About the Plays:

The Shape of a Girl has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

Jewel has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

The Shape of a Girl and Jewel are two full-length dramas by award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod. Two plays based on tragic events in Canadian history. The Shape of a Girl is a dynamic one-woman show that looks at the realities of teenage relationships, aggression, and codes of behaviour. Jewel is a little gem – a tersely written, lyrical monologue about a young woman's struggle to come to terms with her widowhood.

The Shape of a Girl is inspired by the 1997 murder of 14-year-old British Columbia high school student Reena Virk. Her school peers savagely beat her, and ultimately drowned her in a pool of water. Not long after reading the story, playwright Joan MacLeod began developing a character named Braidie, who must confront the truth of her giddy, terrifying teenage world. In an imaginary letter to an absent older brother, she struggles to understand the torture and killing of a teenage girl by a group of her school-mates. Braidie enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as she discovers within herself both the capacity for and the conflict between impulses of good and evil. In thinking back on the history of her own tight-knit group of friends, she begins to see how in the excitement of belonging to a ritualized, secret collective, the self is created by the increasing dehumanization of the other – of both the bully and the victim. Particularly suitable for schools and play contests, The Shape Of A Girl toured internationally for four years, including a sold-out run in New York, after its premiere in 2001 at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, and has been translated into six languages. (Cast: 1 female)

Jewel invokes the torment of a young woman widowed in the real-life sinking of an offshore oil rig. On Valentines Day in 1982, the Ocean Ranger oil rig sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a brutal Atlantic storm. 84 men were on board. There were no survivors. On Valentine's Day 1985, the third anniversary of her husband's death, Marjorie Clifford is at home in her trailer in Northern Alberta. With humour and gratitude, she begins to take the first step in understanding that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralyzed and dominated by loss. Her first play, Jewel premiered in 1987 at Tarragon in Toronto, and was subsequently produced for radio in English, French, German, Danish, and Swedish. (Cast: 1 female)

What people say:

"Once in a while a play comes along that is so powerful and real, it leaves you thinking about it long after the last line is spoken." — The Calgary Sun

"The Shape of a Girl is a stunning example of theatre's singular power to interpret life's tragedies so they have context and meaning." — Times Colonist

"Joan MacLeod has written not only a deeply affecting script, she's written an important one — a script that could really help young adults deal with bullying, bewilderment, anger and guilt." — The Vancouver Courier

"If by watching The Shape of a Girl even one teen can find the courage to say enough is enough and speak out before bullying goes too far, then the play has done far more than just entertain us." — Nanaimo News Bulletin

"Joan MacLeod's The Shape of a Girl has many of the hallmarks of the best intuitive writing… [her] poetry is pure." — Georgia Straight

"Brilliant. — Globe and Mail

"Beautifully written… like Jewel, The Shape of a Girl will enter the repertoire and be performed for many years to come." — Toronto Star

"…Ms. MacLeod has turned what could have been a simple after-school special into a much more complex drama with thornier moral issues. …She struggles mightily not to judge her main character, who feels so much more real than most portraits of young people onstage. Ms. MacLeod writes dialogue that sounds like the way girls talk, without being a bit condescending." — The New York Times on The Shape of a Girl

About the Playwright:

Joan MacLeod is an internationally celebrated Canadian playwright. She grew up in North Vancouver, lived for eight years in Toronto as playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre, before settling on Bowen Island just outside Vancouver. Since 2004, she has taught at the department of writing at University of Victoria. Her plays have been extensively produced around the world, and she has won multiple theatre awards, including the recipient the Governor General's Award, two Chalmers Canadian Play Awards and the 2011 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, Canada's largest theatre award.