Description

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Julie, a young Jamaican Canadian screenwriter, is passionately working on an adaptation of one of the most beloved American novels of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird, telling the story from the perspective of the Finch family's Black maid, Calpurnia. But within the safe confines of her wealthy father's home, and besides all the encouragement from their Filipina housekeeper Precy, Julie struggles with writer's block and numerous distractions as her family prepares for an important dinner party. When her brother challenges her, saying she's appropriating a culture she doesn't belong to, she goes to dramatic lengths to prove her point, only to find she has much to learn.

Calpurnia is a witty and highly charged look at the complicated entanglements of intersectionality and allyship, exposing motives and biases that are clear as a bell one moment, and drowning in ambiguity the next.

About the Author

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Audrey Dwyer is an actor, director, playwright, teacher, artistic director, facilitator, and mentor based in Winnipeg. Her writing includes The D Cut, an award-winning six-episode series on Crave and Shaftesbury Film's KindaTV YouTube channel. She was one of the winners of the CBC Creative Relief Fund to create a television pilot called The Gordons. She wrote the musical Come Home--The Legend of Daddy Hall for Tarragon Theatre, which was produced in their acoustic season in 2021. She wrote her first libretto called Backstage at Carnegie Hall, which will be produced in Montreal in 2022. She's been commissioned by Nightswimming Theatre to write The Generations, an epic five-hour drama about the legacy of a Black family over many thousands of years. She's the associate artistic director of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. She graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada.