Join our artistic teams, creative leads, playwrights, and staff to learn, teach and dig deeper into the art.
Enjoy!
Beyond the Stage
From behind the curtain
In our time, we have fostered a positive and productive creative space instilled with pride, passion and promise.
Tarragon Talks
Join us for our open forum lecture series, where we bring in experts to have engaging panel discussions about our shows in production.
For an in-depth discussion related to your favourite plays, dive deep with other theatre enthusiasts exploring the themes and nuances so common to us all and to our times.
Our full 2023/24 Tarragon Talk Schedule:
Come Home - The Legend of Daddy Hall
Sunday, May 19 – 12:30-1:30pm
Tarragon Theatre Rehearsal Hall
Join the lead creative team to learn more about this amazing play and how it came to be.
Please join us in welcoming...
Audrey Dwyer
Playwright
Audrey Dwyer is a multi-disciplinary artist with over twenty years of experience working as an Actor, Director, Playwright, Teacher, Artistic Director, Facilitator and Mentor.
As an actor, her theatre work includes Tarragon Theatre’s Theory, Young People’s Theatre’s One Thing Leads to Another (Dora Awards - Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Ensemble), The Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Mirvish Productions’ Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, RMTC’s Good People and The Crucible, thirsty at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Mirvish/Studio 180's Clybourne Park and The Overwhelming, Canadian Stage's Dream in High Park - The Tempest, Obsidian Theatre's Black Medea, Mirvish/RMTC's Medea, and Young People’s Theatre’s Blue Planet. She was also a member of The Second City Touring Company.
Her television and film credits include Da Kink in My Hair, The Ron James Show, The State Within, Man of the Year with Robin Williams, Atom Egoyan's Where The Truth Lies and multiple episodes of the award-winning comedy series The Baroness Von Sketch Show.
Monique Mojica
Dramaturg
Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock nations) is an actor/playwright/dramaturg/artist-scholar spun from the family web of Spiderwoman Theater. Monique’s artistic practice mines stories embedded in the body in connection to land and place. She has created land-based, embodied dramaturgies and taught Indigenous theatre in theory, process, and practice throughout Canada, the US, Latin America, and Europe. She has most recently been seen on stage in the role of Wanda in My Sister’s Rage at Tarragon Theatre, Aunt Shady in The Unnatural and Accidental Women at the NAC and in Izzie M.: The Alchemy of Enfreakment, written by Monique with a diverse creative team. Monique has collaborated with Santee Smith as the dramaturg for Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s tryptic Re-Quickening/Blood Tides/SKe:NEN and for Teneil Whiskeyjack’s Ayita for Edmonton’s SkirtsAfire Festival. She is a member of the newly formed Indigenous Dramaturgy Circle at Tarragon Theatre. Monique is the 2023 inaugural Wurlitzer Visiting Professor at the University of Victoria’s Theatre Department. Recent publications include Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way: Mapping Embodied Indigenous Performance, written with Brenda Farnell (University of Michigan Press, 2023).
Mike Payette
Director // Tarragon Artistic Director
Saturday, May 25 – 6:00-7:00pm
Tarragon Theatre Rehearsal Hall
Join Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke for an engaging discussion about Black Canadian history and Daddy Hall.
Clarke will have books available for purchase at the talk. Cash is preferred.
George Elliott Clarke
Poet Laureate
The 4 th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7 th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke hails from Windsor, Nova Scotia, as of 1960 Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature, with two major tomes to his credit: Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002) and Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (2012). A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His recognitions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Fellowship (US), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and International Fellow Poet of the Year, Encyclopedic Poetry School [2019] (China). His acclaimed titles include Whylah Falls (1990, translated into Chinese), Beatrice Chancy (1999, translated into Italian), Execution Poems (2001), Blues and Bliss (selected poems, 2009), I & I (2008), Illicit Sonnets (U.K., 2013), Traverse (2015), Canticles II (MMXX) (2020), Canticles III (MMXXII) (2022), and J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence) (2021). Clarke penned the libretto for James Rolfe’s triumphant, tragic opera, Beatrice Chancy (1998), plus two lyrics for Four the Moment’s 2022 Polaris Heritage Prize-winning album, We’re Still Standing (1987).
Post-Show Artist Talkbacks
Stay with us following the show on Tuesday evenings and Sunday afternoons after Opening to join in discussion with members of the cast & creative teams to talk about the play.
El Terremoto
- Sunday, April 7
- moderated by Camil@ Diaz-Varela (they/them)
- Tuesday, April 9
- moderated by Camil@ Diaz-Varela (they/them)
- Wednesday, April 10 (matinee)
- moderated by Anahita Dehbonehie
- Sunday, April 14
- moderated by Camil@ Diaz-Varela (they/them)
- Tuesday, April 16
- moderated by Camil@ Diaz-Varela (they/them)
- Wednesday, April 17 (matinee)
- moderated by Anahita Dehbonehie
Come Home - The Legend of Daddy Hall
- Sunday, May 26
- Tuesday, May 28
- Sunday, June 2
- Tuesday, June 4
- Wednesday, June 5 (matinee)