TCG Books

Winner of the Fringe First Award, Edinburgh 2010. An exhilarating coming-of-age drama for a solo performer. When her boyfriend is attacked on the street, feisty eighteen-year-old Katie is thrust on a white-knuckle ride through one extraordinary evening.

Forty-something Hildy is in crisis. Her father is in a nursing home. Her belittling mother has moved in with her and shows no sign of leaving. Her son is a recovering drug addict on methadone and hugely overweight. And her ex-husband persuades her to have sex one more time.

Drawing on the work of key practitioners and packed with games, exercises and techniques, The Active Text shows how physical theater and devised theater practices can be applied to scripted plays. This inspirational guide leads readers through an active, physical approach to text that can challenge assumptions about even the most familiar of plays, and that will revitalize work in the rehearsal room, workshop, or classroom.

A funny, sexy, scurrilous adaptation of the play Bertolt Brecht made into The Threepenny Opera. On board a convict ship to Australia, the prisoners stage their own version of John Gay's eighteenth-century romp-with-song, The Beggar's Opera, finding it easy to identify with the villainous but charming hero, Macheath.

A play about the myths, ideas and realities of migration and identity in the twenty-first century, by Catherine Grosvenor in collaboration with Lorne Campbell, Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner.

Grazyna Antkiewicz lived.
Robert Dziekanski died.

Two people from Poland. One real, one imagined. What happened - or might have happened - between there and here? The distance from living the dream to waking up in a shared room in Scotland with mushrooms growing out of the carpet. From desperately missing your child to falling in love with a foreigner.

A heartrending drama about family, betrayal and forgiveness, spanning four generations and two hemispheres. From the writer of the award-winning film Lantana.

It interweaves a series of connected stories as seven people confront the mysteries of their past in order to understand their future, revealing how patterns of betrayal, love and abandonment are passed on. Until finally, as the desert is inundated with rain, one young man finds the courage to defy the legacy.

Concise and practical, this guide for aspiring directors is a distillation of Ric Knowles's twenty-five years of experience as a director, teacher of directing, and dramaturge across Canada. Organized to reproduce the chronology of a play's rehearsal, the book moves through the various stages of the directorial process, from selecting a project all the way through to closing night.

Written for Clean Break—a theater company working with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system. This Wide Night is a tender portrayal of two damaged women trying to repair their broken lives.

Laugh-out-loud funny to start with, Jez Butterworth’s new play Parlour Song gets darker and more surreal as it unfolds. It is a darkly hilarious exploration of deceit, paranoia, and murderous desire, as the spirit of the blues lands in leafy suburbia.

A "how to" book for actors who want to develop a "can do" attitude to their profession in the face of rejection and intense competition. This book will inspire you to break out of the cycle of despondency and start to view yourself as a creative and autonomous individual who is valuable and employable.

Jake is a widower whose life is devoted to his son, a severely disabled seventeen-year-old boy. However, when Jake suddenly develops a serious medical condition, he becomes the one to rely on the people around him. As Jake's condition worsens, an ethical dilemma troubles the household as everyone is forced to consider the possibility of saying goodbye too early.

This book contains two of the most enduring plays from one of Canada’s most accomplished playwrights and performers. A funny, satirical story, Never Swim Alone is about two men locked in a ruthless competition of one-upmanship. A hilarious metaplay, This Is A Play follows three actors who reveal their thoughts and motivations as they struggle through a performance.

In Lucy Kirkwood's version of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's nineteenth-century heroine is relocated to present-day London, to startling effect.

Hedda, still mourning for the father she adored, returns from honeymoon with a husband she doesn't love, to a flat and a pregnancy she doesn't want. Trapped by her past and terrified of her future, bored by her life but too cowardly to walk away from it, she finds herself caught between three men. And in the end, something has to give

An enthralling new version of an unforgettable Henrik Ibsen classic. Part psychological thriller, part Gothic tragedy, Ibsen's late masterwork is a compelling portrait of one man's obsessive determination and what might lie on the darker side of ambition.

