Toronto director to direct "TomorrowLove" | Communication Arts

The Theatre and Performance program is excited to announce that Toronto-based director-dramaturg, Andrea Donaldson, has been contracted to direct the fall production of TomorrowLove. This is Andrea's first time working with the program.

TomorrowLove was written in 2015, by Toronto-based playwright Rosamund Small, who has had great success as a playwright and is only in her 20’s. Rosamund states the play is ”about love and set in many different versions in the very near future, where one piece of amazing technology exists. It’s about exploring different relationships and how this one thing activates change in the way that two people relate to each other. Sometimes it ends up bringing people closer together and sometimes it pushes them further apart.”

Originally staged as an immersive theatrical experience the program has chosen only 7 of the 15 possible playlets and are staging them on the Theatre of the Arts thrust stage. Millenials, who already have an intense relationship with technology, will connect with these conceivable worlds. TomorrowLove is a truly contemporary play that allows us to meditate on the possibilities and dangers technology introduces into love and relationships in the twenty-first century.

Andrea almost exclusively develops and directs new works for the stage, a calling that was seeded in her early interdisciplinary and collective creation training. Her work is imagistic, complex and discreetly choreographic. Andrea is driven to create arresting works that expose private moments in a public fashion. Andrea’s directing has been described as visually stunning, hilarious, thrilling, whip-smart, sublime and bold.

Recent directing credits include:

Snowman (Soulpepper Academy)
These Peaceable Kingdoms (National Theatre School)
Quiver (Nightwood Theatre)
Within the Glass (Tarragon)
Mistatim (Red Sky)
The Atomic Weight of Happiness (Theatre Direct)
Montparnasse (Theatre Passe Muraille)
Janet Wilson Meets the Queen (GCTC)

TomorrowLove November 14-17, 2018 at the Theatre of the Arts

Andrea has been honoured with Stratford’s Jean Gascon Award for Direction, Best Director - International Youth Drama Month - Shenzhen, China, has been nominated for the Pauline McGibbon Award & the John Hirsch Directing Award and has received a Dora Award for Outstanding Performance & Production for performing in And By the Way, Miss (Theatre Direct). Andrea was Tarragon Theatre’s Assistant/Associate Artistic Director for four seasons, is in her fourth season as the Program Director for Nightwood Theatre’s Write From the Hip, is a regular guest artist at the National Theatre School and co-Artistic Director of Groundwater Productions with Governor General Award winning playwright Erin Shields.

Andrea's reasoning for choosing TomorrowLove as a project for the program:

“One of the features that attracted me to this piece is that gender and sexuality has no impact on any of the casting. Each role is designed to be utterly malleable and different meanings can arise from the choices we make. Also, no role is defined or exclusive to outdated notions of how gender might have once informed status and relationship. This allows us to be responsive to the actors before us and ensures that each student has a role that while not necessarily long, can be full and meaningful.”