Congratulations to CDTPS undergraduate student Lauren Lacey for being named one of two runners-up for the Playwrights Guild of Canada's Robert Beardsley Award for her play Cordelia, which she wrote and developed in Djanet Sears's DRM428 playwriting class in 2018.
The Award was announced at the Playwrights Guild of Canada's Tom Hendry Gala on October 28, 2018, which is sponsored by the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto.
A workshop production of Cordelia it will be happening at the U of T Drama Festival in February 2019, directed by Nicole Eun-Ju Bell. The Playwrights Guild of Canada is also kindly organizing a read through of Cordelia at some point next year.
In this piece, the main character, Cordelia, never speaks. She is absent from every scene, and yet this is her story, told exclusively from the people around her. From her mother, to strangers, ex-lovers, friends, and more, her story is not told with her own words but from the way her life impacts the others around her. Each scene focuses on a different character, and their relationship to Cordelia, and the potentially surprising ways she has affected the lives of many. I want to explore the connections we have to strangers; mutual friends and acquaintances all revolving around the central, yet unseen, Cordelia, and how through coincidences we are all seemingly connected to one another; our lives are threads that we cannot untangle.
Lauren is a fourth-year student in the University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, double majoring in English and Drama, who specializes in both playwrighting and theatre production. She is the lighting and projection designer for You Are More Beautiful Than Istanbul, currently playing at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse as part of the CDTPS 2018 Directors' Showcase. She is currently teaming up with Nicole Eun-Ju Bell on a long-term projection design project of her play Chronically, with a workshop production coming up in April, as well as designing shows all over campus. She is the Co-Assistant Technical Director at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse.