Celia McBride

Celia McBride is an award-winning playwright whose plays have been produced in Europe, the US and Canada.

She graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada in 1995 and, having received the Fox Fellowship Award, travelled to Ireland to work with Dublin’s TEAM Educational Theatre Company and Limerick’s Island Theatre Company. In 1996, her play Choke My Heart was selected for the National Playwrights’ Conference of Ireland in Waterford, which led to a production of the play by Waterford’s Red Kettle Theatre in 1998.

In 2001, Celia was commissioned to write a one-act play for the Stratford Festival of Canada and Walk Right Up was subsequently produced during the inaugural season of the Studio Theatre at Stratford in 2002, directed by Michael Shamata.

Celia’s creative process involves directing and performing her own work. Some of her past productions include: Hitching A Ride (infinitheatre, 1998; infinite Award for Best Direction/Production); What A Cad! (Journées de la Culture, 1999; infinite Award for Best New Play); Last Stop for Miles (Centaur Theatre, 2000); Cardboard Box (Rhubarb! Festival 2001); Happy ? (Rhubarb! Festival 2002); her only customer… (Studio 303, 2001); What A Cad! (Summerworks, 2004); Snore (Nakai Comedy Fest, 2005); and The Critical Success (Homegrown Festival, 2006).

From 2001 to 2004 Celia lived in Port Hope, Ontario and worked on various theatre projects in Toronto. She was a member of the Writer’s Lab at the Factory Theatre for two and a half years and a member of the Groundswell Playwrights’ Unit at Nightwood Theatre in 2004. Her plays Will Love Hunt & Punish and Snore were produced by Theatre Columbus in 2003 during the Mayhem Festival, directed by Leah Cherniak. Snore was later produced by Looking Glass Theatre in New York City, in 2005. Looking Glass also produced her only customer… in New York in June 2007.

In the spring of 2004, Celia returned to her hometown of Whitehorse, Yukon to complete a year-long stint as Playwright-in-Residence with Nakai Theatre. Friends since 1998 in Montreal, Celia and Moira Sauer, who had been living in Whitehorse since 2001, formed Sour Brides Theatre in the fall of 2004.

Sour Brides presented a staged-reading of Celia’s newest play in September 2006 at the Yukon Arts Centre as part of the Art Equinox/Performance Creation Canada Conference in Whitehorse. The reading was hailed by both national and international artists and arts presenters, critics and local audience members.

Celia has been interested in making the leap into film for many years and the Yukon has provided many opportunities to make this dream a reality. As an actor, Celia has appeared in Ernie’s Earth, written and directed by Ross Burnet, the CBC mini-series Northern Town, written by Daniel Janke and directed by Gary Burns, and Artifacts, written and directed by Andrew Connors.

Celia recently finished writing an adaptation of her play Last Stop for Miles for the screen and produced a six-minute excerpt of the feature-length screenplay in Whitehorse in November 2006. The Bravo!FACT film was directed by her sister, Clara McBride, and has become a 2007 festival favourite in the Yukon, screening at Cinematic Territories, an Available Light Film Festival presentation, the Dawson City International Short Film Festival and Picturing the Yukon: Yukon Films on Tour.