ABSTRACT
Judith Thompson (b.1954) is one of the most influential playwrights in Canada, with a body of work since 1980 which includes plays, screenplays, collective creations, and occasional writings on her role as an educator, artist, and activist. Her internationally acclaimed works are known for their focus on vulnerable women and girls in contemporary society and their hallmark mixture of ordinary language, realist settings, and dream-like, often violent, encounters between the marginalized and their oppressors. “That Stinking Hot Summer” (2010), excerpted in this anthology, is one in a series of autobiographical essays by Thompson. It chronicles her early years as an actor-turned playwright, struggling to find her voice in a postcolonial nation overshadowed by Britain and the United States, and dominated–even in an exciting new theatre scene–by a White masculinist sensibility. How she survived, re-inventing herself as a formidable artist and social advocate, provides the reader a fascinating insight into the role of a female dramatist in our own era, highlighting the power to shape (as well as to observe) the evolution of a nation constructing a new identity in the late 20th and early 21st century.
