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Awards
 $100,000 Siminovitch Prize 2007 Awarded to Director Brigitte Haentjens
Recipient Selects Quebec City Director and Montreal Ensemble as Protégés
 BMO Financial Group today announced that director, Brigitte Haentjens has been named the 2007 recipient of the Elinore & Lou Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, Canada’s largest annual theatre award. Ms. Haentjens was chosen from a short-list of four finalists the jury selected from 26 of Canada’s top professional directors who received nominations. The announcement was made during a ceremony this evening at First Canadian Place in Toronto.
“In choosing Brigitte Haentjens as the recipient of the 2007 Siminovitch Prize, the jury wanted to recognize the prodigious virtuosity of her “écriture scénique” [her work as a director/creator], as well as the profoundly human character of her mission," explained Leonard McHardy, Jury Chair. "In Brigitte's world, ideas bleed, bodies think, space throbs. This is écriture scénique that defies classification; that displays a breathtaking tension between meticulousness and brutality; and wherein people, even as they are excited and inspired by the show itself, will find themselves forced to question the very foundations of their existence, of their identity, without any possible escape.”
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Playwright Judith Thompson wins Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts
 Ottawa, August 7, 2007 – The Canada Council for the Arts announced today that playwright Judith Thompson is the winner of the 2007 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts. The $50,000 prize, administered and presented by the Canada Council for the Arts, recognizes the highest level of artistic excellence and distinguished career achievement by Canadian artists who have spent the major part of their career in Canada in theatre, dance or music....
In awarding the prize to Ms. Thompson, the committee said:
“Possessed of one of the most dynamic and unique theatrical voices anywhere, Judith Thompson has created a corpus of plays of singular power and originality over the past quarter-century. This Canadian visionary, whose often disturbing work never leaves audiences unmoved, continues to break new ground even as her plays are produced, anthologized, and honoured across the nation and the world. Along with her significant achievements in writing for stage, film and radio, she is increasingly influential as a theatre director, educator and mentor. Judith Thompson has sustained artistic excellence across a distinguished career with the promise of more to come and is a worthy recipient of the Walter Carsen Prize.
Plays by Judith Thompson.
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From the Canada Council website. Photo of Judith Thomson by David Laurence.
Daniel MacIvor: 2006 Governor General's Award-winner - Drama
 A
dazzling display of virtuosity and honesty, these plays
demonstrate the author's consummate theatricality, as well
as his compelling humanity. Journeying from the archetypal
male world of Never Swim Alone to the dynamic
female world of A Beautiful View, this collection
is quintissential MacIvor, breathtakingly innovative and
overwhelmingly recognizable.
 I
Still Love You: Five Plays by Daniel MacIvor
Daniel MacIvor
Never Swim Alone is a competition. "If
you let it, compassion will kill desire. Especially the desire
to be first. And being first, my friends, is the point." The
Soldier Dreams is a darkly comic play
about life, death and grief. As a young man, David lies dying
of AIDS as his family gathers around his bed trying to understand
his delirious mutterings. While the living struggle to find
the meaning in David's dying words, MacIvor takes the audience
inside David's imagination to recapture significant moments
in his life. In You Are Here, You are about to meet Alison,
who searches her life for meaning. In a series of luminous
encounters, we're drawn into Alison's world: love that fades,
hopes that die, and enduring friendship that offers the promise
of redemption. In On It is a spiralling narrative about a dying
man trying to make plans for the end, a pair of lovers trying
to make it work and two men trying to make a play. A world
where accidents happen. A story about control. A play that
keeps its options open. Softcover, 250 pp. $29.95.
Plays by Daniel MacIvor.
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