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Scollard, Rose

Rose Scollard
Rose Scollard. Photo credit: David Scollard.

Rose Scollard is a Calgary-based playwright with over thirty professionally produced stage and radio dramas. She has published two books of drama and several plays and short stories in various literary journals and anthologies. Her play Shea of the White Hands, a modern-day version of the Tristan and Isolde legend set in the political turmoil of seventies Belfast, was a finalist for the Susan Smith-Blackburn Prize, (1995).

Her early productions include Uneasy Pieces, three quirky and grotesque feminist tales that explore rape, repression in marriage and suppression of feminine selfhood from unexpected perspectives. Winner of two awards in the Alberta playwriting competition, the trilogy was produced by by Theatre Network in 1985, directed by Sherry Wells, Raymond Storey, and Stephen Heatley. Frangipani, the Very Very VERY Bad Elephant was produced by Quest Theatre’s Wagon Stage (dir. Duval Lang). Murder in Mount Royal, was directed by Bartley Bard for Lunchbox Theatre.

Rose Scollard was a co-founder in 1987 of Maenad Theatre, western Canada’s first woman-centred theatre. For over a decade Maenad produced more than fifty plays in addition to holding a yearly Fem Fest, a goddess festival in which women from all over the country as well as from the United States and Europe performed their own work.

Works produced by Maenad Theatre included: 13th God, where two women on holiday in Greece get caught up in an ancient god’s attempt to reassert his powers (1989, dir. Brenda Anderson); Firebird, a feminist retelling of the Russian and Ukrainian fairy tale (1990, dir. Alexandria Patience); and Bęte Blanche/Tango Noir, (1991, dir. Gerri Hemphill). In the first play in this feminist diptych, Bęte Blanche, Faye struggles with the white beasts of corruption to which women are hitched – Innocence, Frailty and Purity. The second, Tango Noir features writer Colette, who in her mysterious and shifting dream encounter with Mata Hari, chooses being a monster over being a victim. The diptych was published with Preservation Blues by Frontenac House in 2012.

In 1991, along with Co-Artistic Directors, Nancy Jo Cullen and Alexandria Patience, she wrote Aphra, where 17th Century playwright Aphra Behn, nearing death, battles with the moral forces that would silence her and banish her to oblivion. It was published by Frontenac House in 2016.

In 1997, she was appointed playwright-in-residence at the University of Calgary as part of the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program. During her residency she completed Caves of Fancy, a play about Mary Shelley, her mother, and her “monster”, that was workshopped by the Drama department and presented at an international Shelley/Wollstonecraft conference at the University of Calgary. Caves of Fancy was later published as part of the anthology Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998).

Her published work also includes Strategies: The Business of Being a Playwright in Canada, co-authored with playwright Caroline Russell-King by Playwrights Union of Canada in 2000.

In 2003 Firebird was translated into German and produced by Freie Kammerspiele of Magdeburg, Germany for two years as their Christmas play, Feuervogel.

Her radio plays include: The Man Who Collected Women, (Vanishing Point CBC, 1988, dir. Mark Schoenberg) which won First Prize in the Alberta Culture/CBC Write For Radio Competition; Love & War Western Style (CBC Morningside, 1991, dir. Martin Fishman); Don't Fence Me In (CBC Studio 92, 1992, dir. Martin Fishman); Birdie French Private Investigator (Radiodrama, CBC, 1993, dir. Martin Fishman; Victory Matinee, a radio-drama/museum-theatre piece, a live component of a World War Two exhibit at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary. November 11, 1995 to March 30, 1996. (dir. Martin Fishman). It aired November 10, 1995 on CBC's Homestretch.

Recent productions include Firebird, Guelph Little Theatre (2018); Aphra, untitled theatrics (2022); and Bad Hair Day in Las Vegas Ward One Acts, (2022).

Last updated 2023-06-06