2025 Playwright in Residence

Bernadine Stapleton

Bernardine Ann Teráz Stapleton is a playwright, author, skit-artist, and actor. She’s spent her career making beautiful theatre in unexpected places. In 2024 she was a Siminovitch Playwright Prize finalist. This year she and co-artistic director Nicole Smith are celebrating 25 years of Girl Power Inc with a special year of crafty research, process-based tinkering, and new works focusing on female powered stories, including Hysterical Vadge, Taste, Dying at the Discotheque, Ophelia, and more. In 2025 she was the inaugural playwright-in-residence with RCAT. Her plays include Offensive to Some, The Antidote for Life: Memory, Madness and Beagles, and an audio play for the NAC English Theatre Woman of One Thousand Years. In the works are the novel adaptation of her play Brazil Square, and the upcoming podcast The Haunted Doorbell. Bernardine was writer-in-residence at Memorial University in 2019 and her other books include Love, Life, with Breakwater Books. She lives in St. John’s with rescue beagle Georgie Girl.

 

[ID: A colour photo of a white women with long grey hair. She is wearing a black blouse and a string of pearls around her neck. She is smiling and looking at the camera.]

Dying at the Discotheque

Public reading Oct 29, 2026, LSPU Hall Main Stage

Were we planets, or are we Gods at last? That’s all of us here, you know, waiting to go, and gone. Bernardine Ann Teráz Stapleton loved writing those words as the inaugural playwright-in-residence for RCAT in 2025. Dying at the Discotheque assembled a stunning array of senior talent on the LSPU mainstage for the workshop/reading of this heart-rending, funny, nostalgic examination of aging and dying in the professional arts. The residency was also the inspiration for a new one-woman show Hysterical Vadge with a special excerpt to be read at the upcoming Women’s Work Festival. Bernardine likens her residency to being Miss Congeniality for a whole year, writing like a banshee buoyed with the support and encouragement of RCAT and the LSPU Hall, and the conversations and interactions with our community.

featuring:

Paul Power

Suzanne Mullett

Aiden Flynn

Amy House

Mary-Lynn Bernard

Greg Malone

Frank Barry

Sheilagh Guy Murphy

Jillian Rees-Brown

Donna Butt

Our call for the 2026-2027 Playwright in Residence will go out later this year.
Stay tuned to our social media and website for details!