Kicking off our season of 25th Anniversary "Homecomings", we are hosting two simultaneous residencies by writer-actor-director Jane Wells (Brightness Falls, Icaria, The Curious History of Peter Schlemihl, The Mystery of Lakewood House), and Megan Stewart, Artistic Director and co-founder of The River Clyde Pageant in New Glasgow, PEI.
Jane will be working on a solo performance, early in its life, entitled How to Live with Dread, intended for small audiences gathered around a kitchen table.
Megan will be joined by dramaturge and frequent collaborator Julie Hammond (Portland, OR) during this residency week to develop the script and explore early ideas for staging and performance of On Bread Time, a solo performance that explores loss, grief, and renewal between seasons of garlic and loaves of bread.
Jane Wells is a writer, actor, and director based in Toronto, where she worked for many years with Number Eleven Theatre. Since 2017 she has been a contributing artist, and since 2020 co-director, for the River Clyde Pageant, a collaborative community performance created annually in New Glasgow, PEI. In addition to writing for theatre, Jane has published essays and articles with Toronto Life, Prairie Fire, Canadian Notes and Queries, and Reader’s Digest.
Megan Stewart is a theatre artist residing and working in Epekwitk (Prince Edward Island), the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people. A director, producer, dramaturge, and performer, much of her practice centres upon large-scale collaborative theatre projects and community-engaged creation. She is the artistic director and producer of The River Clyde Pageant, which she co-founded in 2016 with Ker Wells, and continues to direct each summer with Jane Wells. Aside from the Pageant, her recent work includes direction and dramaturgy for Leah Abramson’s "Songs for a Lost Pod", which premiered in Vancouver, BC in 2022; co-leading the creation of "The Soley Cove Legacy Project" in Economy, Nova Scotia in 2021; and "The Flock" in Charlottetown, PEI in 2020. She is a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts.