2026 Playwright in Residence

Sara Tilley

Sara Tilley is a multidisciplinary artist from Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, whose work bridges writing, theatre, clown and puppetry. A graduate of the BFA Acting Program at York University, she has written, co-written or co-created fifteen works for theatre, as well as the award-winning novels Skin Room and DUKE.

Sara was Artistic Director of She Said Yes! theatre company in St. John’s from 2002-2016, producing many of her own plays, dramaturging new works nationally and internationally through the Mail-Order Dramaturgy program, and co-founding the Women’s Work Festival with White Rooster Theatre and RCA Theatre. She received the Rhonda Payne Theatre Award in 2006, celebrating women in theatre in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Sara’s plays include solo shows like Fruithead and Nosebleed, as well as ensemble plays like The (In)complete Herstory of Women in Newfoundland (and Labrador!), which was voted Best Theatre Production in St. John’s, 2009, by readers of The Scope. Her most recent full-length script, White or Red, was the winner of an Arts and Letters Award for Dramatic Script, and shortlisted for the Jenny Munday Atlantic Canadian Play Award.

Sara is currently based in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. Her third novel, The Malignant, will be published by Breakwater in the spring of 2027.

 

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During her time as Playwright-in-Residence with RCAT, Sara will write the first draft of Queenie and Edith–the story of Edith Watson and Victoria Hayward, two ‘come-from-aways’ whose affinity for Newfoundland and Labrador was almost as strong as the bond between them. Watson, an American from rural Connecticut, first travelled to Newfoundland in the 1890s, journeying from town to town, beginning friendships that would last throughout the nearly forty summers that she (and later, she and Hayward) spent there. Watson was quite an unusual figure–both a solo woman traveller and a photographer–convincing people who’d sometimes never seen a camera before to pose for her lens. She met the younger Victoria “Queenie” Hayward, a Bermudan writer, in 1911, when Watson was nearly fifty. The two were quickly inseparable, and spent their lives travelling, collaborating on travel books, and selling photographs to fund more travelling. Their journeys took them across North America, to Europe and the Caribbean, but the one place they kept returning to more than any other was Newfoundland, often staying with the same families in each community year after year, their arrival as regular and welcome as the return of migratory birds. The play will tell Queenie and Edith’s story through a combination of live actors, overhead projection and shadow puppetry.

2025 Playwright in Residence

Bernardine 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.

 

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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