If the content you are seeing is presented as unstyled HTML your browser is an older version that cannot support cascading style sheets. If you wish to upgrade your browser you may download Mozilla or Internet Explorer for Windows.

Walker, George F.

Playwright born in Toronto's East End working class district, Ontario , August 23, 1947.

He was a taxi driver when he heard that Factory Theatre was looking for new authors. He sent them his first play, The Prince of Naples and the company performed it in 1972. He has been linked with the house ever since.

Mr. Walker experiments with form and language, fitting odd concepts and words into the mouths of characters that, as strange as it sometimes seems, profit from the anomaly. In Zastrozzi , for instance, Walker uses a strange hybrid language between modern and written/literary/romantic to create a dark comedy about obsession. However, he switches gears to a more contemporary idiom in Criminals in Love to tell the tale of a bunch of urban losers who are occasionally wise, often witty but are nevertheless victims of circumstance. He revels in surprise, sometimes using it to trip up and comment on the form he has chosen for the play (as in Problem Child).

Walker, one of the savviest writers in the land, walks a tightrope between pure artistic achievement and commerciality. He does it very well. He has become, in the process, one of the rare Canadian writers who has had a made-in-Canada commercial production of a work with Nothing Sacred .

He has twice won the Governor General's Award and has four Doras and seven Chalmers Awards (the latest for The End of Civilization, of Suburban Motel , 1999). His plays have been performed across the country as well as in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago (among other cities), in over 100 productions in English and several in translations to German, French, Hebrew, Turkish, Polish and Czech.

Mr Walker also directs, including his own six-play cycle, Suburban Motel - of which Problem Child is a part (Factory Theatre, 1998).

In January, 2000, Mr. Walker's play Heaven, figured in a controversy when Canadian Stage , the company premiering the work, transferred the work from its mainstage to its smaller hall after the leadership of the house decided the work was too controversial. Said Martin Bragg, artistic producer, in an interview with CBC, "George wants to make people angry ... and what he doesn't realize is that a good portion of the Bluma Appel audience wouldn't have the interest in getting beyond the first five pages of the script."

He said, himself (in interview with Kate Taylor ), on the production, "First and foremost, an audience wants to be connected . . . They connect emotionally." And in the same interview, about why he directed his own plays, "I want to make sure they have a pulse. I don't want the intellectual approach to my work that I think is a big deal in Canadian theatre."

He has three children and lives in Toronto with his second wife, actor Susan Purdy.

Other plays include: Tough!, Escape From Happiness, Theatre of the Film Noir.

An archival collection on this subject is available at the LW Conolly Theatre Archives at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

(Additional information provided by Ed Gass-Donnelly)

Suggested Readings: George F. Walker. The East End Plays, Part 1. Vancouver: Talon, 1988

George F. Walker. Suburban Motel. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1999.

Chris Johnson. Essays on George F. Walker: Playing with Anxiety. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1999.

Last updated 2006-10-25