A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction

Warona Setshwaelo is a storyteller, mother, and activist. Since moving to Tiohtià:ke 14 years ago, Warona has immersed herself in the theatre community, both locally and nationally. Apart from performing with several theatre companies in Montreal, such as Teesri Duniya, Repercussion Theatre, Geordie Theatre, Black Theatre Workshop, The Segal Centre, and Scapegoat Carnivale, she has performed in Toronto at the Tarragon Theatre as well as at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Company in Winnipeg and the Belfry in Victoria. Her credits also include DeathWish, The Disappearance, 19-2, Quantico, The Detectives, Fatal Vows as well as several video games including Assassin’s Creed Origins, The District, John Clancy’s Ghost Recon, and most recently, Far Cry 6. She is presently the co-coordinator of the Artist Mentorship Program at Black Theatre Workshop and recently stepped down as Vice President of the Quebec Drama Federation’s board. She sat on the board of ELAN (English Language Arts Network) from 2015 to 2017. Warona is thrilled to work at Centaur for the very first time.

Miranda Rose Hall (she/her) is a writer from Baltimore, MD. Her plays include A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (finalist for the 2021 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), Plot Points in Our Sexual Development (finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Drama), The Hour of Great Mercy (winner of the 2019 San Diego Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Play), The Kind Ones, and Menstruation: A Period Piece. A Play for the Living… is currently touring Europe as part of the Sustainable Theatre? project created by British director Katie Mitchell, French choreographer Jérôme Bel, and Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland. Miranda is under commission from LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater, Yale Repertory Theater, and Playwrights Horizons Soundstage, and has recently written for television on Showtime’s American Rust. In 2020, she was honoured with a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. She is a founding member and artistic leader of LubDub Theatre Co., a New York–based physical theatre company. She holds degrees from Georgetown University and the Yale School of Drama. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Rose Plotek is a theatre director and performance maker. Born and raised in Montreal, she is a graduate of Concordia University’s theatre program and the directing program at the National Theatre School of Canada. She was Associate Director of the Directing Program at the National Theatre School of Canada from 2013 to 2018, and Intern Director at the Shaw Festival in 2013. She is currently Associate Artist at the Centaur Theatre, where she curates the Wildside Festival. Recent credits include Like Mother, Like Daughter (Why Not Theatre & Complicité, UK); LEAR: A Retrospective (World Stage, at Harbourfront Centre); and Performance about a woman (OFFTA; Tiger Dublin Fringe; SummerWorks).

Julie Fox has been a production designer for theatre, dance and opera in Canada for over 20 years. Theatre credits include Stratford Festival, Shaw Festival, Electric Company, Soulpepper, Canadian Stage, Crow’s Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times, Why Not Theatre, Necessary Angel, Volcano, NAC, Segal Centre, Citadel, Theatre Junction, and Manitoba Theatre Centre. She has received four Dora Awards for Outstanding Set Design, the Virginia Cooper Award for Costume Design, and has been nominated for Sterling and META awards. She is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada, where she also teaches.

Paul Chambers is a Montréal-based lighting designer, visual artist, educator and co-artistic director of CHA collective. He holds a BFA (Sculpture Major) from Concordia University and a DEP in Design for the Theatre from John Abbott College. Working with artists across different disciplines, he has always prioritized collaborating on new dance works. In addition to leading workshops and lectures on design, Paul has taught at Concordia University in the Contemporary Dance department since 2015, and has coached design students at the National Theatre School of Canada since 2018. Recent design credits include work with Lara Kramer Dance, Amanda Acorn, Dorian Nuskind-Oder, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Priscilla Guy, Maria Kefirova, Katie Ward, PME-ART, Danse CarpeDiem, MAYDAY, Parts+Labour_Danse, Destins Croisés, Benjamin Kamino, & Public Recordings.

Jesse Peter Ash has created sound and music for theatre, film, and installations that has been heard across Canada and around the world. Recent projects include digital project Antioch; An Enhanced Reading (Talisman), installation Liens/Ties (NTS/Monument National), and the English premiere of Mob (Centaur). Past standouts include Mutable Tongues (PDA), The God That Comes with Hawksley Workman (2B), En attendant Godot (TNM), Robert Wilson’s Mind Gap Exhibition (Norsk Teknisk Museum) and his own sound piece Aural Histories: Monument (Third Space). In addition to sound work, Jesse spent several years as Technical Director with Montreal’s Moment Factory. Jesse is a Production graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada and of the Audio Engineering Technology program at O.I.A.R.T. He teaches sound design at John Abbott College.

Luciana is an established Montreal stage manager whose career spans over two decades. Selected favourite credits (amongst too many to mention): Okinum (Imago Theatre/Onishka), Paradise Lost, The St. Leonard Chronicles, Good People, Paradise by the River and In Piazza San Domenico (Centaur Theatre); Mythic, Once, Prom Queen: the Musical, The Secret Annex, Funny Girl, Othello, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: the Musical, Cabaret, The Diary of Anne Frank, (The Segal Centre); Corpus, Where the Blood Mixes (Teesri Duniya) and many more. Luciana also translated and adapted St-Exupéry’s fable The Little Prince for the stage, which premiered in Montreal by Geordie Productions and has since been produced in Ontario and Australia. Her French translation of The 39 Steps toured all over Quebec in 2012. Directing credits include: Better Late, Forever, Patsy Cline (Theatre Lac-Brome); staged readings of Once Upon a Melody and When Blood Ran Red (Segal Centre’s Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre) and the 2017 METAs Award Ceremony.