The Playwright of the Month for September 2026 is Lois Brown (NL)!
Lois Brown (BA Drama, U of A; MEd MUN, Curriculum and Instruction) is a seventh generation Newfoundlander and lives in St. John’s, (Canada) where she has had a full-time cross-disciplinary artistic practice including dance and theatre creation, disability aesthetics, performative inquiry, improvisation and dramaturgy, especially for ghosts. Among numerous acknowledgements of the value of her work, she has been awarded The Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement in theatre, and inducted into the DCD Dance Hall of Fame in Toronto. Her pieces with composer James O’Callaghan, I AM A GENIUS DOES ANYONE HERE KNOW ME? toured to Toronto, Calgary, and Ireland. The sequel is about water equity. Lois’s script Drinking Again premieres in St. John’s in November 2026, produced by White Rooster Theatre Company and directed by Allison Kelly.
We asked some questions so our members could get to know Lois a bit better.
What are some Plays that have stayed with you or influenced your work?
Downed Hearts by Catherine Banks, Burbank and Volupine by Sheila’s Brush, Altimera by Elsa Pépin translated by David Dalgleish, An Evening with Uncle Val by Andy Jones, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich by Back to Back Theatre, Cophenhagen by Michael Frayn, Ciel bleu ciel (Face au mur) by Martin Crimp, Time Before Thought by Mercedes Barry, Agnes Walsh, and Andy Jones, Heartbreak House by GBS, Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O’Neill, Wreckhouse by Frank Barry, The Medea Effect by Suzie Bastien, The Fever by Wallace Shawn, The Devil You Don’t Know by Joel Hynes and Sherry White, Fortune in Men’s Eyes by John Herbert, Sold Out by Beni Malone, Oblivion by Sarah Vanhee, Thinking of Yu By Carole Fréchette, and many more ranging from Fruithead by Sara Tilley to Kate Crackerberry by Ruth Lawrence to Possible Maps by Ed Riche and Gerry Porter. I like the entire canon of playwrights like Catherine Banks, Andy Jones, Robert Chafe, Back to Back Theatre, Bernardine Stapleton, M. G. Coles, and especially in my early theatre practice – GBS + J.M. Sullivan+ Eugène Ionesco. I have probably left out plays that influenced me that didn’t come to mind like All the Premiers I Loved Before by Tara Manuel. And there are more plays to read and see, not yet written, by which to be influenced.
What are some questions you’re exploring or investigating in your work right now?
I’m investigating using the chorus and its rhetoric to investigate how we talk about the ecological, psychological and spiritual detritus of drug addiction, how to broaden + deepen my practice of dramaturgy, and what happens in the wings. You can see from my list of plays that I am fascinated by stories inside stories. I like narrators. I’m interested in collaborating with invisibility. I’m fascinated by the possibility of lecture performances as theatre, as plays.
Do you have any rituals or routines that fuel your creative process?
Here are some tips that help me stay in the zone or bring me home to my writing. When I was in residence at Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal, I attended a roundtable of Canadian playwrights. As I listened to them describe their process, it seemed to me that they all wrote their plays while walking – many had a daily walking practice. And then, when they returned from their walk, they wrote their plays down. So I would recommend that if you want to hear what your characters are saying – or in fact, what your play is saying – go for a walk, come home and write it down. The 100s is a writing practice developed by Berlant and Stewart and published as a book called The Hundreds; the book consists of their reciprocal monologues – especially interesting is their responses to ordinary life. If you have a creative partner, the 100s is a great way to maintain a daily writing practice. Any daily writing practice is a great way to take pleasure in your writing practice when you are having tough days with your play. Go see plays. Travel and see plays. Call your dramaturg. Pay your dramaturg. Return to the research. Become a PARC member. Write in a journal by hand, but take care the writing is legible. You want to be able to read something that later becomes a part of your play. Also have a small notebook handy to record a few words you might hear in the urban wild. Be brave – write plays that take a week and write ones that take seven years. Draw your set and then colour it. Take a photo of places that you think, “That could be a set for my play.”
Tell us a bit about the role that PARC has played in your development as a writer and an artist.
Most recently, PARC supported my play Drinking Again through workshops in St. John’s with local actors and my dramaturg. These workshops led to a upcoming production by White Rooster Theatre Company. In the past, PARC supported a public reading of When the Angel of Death Says? How Are You… in Halifax. PARC has supported my development as a dramaturg, and introduced me to Catherine Banks process. Last year when I needed help with a budget question — could I afford a read-through I had been offered, but I had to produce it myself — I called Santiago and he helped me answer my question on the spot!
Contact Lois:
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Photo Credit: Marie-Rachel Dionne