2026 Emerging Playwright Award Finalists
Look At Me by Raymond Beauchemin (ON)
Look At Me examines our connection to visual art in three short acts. In the first, “3 Hours, 10 Minutes,” a man and woman meet while looking at a painting in an art gallery; they connect while discussing what the painting says to them. In “Sticks and Stones,” an Indigenous woman in her 20s and her grandmother visit a gallery where they have very different, visceral and political reactions to a painting. In the third act, “White Out,” Lawren Harris and Tom Thompson engage in a brought-back-from-the-dead, humorous, if combative, discussion about art, its impacts and purpose, while the two actors from the earlier plays act as a Greek chorus commenting on the painters’ conversation.
Raymond Beauchemin wrote the novels Everything I Own and These Days Are Nights, and The Emptiest Quarter, a collection of novellas. His play What We Talk About When We Talk About Trump was a Brave New Works selection at Theatre Aquarius in 2025 and 3 Hours, 10 Minutes, one of the acts in Look At Me, won Best in Venue at the 2025 Hamilton Fringe Festival. 3 Hours, 10 Minutes is the subject of a documentary shot by Toronto director Saint Chris Bailey. Beauchemin lives in Hamilton.
Lamb by Sepehr Reybod (ON)
Lamb is a surrealist drama about diaspora, its cost and the ways it takes. It’s also about liberty and transcending form and place. When Beau, an Iranian-Canadian afflicted by kidney failure, travels to Iran and begins a sordid affair with Hamid, the man he purchases a kidney from, economies, hearts, and futures collide. Raha, Hamid’s pregnant wife, is meanwhile seeking escape, to get rid of the baby that threatens to trap her forever in a life she does not want, all while the country is heating up and breaking apart in political and environmental upheaval. Maybe the answer to Raha’s future is through her own body – the very body the rest of the world is trying to command. How much of ourselves do we need to cut away to make survival possible?
Sepehr Reybod is an Iranian-born actor, playwright, and director based in Toronto. Select acting credits include: MAJOR BARBARA, Shaw Festival; ENGLISH, Soulpepper; R+J, WhyNot Theatre & Stratford Festival; RICHARD III, Stratford Festival. Directorial credits include: the 2023 Fringe hit One Night Only, duhdumduhdum productions; Here Lies Henry (Assistant), Factory Theatre; IMMOLATION (Assistant & Text Developer), University of Waterloo. Sepehr holds a BFA Spec. Honours in Acting from York University and is an alum of Factory Theatre’s Training Enhancement Programs The Mechanicals (2018-2019) and Foundry (2019-2020).
The Astros by Brianna Russell (NL)
The Astros is about an all-boys high school hockey team in rural NL, playing their final championship game against their biggest rivals. As the game goes on, and the team realizes that they might graduate as losers, animalistic violence and toxic masculinity rears its ugly head. Stuck between boys and men, the youth grapple with the fact that although most of them won’t make it out of this town, hockey was the one thing that made them someone. All characters in this play (except one) should be played by female and gender-diverse performers.
Brianna Russell is a queer filmmaker and playwright from Clarke’s Beach, NL. As a playwright, Brianna’s one-act plays Icarus Is Falling and The Virgin, Mary have received development workshops through PARC/Shakespeare by the Sea and Doormouse Productions, and the former of the two won the 2026 New Play Contest for the Hamilton Fringe Festival. She is the Co-Owner/Artistic Producer at Sheep’s Clothing Theatre, and she wrote and produced a site-specific adaptation of Julius Caesar set in a fraternity entitled Blood Brothers, which had a limited run in August 2025 at the Delta Upsilon Fraternity. Brianna is the 2022 recipient of the RBC Michelle Jackson Emerging Filmmaker Award, an alumni of the WIDC Career Advancement Module, and a participant in the 2024 Whistler Film Festival Screenwriters Lab. Brianna was a resident in the 2025 CFC’s Norman Jewison Writers’ Lab, and graduated in December 2025.
Special thanks to the Emerging Playwright Award Peer Assessment Panelists: Kacie Hall (Chair), Megan Gail Coles, Marie Leofeli Barlizo.