TCG Books

In John and Beatrice, Beatrice waits for the right man to respond to her ad. When John appears, the games begin. A play about the difficulty of connection and the meaning of love. In Helen’s Necklace, Helen wanders through a Middle Eastern city looking for a lost pearl necklace. Helen comes into contact with a series of people, and she is irrevocably changed by her search for a trinket.

A play about art, history, sexuality, how we fight our battles and, ultimately, how we choose to live our lives.

Palace of the End is a searing triptych of three monologues. With its emphasis on the human voice and power of the soul in the midst of a destructive war, each account is a riveting and brilliantly portrayed indictment of the war in Iraq.

Cutting deep into the lawyers' private lives, their families and foibles are richly portrayed as an integral part of Toronto's shifting mosaic. From an ostensibly routine traffic stop, each character must come to terms with the city's racial politics and how they have shaped their own beliefs and prejudices.

A collection of contemporary Canadian monologues for women, intended for auditions, study or general interest and addressing themes of Adolescence, Body, Childhood Memories, Identity, Mothers, and Passion.

“A monologue must give voice to those who have been silenced. The speaker must urgently need to speak, to proclaim, to persuade, to incite, to inspire, to agitate, to fabricate, to contaminate or whitewash, to justify; the speaker needs approval, or absolution, or acclaim, or worship, or laughter or sympathy. The monologue can only happen if the speaker has an audience. The monologue is ultimately the electric interaction between the audience and the speaker.”
—from the introduction by Judith Thompson

The characters who inhabit Varma’s play are all seeking the common good. But they are not guided by the same priorities. To get what they want, they must negotiate with each other. Each time they do, something is lost. And these losses ultimately add up to disaster. This play—a pitiless analysis of the stakes of globalization—explores how this happens.

Living Curiosities dramatizes the story of Anna Swan, a giantess from Nova Scotia who is sent to P.T. Barnum's famed American Museum in New York City. Old alliances and bitter feelings threaten to tear the company apart, yet they must all work together to escape the past and find their own identities.

Stories from the Rains of Love and Death is a quintet of interrelated one-act plays written in 1977. Aurash is a Persian myth dating back over one thousand years. The Death of the King is a retelling of Persian history. Interrogation tells a timeless truth: nothing enduring can be built on violence.

Three touching and funny plays by Norm Foster. Maggie’s Getting Married is “quite possibly Foster’s best play to date” (The Guelph Mercury). In Here on the Flight Path “Foster cleverly weaves double meanings into his brilliant conversations. . . . [It is] clever and thought-provoking” (Rossmoor). The Long Weekend has plenty of surprises along the way in this biting comedy of manners.

“Mighton’s most accessible play…beautifully told.”—Stage and Page

Two nursing home residents rekindle what might have been a wartime romance. The award-winning author of Possible Worlds brings us this poetic and moving meditation on identity, aging and the nature of memory. What shines through when memory fades away? John Mighton is a Dora, Chalmers and Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama winner.

“The imagination of Hannah Moscovitch makes the audience sit up and squirm for all the right reasons”—CBC Radio

Four short plays by one of Canada’s exciting voices. In The Russian Play, the flower-shop girl tells the story of her love for the gravedigger. Essay casts a teaching assistant in the shadow of his professor as they argue the merits of a female student’s paper. In USSR, a young woman relates her journey to Canada from Russia, and Mexico City follows Henry and Alice on their vacation in 1960. These four plays bring each character to life in full colour, jumping off the page before you and onto the stage.

Includes some of the best plays by women that Quebec has to offer, in translation from the original French. Covering a diverse range of subject matter, many of these plays are being published in English for the first time.

Love and RelASIANships includes works that represent cultures from all over Asia and the place those cultures have in Canada. It includes Yellow Fever by Rick Shiomi, Bachelor-Man by Winston Christopher Kam, Maggie’s Last Dance by Marty Chan, Mother Tongue by Betty Quan, Noran Bang: The Yellow Room by M.J. Kang, and The Plum Tree by Mitch Miyagawa.

“Dennis is a writer and performer to keep your eye on. Sparked by anger but suffused with humanity and humility, his Tales are worth telling—and watching.”— NOW Magazine

Includes Tales of an Urban Indian and The Trickster of Third Avenue East, both of which depict native people seeking better lives in the city.

