All staged readings are at The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts,
Jan. 26 to 30, 2026.

The Advance Theatre Festival 2026, produced by Ruby Slippers Theatre in association with the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and Playwrights Guild of Canada, is curated by Zahida Rahemtulla. The Festival showcases new works written and directed by female identifying and gender non conforming artists who also identify as IBPOC. 

  • Monday, January 26 at 7:30pm

I Have A Dream In Chinese

by Irene Fan Yi

Directed by Daisy Mengru Jia

Performed by Huirui Zhang Su

Image courtesy of Jingyuan Ji

I Have a Dream in Chinese is a one-woman theatrical journey through borders, bodies, and names. Set aboard a long-haul flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver, a Chinese immigrant navigates the turbulence of microaggressions, state surveillance, workplace erasure, and the haunting grief of a city left behind. As she oscillates between “Song” and “Ivy,” Mandarin and English, belonging and exile, her inner fracture deepens. Blending poetic monologue, surreal memory, and bureaucratic absurdity, the play explores what it means to carry two names, two histories, and the unbearable silence of trying to belong.
Stark, intimate, and unflinching, it asks: how do you start over when you are still arriving?

About the Playwright

Irene (Fan) Yi (she/her) is a bilingual playwright, dramaturg, and performer whose work explores diaspora, identity, and the dissonance between language and belonging. With a background in Theatre Studies (MA, University of Ottawa) and Arts Administration (MA, Indiana University), she creates interdisciplinary works that blend poetic text, projection, and sound to examine how systemic violence shapes the body and memory.
Irene has worked as a director, dramaturg, and performer in productions such as The Reaper and The Whale (Davis Shakespeare Festival), The Pillowman (Indiana University Bloomington), Night, Mother, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  • Tuesday, January 27 at 7:30pm

Far and Free (Tagalog Title: Malayo at Malaya)

by Abi Padilla

Directed by Anjela Magpantay

Image courtesy of playwright Abi Padilla.

A coming of age story set in the late 1980’s during the Philippine’s martial law, twins Farah and Francis move to Canada and struggle to let go of first romances and activism as they seek a safer, better life. A question continues to haunt them: How will they balance their  personal freedom against the freedom they desire for their motherland?

About the Playwright

Abi Padilla (she/her) is a first generation Filipino-Canadian actor, playwright and filmmaker. A graduate of the Studio 58 acting program, her co-written plays “The Banyan Tree” and “How to F*ck Up a Funeral” were staged at the Six of One: New Play Festival. Her short film directorial debut “Thank You Mila” was showcased at the 2020 MAMM Film Festival.
“Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla”, her first full length play where she also played the titular character, world premiered under Ruby Slippers Theatre in 2025. She has performed in numerous festivals and has worked with various theatre companies based in Vancouver such as rice and beans theatre, Theatre Replacement, Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre, United Players of Vancouver, NPC3 and Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage Society.

  • Wednesday, January 28 at 7:30pm

Just Like Paris

by Marcia Johnson

Directed by Elaine Avila

Image of Wheat Field by Manu_H, Pixabay.

Just Like Paris is a World War II play set in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Gwendolyn leaves her fiancé Donovan and their baby in Jamaica for Canada where she can use her newly earned nursing degree to help in the war effort.

Gwen is stationed at the largest of Canada’s twenty-seven German Prisoner of War camps in Lethbridge, Alberta. It holds over 12,000 men.

Also in Lethbridge is young Japanese Canadian couple Byron and Sakura. They have been displaced from Vancouver and are settling into a small outbuilding on a beet farm. They will work on the farm as cheap labour and wait out the war when people of Japanese ancestry will no longer be seen as the enemy. Their path crosses with Gwendolyn’s when Sakura has a medical emergency.

Dietmar is a German private who was captured by British forces in Africa and transported to Lethbridge. He suffers a concussion and has to spend time in the Camp 133 infirmary. When he meets Gwendolyn, he spews all the hatred that he’s been indoctrinated with in Hitler’s Germany. However, Gwendolyn’s resolve and her thoughtful caregiving wins him over. They form an unexpected bond.

About the Playwright

Marcia Johnson (she/her) is an actor/writer/dramaturg based in T’Karonto.
 
