Discipline: Theatre – playwriting

Alison Lawrence

Discipline: Theatre – playwriting
Region: Toronto, CANADA
MacDowell Fellowships: 2018

Alison is a Canadian playwright, actor, and independent theatre producer. She co-wrote the play bittergirl, the book Bittergirl: Getting Over Getting Dumped (published by Penguin Canada, Plume U.S. and Distribuidora Brazil) and Bittergirl – the Musical, which was produced across Canada in 2017. Her other plays include Piece by Piece, produced in Toronto and as part of the New American Voices series in London, England; and The Thing Between Us (shortlisted for the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Carol Bolt Award). Her new play Too Close to Home is slated for production in 2019. Alison also wrote The Catering Queen, which she also starred in, and And All For Love, which was developed by and premiered at the National Art Centre’s English Theatre in Ottawa. Her personal essays have been published across Canada in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. She is an alumna of the Banff Playwrights Lab in Banff Alberta.

At MacDowell she completed a draft of her play The Right, about the recent Medical Assistance in Dying legislation in Canada, which was to be workshopped and presented in a public reading in May 2019 by Studio 180 Theatre, Toronto. She also worked on drafts of two other plays and began adapting a screenplay of her play The Catering Queen.

Studios

MacDowell

Alison Lawrence worked in the MacDowell studio.

Built in 1912, Pine Studio was renamed MacDowell Studio in 1943 in recognition of support from a group of Edward MacDowell’s music students. It was built as a composers’ studio and the stuccoed walls were intended to be soundproof. Like many of the studios on property, MacDowell was winterized in the 1950s when the program began welcoming…

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