competition
What is it?
The Wildfire National Playwriting Competition is a free opportunity for young Canadian playwrights.
We want to read awesome plays and we are willing to offer cash money!
We are looking for playwrights 30 years of age or under to submit fresh, young scripts that embrace risk, grit and innovation.
Submitting a play to the competition is free and the two winning scripts selected by our jury receive a cash prize, a development workshop, and a staged reading at MMMC’s Wildfire Showcase in association with Sage Theatre’s IGNITE! Festival.
Why do this competition?
We are a scrappy little company that believes the conversation between young theatre artists is vital in order for fresh, exciting theatre to continue in this country.
Over the seven years the competition has run we have been able to award over $7,500 to young playwrights across the country as well as stage nine workshop readings of winning plays.
We have kept this competition free to make it more accessible to playwrights from all backgrounds and stages of their career.
All six previous years of these awards have been solely funded by house parties, online crowd sourcing, and the support of the Sage Theatre.
This year we are blessed with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts to continue to offer this competition free to playwrights.
Thank you to everyone who has helped support Wildfire over the years, we quite literally couldn't do it without you.
Okay! How do I apply?
Submissions for 2023 are closed.
We will be running this competition again in 2025.
Congratulations to our 2023 winners!
First place: Anais West - Tomboy (Chłopczyca)
Anais West (they/he) is a queer and trans playwright, actor and producer, as well as a Polish settler on occupied xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) lands. The focus of Anais’ practice is multiplicity. Their projects have merged theatre with film, poetry, music and dance, using collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches to disrupt monolithic notions of gender, sexuality, culture and language. His playwriting includes Kill Your Lovers (Buddies In Bad Times Theatre’s Rhubarb Festival, Toronto, and the Fresh Fruit Festival, NYC), Poly Queer Love Ballad (Queer Arts Festival, the frank theatre and Zee Zee Theatre, Vancouver, and Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto), and The Café (Aphotic Theatre, ITSAZOO theatre and the PuSh Festival, Vancouver). His work has been nominated for two Jessie Richardson Awards, including Outstanding Original Script. As an actor, their recent credits include the national tour of Un.Deux.Trois by Mani Soleymanlou (Orange Noyée and theNational Arts Centre), and White Noise by Taran Kootenhayoo (Savage Society and the Firehall Arts Centre). He is the Artistic Producer at the frank theatre company.
Tomboy (Chłopczyca) is a dance-theatre performance using contemporary movement and Polish folklore to investigate gender and memory. In the play, a non-binary university student learns that a boy from their Polish immigrant community committed a disturbing act of violence. This revelation forces them to re-examine their shared adolescence in an insular and tradition-bound culture. But with each remembering, the sequence of events becomes more ambiguous, the choreography of memory more complex, unravelling the narrative they’ve constructed of themself, their gender and the boy's culpability. Were his actions his own, or was he cursed by a monstrous and mythic inheritance? By reclaiming traditions, including folk dance, Tomboy seeks to be both an unflinching autopsy of masculinity, as well as a vision of queer metamorphosis.
Second place: Mercedes Isaza Clunie - Gringas
Mercedes Isaza Clunie (she/her) is a queer, Chilean-Canadian playwright, actor, and poet from Toronto. She graduated with a BFA in Acting from York University just this year, where she performed as Ashlee in Clare Barron's Dance Nation among other roles. She has written and directed two short plays while at school, Prude and Splinters, and is looking forward to spreading her wings and pushing Canadian theatre boundaries in the "real world" with her first full-length play Gringas. Mercedes' work explores topics such as girlhood, culture, sexuality, and language through diverse formats that both disrupt traditional conventions and celebrate the essence of theatre.
Gringas tells the story of 7 Latina-Canadian teenagers who are forced by their mothers to attend a Spanish-only summer camp. Within the confines of shared bunks, they confront their disappearing youth, through dreams, dance, and cigarettes, and tackle the intricacies of the looming shadow of their 'gringa-ness'.
2020
First place
Claudia Kulay - happy now
Second place
Mallory Fisher - inheritance: a motherskin
2017
First place
David Gagnon Walker - Gobbledygobbledygook
Second place
Frances Koncan - zahgidiwin/love
2015
First place
Elena Eli Belyea - Cleave
Second place
Michaela Jeffery - Always
Here’s a list of our previous competition winners:
2021
First place
Julie Phan 潘家雯 - CPC Barbie
Second place
Makram Ayache – The Hooves Belonged to the Deer
2019
First place
Morgan Grau - Absolute F*cking Mayhem
Second Place
Jesse LaVercombe - Hallelujah, It's Holly
2016
First place
Mx Sly - Serenity Wild
Second place
Chelsea Woolley - The Exhibition of Extraordinary Oddities and Living Freaks