Fifty monologues for women drawn from across the Shakespeare canon. Ideal for actors of all ages and experience. Also includes uniquely formatted summarizations to each piece.

The Secret Life of Plays examines several plays' hidden workings and the trade secrets that govern their writing. Steve Waters takes the reader through the key elements of dramatic writing to show how plays are more than the sum of their parts, with as much inner vitality as a living organism.

A new play from one of the world's most acclaimed and inventive puppeteers. Humanity is facing extinction, and Penny Plain, elderly and blind, can only sit and wait. An unexpected cast of characters pay her visits, struggling to escape from the hostile world outside, in this strange and spellbinding play.

Three one-act plays from acclaimed Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch. A chilling psychological thriller, Little One follows adopted siblings and their neighbors, a man and his mail-order bride. In Other People's Children, a wealthy couple's live-in nanny exposes the fragility of their marriage. In This World looks at what friendship means to two teenaged girls from vastly different social backgrounds.

A new play from revered playwright Judith Thompson, inspired by the life of disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson. Julian is a bestselling author and fervent supporter of euthanasia. Elora, a lawyer and disability rights activist who has never walked a step in her life, is the counter-argument. So it comes as a shock, especially to Elora, when the two find themselves acutely attracted to one another.

Unrivalled insights into playing Shakespeare's major characters, from an extraordinary roll-call of star actors. Includes stories from Brian Cox, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Rebecca Hall, Derek Jacobi, Jude Law, Adrian Lester, Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, Tim Pigott-Smith, Kevin Spacey, Patrick Stewart, and Penelope Wilton.

Inspired by the Robert Pickton murders, the devastating parallel stories of women who suffered at the hands of a killer. Dying Girl is being held captive in a secluded barn. Her sister files a police report, but the police let the case slide. After nine years, new evidence comes to light, and it looks like Sister's instincts may have been right all along.

An enduring classic that looks at the inner emotional turmoil in ordinary people and the ways in which they cope. Seventeen years ago, Isobel was murdered at the age of nine. Now she finds herself back in her previous life as a ghost searching for the person responsible. Will she finally get the peace she's been yearning for?

A collection of monologues from diverse contemporary works by Canadian playwrights that reflect the country's artistic landscape through a breadth of themes, styles, regions, and creative practices. Refractions: Solo can be used as a monologue source for actors and students, and as a primer on diverse Canadian theater and an entry point into new works.

"[Bruce Nauman] has had a crucial impact on his peers as well as on countless younger artists in America and abroad."—Robert Storr, critic/curator

Part of PAJ's acclaimed Art + Performance series, this is the first book to combine the essential critical writings on Bruce Nauman, interviews with him, and the artist's own writings, organized around performance issues. Contains more than forty selections, and several pages of illustrations.

A major new collection of the plays by Maria Irene Fornes. Includes Abingdon Square, one of the author’s best-known works originally produced in 1987 under Fornes’ direction. This story of a young woman’s personal liberation set in Greenwich Village of the early 1900s is played out in thirty-one sparse scenes of love and betrayal. The title play, What of the Night?, is an epic drama of four short plays on the individual’s struggle with poverty, love, and sorrow. The volume also includes The Summer in Gossensass and Enter the Night.

Maria Irene Fornes is a nine-time OBIE Award-winner, widely represented in the curriculum of contemporary theater in universities, and anthologized in the major contemporary drama textbooks.

Three haunting, elliptical plays by a talented writer from Northern Ireland.

St Petersburg comprises three scenes involving three characters, an old man, his middle-aged daughter, and a ten-year-old boy.

Limbo is a monologue in which a 17-year-old girl tells us the story of her relationship with an older man and what it led to.

Catherine Medbh is a bittersweet and hesitant duologue in a bar between a youngish man and woman who are ex-lovers.

Though the spareness of the dialogue can be poetic, in Declan Feenan’s writing it is what’s going on under the words that carries the emotional charge. His characters talk, often quite volubly, but all we hear is the unbridgeable gap between them, and the evasions and concealments with which they live their lives.

