Dark Heart
New France, 1661. A young French bride disappears into the forest. Has she run off to be with her lover, or is there something more sinister in the woods? While rumours of a supernatural creature spread through the settlement, everyone seems to be hunting for the missing woman, including an Indigenous fur trapper, the local doctor, a newly-arrived French soldier & her jealous husband. But perhaps one of them is the beast that they fear.
Dark Heart is a suspenseful new play that retells the story of New France as a taut historical thriller. Touching on the European myth of the loup-garou (werewolf) and Indigenous legends of shape-shifting, this play challenges the traditional colonial narrative by giving a strong voice to both female and Indigenous characters.
Measure For Measure
Thought For Food put a feminist spin on Shakespeare’s sexually-fraught script by casting it entirely with powerhouse women from the Toronto theatre scene. This all-female staging of Shakespeare’s provocative comedy transported the story to a Weimar-era cabaret where music, dance and titillation illuminated Measure for Measure’s clash between lust and law.
The Trial of Judith K.
Imagine finding yourself suddenly under arrest. No warning. No explanation. You have done nothing wrong. Your accusers refuse to tell you your charge. This is the world of THE TRIAL OF JUDITH K.
A gender-swapped reimagining of Franz Kafka’s dystopian novel The Trial, this fast, sexy and surreal dark comedy set in 1980s Vancouver follows Judith, a contemporary businesswoman who finds herself arrested and accused of an unnamed crime. Her nightmare task is to prove herself innocent without ever knowing the charges or the evidence against her. Thought for Food approaches THE TRIAL OF JUDITH K. with an unholy enthusiasm that makes this dark and violent story fun and vibrant, full of absurd characters situations that keep you laughing even when you should be crying.
The Memo
A workplace comedy that proves just how inefficient “efficiency” can be! When Andrew Gross receives a company memo written in ‘Ptydepe’, a new artificial language adopted by his organization to streamline communications, Andrew sets off on an epic quest to find someone to translate. A satire about administrative bumbling in business, THE MEMO is a smart comedy for anyone who has ever worked in an office or battled bureaucracy.
THE MEMO is dissident playwright Václav Havel’s masterpiece of absurdism. Banned from theatre under communist rule, he went on to become the last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the newly democratic Czech Republic. This fresh new Canadian edition is written by Havel’s friend and Governor General’s Award-winning translator, Paul Wilson. Thought For Food’s production explores the shockingly universal and comical parallels between Communist Czechoslovakia and modern-day Canada as one employee searches for dignity, humanity and a hot lunch in a world riddled with arbitrary rules and office politics. The end result is a communist comedy that is eerily at home in Canada.
Universal Wolf
A vicious new version of Little Red Riding Hood, this play is a post-modern cabaret of the well-known fairy tale. In this comedy of menace Little Red is a devilish little girl who starts the play by killing a songbird, her grandmother is a retired butcher who drinks her days away with her favourite blackberry wine and the wolf (Monsieur Woolf, to be precise), is a debonair French philosopher who speaks with the accent of Maurice Chevalier. Throughout, The Reader watches from the side and reads aloud the peculiar stage directions the characters can’t, don’t or just won’t do. This Thought For Food production has a French cabaret flair with live piano and original music.
Presented as part of the 2009 Toronto Fringe Festival.
The Cousins of Corsica
The Cousins of Corsica is a new Elizabethan comedy. Written in iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets, the play is part parody and part homage to Shakespeare’s comedies. The play borrows many of Shakespeare’s comedic conventions including an usurped ruler, a woman disguised as a boy and mistaken identities. Written by Jessica Seguin and directed by her non-usurping brother, Tyler Seguin.
Presented as part of the 2007 Toronto Fringe Festival and remounted for the 2015 Springworks Festival in Stratford, Ontario.
The Aleatory Project
A man. A woman. A hotel room. The rest is left to chance.
Are they strangers, lovers or something else? Who they are, what they talk about, how they feel about each other and how they are connected will be determined randomly during each performance by using a coin, a deck of cards and other onstage elements.
The Aleatory Project is a fully-scripted play that changes with every performance. The number of variations possible within the script is an astronomical number estimated to be 1500 trillion of trillions of trillions. In other words, no two shows will be the same. Ever.
Thought For Food toured The Aleatory Project across Canada between 2003-2007.
a little faux pas
Grace and Tom are roommates and struggling performers. As they help each other navigate through humiliating auditions and demeaning social interactions, they discover that the assumptions they make about each other are their biggest mistakes.
Presented as part of the 2004 Toronto Fringe Festival.
Pre-Digital Productions
(sorry for the lack of images!)
2002 The Universal Wolf (remount), Alumnae Theatre Studio
2001 The Universal Wolf, Alumnae Theatre Studio
1999 The Memorandum, The Venue
1997 Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Lab on Britain St.
1995 The Birthday Party, Fairview Library Theatre
1995 Agnes of God, Solar Stage
1994 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Fairview Library Theatre