Judith Thompson

Judith Clare Thompson, OC (born September 20, 1954) is a Canadian playwright.

She has twice been awarded the Governor General's Award for drama, and is the recipient of many other awards including the Order of Canada, the Walter Carsen Performing Arts Award, the Toronto Arts Award, The Epilepsy Ontario Award, The B'nai B'rith Award, the Dora, the Chalmers, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award (a global competition for the best play written by a woman in the English Language) and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, both for Palace of the End, which premiered at Canadian Stage, and has been produced all over the world in many languages.

She studied drama at Queen's (1973-1976) and then acting at the National Theatre School of Canada (1976-1979) in Montreal.

Thompson worked as an actor for a while, but then concentrated on playwrighting.

While in a mask class at NTS, Thompson developed the character of Theresa, inspired by a young woman she had met while working as an assistant social worker during one summer in Kingston, Ontario.

This character was to provide the core of Thompson's first play The Crackwalker (1980), which focuses on four people struggling with economic hardship, anger issues resulting in domestic abuse, and patronizing societal attitudes.

Thompson's second play, White Biting Dog (1984), was an expressionistic and poetic black comedy about an eccentric and wildly self-destructive family.

I Am Yours (1987), while containing similarly expressionistic elements, attaches these to the fears and fantasies of the central characters, to create an even more powerfully compelling theatrical experience.

Lion in the Streets (1990) uses a structure similar to Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde to follow violent and cruel impulses from one character to another, a route which the ghost of a young murdered girl, Isobel, uses to track down her killer.

In 1991, CBC reviewer, Jerry Wasserman called the Vancouver Fringe Festival production, ''The Diamond among the pebbles ... Maybe the most powerful play ever written in Canada about two down and out couples in Kingston Ontario living on the edge, the outer edge of respectability, and trying to make some sense of their lives – to find love and a kind of domestic normality under the worst conceivable conditions.

In 1991, Thompson adapted and directed Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for the Shaw Festival.

It's a very, very disturbing play and I think a deeply tragic play about the lowest depths one can imagine in a Canadian city. About a Vancouver production with the same cast at the Firehall Arts Centre in 1993, The Vancouver Sun's Barbara Crook wrote, The Crackwalker is not theatre for the timid.

Judith Thompson’s first play is a graphic, harrowing glimpse at life on the edge, at individuals battered by poverty, ignorance and hopelessness.

It is also a brilliant piece of stagecraft that makes use of every well-chosen word and powerfully dramatic moment to force audience members to confront their own darker sides.

If you're looking for theatre that takes you to the edge of hell, The Crackwalker fits the bill.''

Thompson first wrote Perfect Pie as a short monologue for television in 1993, but in 2000 expanded the story into full-length play about two teenaged girls whose lives diverge dramatically after a violent incident.

In 1995 Youtheatre (Montreal) premiered Thompson's first play for young audiences, the multi-lingual Leaves Of Forever, including a national tour.

It was directed by Michel Lefebvre with music by Canadian composer Derek Aasland.

Sled (1997), which began life as a seven-hour play called The Last Things, but was later cut down to three hours, attempts again to pursue human violence back to its sources.

A penultimate scene which Thompson cut after the first workshop production of the play, was restored for the 1999 Theatre Kingston production, and Thompson has since then included the scene in all published editions.

Productions of the play have been held in a wide variety of North American locations, including Toronto, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Vancouver, but also Łódź, Poland.

Her translation of Serge Boucher's Motel Hélène appeared at the Tarragon Theatre in 2001.

Habitat, which premiered in 2001 at CanStage, the major regional theatre in Toronto, shows how a middle-class community is torn apart into factions when a group home for troubled youth is established on a quiet residential street.

In 2002, Perfect Pie was also made into a feature film of that name, which, while satisfying in itself, offered a more conventional version of the uncanny story told in Thompson's play.

Capture Me, which premiered in early 2004 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, is centred on a kindergarten teacher who, while searching for her birth mother, is stalked by her violent ex-husband.

A remount of Thompson's adaptation appeared at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 2005.

In 2007 Thompson created the play Body and Soul with 14 women between the ages of 45 and 80, about women and aging, using the performers own words and experiences.

The play premiered at Soulpepper, and then had a second production at the Tarragon the following year.

The Vancouver Olympics brought the play there during the Para Olympics, to great acclaim.

Her adaptation was also performed at the Mainline Theatre in Montreal in February 2008.

Such Creatures premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2011, and The Thrill premiered at the Stratford Festival in 2013.

The success of this verbatim play inspired Thompson to create a play with 9 performers with Down Syndrome for the Fringe Festival of 2012, called Rare.

It was a hit of the Fringe, and then was invited by Soulpepper to be part of "Winter at the Young."

It was a sold out hit which extended three times, and toured to several places.

It was then that the RARE theatre company was formed (raretheatre.org)

She wrote and performed her play Watching Glory Die in 2014, premiering at The Cultch in Vancouver, and then produced at the Berkley Street Theatre later that year.

She has received honorary doctorates from Thorneloe University and, in November 2016, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

Thompson was born in Montreal, Quebec, the daughter of William Robert Thompson, a geneticist and the head of the Department of Psychology at Queen's University at Kingston, and Mary, who taught in the Queens Drama Department for many years.

She is also the sister of William Forde Thompson, a professor of psychology who composed music for a number of Judith's radio and stage plays, and the granddaughter of former Australian prime minister Frank Forde.

Thompson was raised in Middletown, Connecticut and then Kingston, Ontario.