Her play Serving Elizabeth (in which she also acted) premiered at Western Canada
Theatre (co-produced with Thousand Islands Playhouse) in February 2020. The TIP production was pandemic-delayed by a full year. Other productions played at the Stratford Festival, Belfry Theatre, Theatre Aquarius and Peterborough Players in New Hampshire. Another production is scheduled for November 2025 at Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg. The podcast version is available on CBC and PlayMe. Other plays include Binti’s Journey based on The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis, Perfect on Paper at the Toronto Fringe and Talk is Free Theatre and Say Ginger Ale. The latter two plays also had radio drama adaptations on CBC. Marcia has performed in theatres including YES/Sudbury Theatre Centre (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time); Blyth Festival (New Canadian Curling Club, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt) and Factory Theatre/GCTC (The Real McCoy). She also makes brief appearances in TV and Film (American Gods, American Gothic, Diggstown) and two shorts making the festival circuit (Comics, Memento Mori).
  • Thursday, January 29 at 7:30pm

Bella Luz

by Alexandra Lainfiesta

Directed by Carmela Sison and Jane Heyman

Image Poster for Bella Luz, designed by Alexandra Lainfiesta and Elena Stalwick.

Bella Luz is a magic-realist play that unfolds across three simultaneous worlds: Toronto (“Here”), Antigua Guatemala (“There”), and the surreal realm of Immigration System Game Shows (“Nowhere”), all tied to Guatemalan dancer Sumailla’s urgent quest for Canadian Permanent Residency. As she navigates a bureaucratic obstacle course staged like TV game shows, Sumailla’s choices in Toronto’s stunt industry, where she is cast to play stereotypical Latina roles, directly impact her family dynamics in Guatemala and her eligibility to remain in Canada. Torn between her mother’s and grandmother’s opposing views on migration, her love for fellow stuntwoman J, and the harsh reality that her only chance to stay lies in “proving” her value to Canada, Sumailla wrestles with moral compromises that echo her grandmother’s warning: “the rich countries change people.” Blending humour, spectacle, and sharp critique, Bella Luz exposes the contradictions of the immigrant experience in Canada, asking whether the sacrifices demanded by the so-called “immigrant’s dream” are worth the personal and cultural costs.

About the Playwright

Born and raised in Guatemala, Alexandra Lainfiesta (she/her) is a multiple awards winning actor (Jessie Richardson Awards, Dora Mavor Moore Awards, Sydney J. Risk and Studio 58 Acting Award) and a graduate of the Canadian College of Performing Arts, Studio 58 and most recently obtained her Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria.  As an actor, Alexandra has worked across Canada with companies such as The Stratford Festival, Arts Club Theatre, Bard on The Beach, FreeWill Shakespeare, Rice&Beans, Frank Theatre, Theatre Gargantua, Electric Theatre Co., Shakespeare Theatre Company (Washington DC), and Puente Theatre. In 2022, Alexandra was one of eleven individual recipients across British Columbia to be awarded The Lieutenant Governor’s Platinum Jubilee Arts and Music Award. As a writer, her first full length-play Bella Luz was commissioned by the Arts Club Theatre Company’s Silver Commission, and her first one woman show CHULA had its very successful first read at Theatre Gargantua’s 2025 Sidestream Festival. You can catch her next playing Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, a Theatre Calgary and Arts Club Theatre co-production. 

  • Friday, January 30 at 7:30pm

Roald dahl doesn’t care about you

by Sewit Eden Haile

Image courtesy of Unsplash

Roald Dahl Doesn’t Care About You follows a self-formed, self-run writer’s group of 3 young women submitting to the coveted M. Beaumont Writing Competition. When a new addition to the group throws off the dynamic, they’re forced to address biases and the part they play in the commodification of identity in the arts. 

The M. Beaumont Writing Competition is a coveted contest for emerging writers based in the province. Self-identifying BIPOC or Queer writers may use the email nobarriers@mbeaumont.com for free entry, as part of our “No Barriers” initiative.

About the Playwright

Sewit Eden Haile (she/her) is an emerging writer and performer based on the unceded, traditional homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations/”Vancouver”. Recent credits include: Sylvia (500 Words, Green Thumb Theatre); Turtle (East Van Panto: Robin Hood, Theatre Replacement); Mother (Blood Wedding, Studio 58). Her first play, pretty girls, was part of Studio 58’s FourPlay festival, and she’s written for Momentum 180’s Parallel Project. She’s passionate about new work and is a grad of Studio 58!