 1912 in order to save the life of the boy, dramatizing the achievement of a real doctor named JG Fitzgerald, who saved the lives of hundreds of Canadian children by distilling an antitoxin for diphtheria in the body of a strong horse.
Sean Dixon was a founding member of the influential Winnipeg theatre collective PRIMUS, (writing the narrative scaffolding for Dog Day, Alkoremmi, and The Night Room), had a long-running Toronto hit in 1995 (The Painting), won the audience award at the 1999 Vancouver Fringe (Billy Nothin’), had a novel (The Girls Who Saw Everything) named one of Quill&Quire’s 2007 best books of the year, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Governor General’s Award for playwriting (Tarragon Theatre’s A God In Need of Help). A scholar of Toronto-based literature (Amy Lavender Harris) once called him “the true inheritor of [Gwendolyn] MacEwen’s mythopoeic legacy.” He has worked extensively for the Blyth Festival and Okanagan’s Caravan Farm Theatre, as well as Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. Along with plays and novels, he has written a children’s picture book on the theme of adoption, a subject dear to his heart, called The Family Tree.
PYPER by Susanna Fournier (ON)
Through a dramatic and hilarious retelling of the Pied Piper and Pinocchio, PYPER follows the angst, humour, heartbreak, and anxiety of 10 cyborg-AI-teens trying to build a time capsule in case they’re “retired” before high school graduation. PYPER is a post-dramatic text born from the internet algorithms of Gez and Gen Alpha as they reckon with what it means to be and become in the age of AI and the disintegration of analogue world orders. Inherently theatrical, it combines story-telling, revisionist history, satire and poetry to ask wickedly funny, urgent, and existential questions: What does it mean to be human in our ever-increasing digital world? What will the future hold? And who will survive it?
Susanna Fournier is an award-winning Canadian theatre-maker, actor/director, and performance educator. Her work straddles acting and creating in television, film, and stage. She is known in Canadian theatre for her formally provocative performance texts and interdisciplinary productions. In 2018/19, Susanna’s company, PARADIGM productions, produced her critically acclaimed trilogy, The Empire, across three Toronto venues, as a radio-drama podcast series online, and as a complete reader edition published through Playwrights Canada Press. Her theatre-making has been seen at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Canadian Stage, Luminato, Aki Studio, Theatre Centre, as well as in London UK, Munich, and Berlin. Susanna is a two-time nominee for the KM Hunter Award for theatre artist of the year. She is also a guest artist/director at Toronto Metropolitan University, Etobicoke School of the Arts, and Cawthra Park Secondary School. www.susannafournier.com
Blue Beads and Blueberries by Erin Macklem, Original Music by Avery Brown
When a fairy-tale father asks his daughters how much they love him, he feels slighted by his eldest daughter’s answer and sends her away, setting her on an adventure filled with beaded earrings and woven sashes, traditional jigs and Michif language. Or it would, if the present-day Dad trying to tell this story wasn’t being constantly interrupted by his distractible daughter, Alexina. As she starts pulling at the threads of the story, it begins to unravel…and so does her dad. Blue Beads and Blueberries transforms an ancient fairy tale into a celebration of Métis culture, and shows that there’s more than one way to wear a céinture fléchée/sash, more than one way to share a story, and more than one way to tell someone how much you love them.
Erin Macklem is a playwright, costume designer, and arts administrator of Irish, English, French and Red River Métis ancestry. She is grateful to live, create, and raise her daughter on Lekwungen territory, home of the Songhees and Xwsepsum (Esquimalt) Nations (aka Victoria BC). She is a full member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and likes to make theatre that tells old stories in new ways, preferably with music. Some examples include: Blue Beads and Blueberries (adapted from Cap O’ Rushes), and Tragic Animal Stories (loosely based on Romeo & Juliet) – both featuring music by Avery Brown – and This Little Light (adapted from The Little Match Girl) with music by Brad L’Ecuyer. She participated in the Banff Playwrights’ Nest in 2021 and will be participating in the Banff Playwrights Lab in 2025 to adapt katherena vermette’s The Girl and The Wolf into a play for young audiences.
Avery Brown’s early introduction to music came through studies in classical piano and choir. The choir he was a member of was a world class singing ensemble and through the years toured as choir-in-residence at Windsor Castle, Salisbury Cathedral, St. Georges Chapel in Westminster Abbey, Norwich Cathedral and many others, offering a look at what can be accomplished with focus and inspired direction. Around high school Avery started his exploration into jazz music. He was offered a full scholarship to the fledgling Mount Royal College Jazz Performance Program. Calgary music legend, Eric Friedenberg was in charge of that rodeo and it was an absolutely wonderful, eye-opening two years for Avery. He has gone on to perform as a pianist, keyboardist, trombonist and singer in bands, choirs and orchestras. He has composed, directed and conducted for professional theatre for 30 years.
Special thanks to Theatre for Young Audiences Award Peer Assessment Panelists: Jan Taylor (Chair), Lily Falk, and Michele Riml.