This wide-ranging anthology includes a collection of reviews tracing Foreman’s reception from the 1960s to today, a series of informative interviews, a section of critical essays and a selection of Foreman’s writings (including the complete text of My Head Was a Sledgehammer). The book also offers a detailed chronology of Foreman’s career, a current bibliography and 19 photographs from his plays.

For actors, directors, students, and teachers of movement in the theater. It is bursting with energy, ideas, passion, and commitment. In precise detail Christian Darley sets out, step by step, the exercises and techniques she developed with her own students at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, dealing with the vital building blocks of movement training.

This warm and touching new play from Ireland about death, loneliness, and love is classic Conor McPherson, full of recognizable characters that have been knocked around by life.

Katherine's life has come to a standstill. Her husband, Tom, has left her for a younger woman and her once-glamorous mother Dorothy is slowly losing her mind. As Dorothy's condition worsens, Katherine's stepfather and a new nurse rally to support her. Then Tom appears with a sudden announcement that sets them all off on an unexpected journey deep into rural Ireland.

Internationally recognized for her visually elegant, thought-provoking video art, Mary Lucier was a sculptor, photographer and performance artist before she turned to video in 1973. This volume brings together a selection of Lucier’s previously unpublished writings and drawings along with essays, reviews, interviews and photographs of her ephemeral installations and performances to create an absorbing portrait of one of America’s most accomplished video pioneers.

A three-play collection about youth that explores the themes of race, identity, and belonging. This book is comprised of And By the Way Miss . . . by URGE Collective, Beneath the Ice by Eva Colmers, and The Middle Place by Andrew Kushnir, featuring scholarly introductions for each.

Short plays from twenty cutting-edge Los Angeles playwrights make up this powerful and entertaining anthology. Includes works produced by Padua Playwrights and Sharon's Farm. Contributing playwrights include: Sissy Boyd, Hank Bunker, Heidi Darchuk, Juli Crockett Feldman, Susan Hayden, Coleman Hough, Bernard Goldberg, Michael Hacker, Rachel Jendrzejewski, Marc Jensen, Christopher Kelley, Murray Mednick, Kevin O'Sullivan, Gray Palmer, Chris Rossi, April Rouveyrol, Cheryl Slean, Wesley Walker, Sharon Yablon and Guy Zimmerman.

A new play from acclaimed writer Tony Burgess, author of the wildly successful novel, Pontypool Changes Everything. In the sleepy town of Pontypool, Ontario, no one is safe from an epidemic so devastating it will leave you literally speechless.

I, Animal is a trio of riveting monologues from celebrated playwright Daniel MacIvor, each of which explores identity with tremendous insight and dark humor. In "Man in Scrubs," a queer black nurse is getting awfully tired of being put in a box. "Boy in Hoodie" is the story of a boy fascinated by death. In "Woman in Prada," a former suburban housewife navigates social expectations and desires.

A neglected favor sets in motion a series of events that end in tragedy, and a woman finds herself haunted by regret. Jennifer Tremblay's play, winner of a 2008 Governor General's Literary Award, is brought vividly to life in this celebrated new translation.

Two plays from the award-winning French Canadian playwright and her acclaimed translator. In The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, Grace finds herself irresistibly drawn to a mysterious and forbidden room. Thinking of Yu follows a woman who becomes fascinated by a creative rebellion in Tiananmen Square.

A collection of contemporary Canadian plays. Includes Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Still Stands the House, Trey Anthony's 'da Kink in my hair, Tara Beagan's Miss Julie: Sheh'mah, Madeleine Blais-Dahlem's La Maculées Tain, Hillar Liitoja's The Last Supper, selections from the Impromptu Splendour series, Theatre Replacement's BIOBOXES, and Zuppa Theatre's Penny Dreadful.

An updated edition of the compelling play that won the 2003 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama. Einstein's Gift follows the story of Nobel laureate Dr. Fritz Haber, a chemist who risked everything for a country that never accepted him, and discovered too late this his knowledge had fallen into the wrong hands.