Darrel is a middle-aged mentally challenged man who lives with his mother. When she dies in her sleep, Darrel does not realize she is gone, and, for ten days, he lives alone. Tandem to Darrel’s day to day routine are the adventures of his favorite children’s book characters, Honeydog and Little Burp. The newest play from puppeteer Ronnie Burkett who garnered critical acclaim for Provenance.

Two plays with a deep sense of Newfoundland’s history. Butler’s Marsh explores 30-year-old family secrets hidden in the dark, dense woods. In Tempting Providence, Myra Grimsley boards a steam ship from London in 1921, charged to serve as the sole health provider for the sparsely settled coast of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula.

From Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Djanet Sears comes a beautiful and deeply moving story set in present-day Negro Creek, a 200-year-old Black community. Rainey Baldwin-Johnson, a country doctor, struggles to come to terms with the loss of her daughter, the disintergration of her marriage and an eccentric elderly father on an astonishing crusade.

In this powerful and moving play which speaks honestly and intelligently to teens, Dennis Foon examines the cyclical nature of physical and psychological abuse. When abusive behaviour surfaces in the lives of four friends, the teenagers are forced to examine how learned behaviour can be mirrored by victims and home situations.

The first anthology of First Nations drama to be published in Canada, this volume includes seminal work by Spiderwoman Theatre, Daniel David Moses, Monique Mojica, Drew Hayden Taylor, Yvette Nolan, and Marie Humber Clements, and features previously unpublished plays by Tomson Highway, Maria Campbell, Floyd Favel Starr, and William Yellow Robe, Jr.

Based on the author’s own life, the play’s main character/narrator undertakes a dream journey to bring to light the men hidden in a collection of 700 family letters—letters from five brothers who fought in WWI. Not only does the writer step into the characters of these forgotten soldiers, but also into his own life as a child.

Jenny’s House of Joy is a delightful comedy about the oldest profession. Outlaw is an authentic Western that is a unique take on the days when guns were the law. In Bedtime Stories we follow interweaving characters in their comic struggle to find the meaning of love.

Mapleview Lanes—address of "The Canadian Dream." The newest resident_a group home for troubled teens. There goes the neighborhood. Disturbing and touching, funny and heartbreaking, this is classic Judith Thompson.

The second volume in this groundbreaking collection features plays written since 2002. It includes Yes Yoko Solo by Jean Yoon, Tiger of Malaya by Hiro Kanagawa, Miss Orient(ed) by Nina Lee Aquino and Nadine Villasin, China Doll by Marjorie Chan, Banana Boys by Leon Aureus, and paper SERIES by David Yee.

A groundbreaking anthology of plays about the Israel-Palestine conflict penned by diaspora playwrights of Jewish and Palestinian decent. This volume of seven plays varies in genre between drama and comedy, in aesthetic between realism and surrealism, and in setting between the diasporas and Israel/Palestine, offering distinct perspectives that turn the political into the personal.

Includes The Red Priest and Mieko Ouchi’s new play, The Blue Light, in which Leni Riefenstahl, one hundred-years-old, is in the office of a young female Hollywood studio executive to make one last desperate pitch to direct her first feature film in fifty years. A thought-provoking contemplation on art, politics, and the seduction of fascism.

Included are: Path With No Moccasins, The Indian Medicine Shows, More Than Feathers and Beads, Annie Mae’s Movement, Trail of the Otter, Governor of the Dew: A Memorial to Nostalgia and Desire, Confessions of an Indian Cowboy, Burning Vision, Please Do Not Touch the Indians, and The Scrubbing Project.

Inspired by the true story of a New Brunswick teenager who committed suicide in prison when corrections officers failed to intervene. From the two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, this play is a bold, captivating portrait of three women who remain helpless in the tight jaws of an unjust judicial system.

A collection of twenty-five short, powerful plays that pack a punch through a variety of genres and styles. Ideal for a range of readers from drama students to aspiring theatre practitioners, and for those working in community and professional theatres, Long Story Short gathers plays that create complete and moving stories that transcend the page in about ten minutes each.

Three new plays by award-winning author Daniel MacIvor featuring generations of women as they come to terms with themselves and each other. In Communion, a recovering alcoholic and her estranged daughter try to negotiate a new relationship; Was Spring follows three women who suffered a tragic accident years ago; and Small Things explores how little differences keep us from understanding each other.

Norman Davenport feels he was born in the wrong century. Disappointed that he is forced to cater to more current tastes when he opens a brand new clothing store, Norman makes a wish that changes his life—and the lives of his two loyal employees—forever. A delightful new play from one of Canada's most-produced playwrights.