Script Salon 10th Anniversary Recordings
In honour of Script Salon’s 10th Anniversary, we invited monologue submissions from Alberta playwrights to be read aloud at a celebration event in Edmonton in 2024. Below are the recordings from that event along with information about the playwrights who took part.
Rona Altrows
Rona Altrows is a fiction writer, essayist, editor,and playwright. Her books of short fiction are A Run on Hose, Key in Lock, and At This Juncture. She wrote her chapbook The River Throws a Tantrum to help children process their feelings after the 2013 Calgary flood. She has co-edited or edited three anthologies, including You Look Good for Your Age, which explores women, aging, and ageism. Rona's 10-minute plays have entertained audiences in Edmonton, Calgary, Hawaii, and Connecticut. With Ethan Cole and Lisa Murphy Lamb, Rona co-produces Gimme 10 Minutes, an afternoon of staged readings of 10-minute plays in Calgary.
Louise Casemore
Louise Casemore is an artist advocate, prairie nuisance, and two-time Sterling Award winning playwright. Based in Alberta on Treaty 6 and 7 Territory, she is the recipient of the ATP/Enbridge Playwright’s Award, was shortlisted for the inaugural John Palmer Award from the Playwright’s Guild of Canada, and is a 2023 Edmonton Artist Trust Fund honoree. Original plays include OCD (Canadian tour), Functional (Found Festival, IGNITE!), GEMINI (Chinook Series, High Performance Rodeo), and Undressed (Alberta Theatre Projects). Louise remains active in the wider community by way of dramaturgy, teaching, and sector research; and in 2021 released a national study on new play development, "Surveying The Landscape" (commissioned by APN). She is a member of the Playwright’s Guild of Canada, LMDA, Citadel Theatre Playwrights Lab, and recently completed an MFA in Theatre Practice from the University of Alberta.
Monica Gate
Monica Gate is a mixed-race actor, playwright, and producer based in Amiskwaciwâskahikan. She has been working alongside Josh Languedoc in Workshop West’s Indigenous Playwrights’ Circle on her one-woman play, Donut Holes, which explores the politics of culture vs tradition. Recently, she was 1 of 2 candidates across Canada to complete the Indie Producer Co-op in Ontario with Theatre By The Bay. During her time in Ontario, she completed a production campaign for Donut Holes, and looks forward to its premiere in the 2026 Fringe Festival. Monica is very honoured to be featured alongside so many talented playwrights at Script Salon.
Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez
Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez (she/her) is an immigrant performer, writer and creator originally from Mexico. Prior works include Frida y Su Reflejo (Frida Through the Looking Glass), a bilingual movement-based show about the life and death of Frida Kahlo. Her most recent piece, El Funeral, explores the guilt and experiences by members of the diaspora through the lens of her family history. She has also written a number of short plays including Rooftop Murmurs, selected as a winner of the inaugural EdmonTEN festival, as well as Alebrijes, commissioned by Concrete Theatre for their Anti-Racism and Change programming. Love always to Isabel and Aaron.
Madi May
Madi May is a playwright/comedian currently attending the National Theatre School of Canada. Madi got her start writing plays when she was fifteen. She has written and directed FANTOMINA (2022) and Pas de Deux (2019) for Edmonton’s Nextfest, and created the short film An Ode to My Siblings for the Found Fest in 2020. She performed in the stand-up show Tales of Gender Affirmation in Montreal in 2022, and was apart of the improv show Shot in the Dark for the Edmonton Fringe. Her play JULIE:BOT will have a reading at Nextfest in June, and FANTOMINA will be remounted at the 2024 Edmonton Fringe.
Camille Pavlenko
Camille Pavlenko (she/her) is a playwright, theatre artist, and writer based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary. Recent projects include real boi: The Tragedie of Pinocchio in Five Comedic Acts (Calgary Young Peoples’ Theatre), The Hitchhiker (Vertigo Theatre), and Go for Gold, Audrey Pham, which will be featured at the Foster Festival’s 2024 Playwrights Festival. She is the winner of the Ottawa Little Theatre Playwriting Competition, the Shevchenko Short Prose Competition, and the Allied Arts Council’s Young Artist Award. Camille is the Artistic Associate at Verb Theatre and a graduate student in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia.
Trevor Schmidt
Trevor Schmidt has been the Artistic Director of Northern Light Theatre for the past 22 years, and involved with NLT for the past 31 years as a performer, director, designer, and playwright, as well as being a multiple Sterling award winner in performance, director and playwrighting categories. This fall his one-woman Gothic thriller We Had a Girl Before You opened the season in its American premiere at the Greater Boston Stage Company. He has been awarded for Outstanding Choreography for 6.0: How Heap and Pebble Took on the Work and Won at the Betty Mitchell Theatre Awards in Calgary, and the DIALOG Award for Excellence in Artistic Direction as part of the Mayor's Evening for the Arts in Edmonton. He was on the shortlist for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award this year through the Alberta Literary Awards for his libretto for Two-Headed, Half-Hearted, a musical he wrote with composer Kaeley Jade Wiebe. He was most recently honoured at the AMPIAs for Outstanding Performance in a Lead Role-Male or Non-Binary for his work in the film Me & Mr. Right with Northern Gateway Productions.
Amir Shah
Born and bred here in the City of Champions, Amir Shah is honoured to be included in the 10th Anniversary Script Salon Monologues. His first play was Sheep May Safely Graze at Stage Struck last April. His “Sunsets" monologue is from a new play in search of a title.
Cat Walsh
Cat Walsh is an Edmonton-based performer and playwright. Her plays include The Laws of Thermodynamics (Theatre Yes/Workshop West Theatre), FETCH (Interloper Theatre), eleven-oh-four (charm/strange theatre) and Do This In Memory of Me (Northern Light Theatre/L'Unitheatre). Her new play POLO was read at Script Salon this past summer. Cat always ends her bios by saying she's working on a new solo show, but she really means it this time! She's also a graduate of the University of Ottawa.
Linda Wood Edwards
Linda Wood Edwards’ plays haves been to Australia, Washington DC, Yukon, Victoria, Saskatchewan, and across Alberta. Linda has two Sterling nominations (Spring Alibi 2005; Trail and Error 2016), two tours (Never Let the Crew See You Cry 2014; Four in the Crib 2013/2018), accolades for 10-minute plays (Walk of Shame 2023; Gibberish v. Genius 2018; Almost the Pioneer Brewing Company 2018), and a professional production (The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921 w/David Cheoros, 2021 Northern Light Theatre). And more! Linda is a governance nerd, funeral celebrant, beer judge in training, and devoted fan of the CFL. She thanks Script Salon for holding space for our plays.