Stage Door News

Stratford: Here For Now Theatre will move indoors for its 2022 season

Monday, March 7, 2022

The Here For Now Theatre Company is well into the production of its 2022 season and for the first time will be performing indoors following two successful seasons outside on the grounds of The Bruce Hotel in Stratford.

Tickets will be available on the theatre company’s website www.herefornowtheatre.com beginning March 9th for the 2022 season, which opens July 5th and runs through Sept. 11th. The playbill features nine one-act plays – including seven world premieres. Overall, there’ll be more than 100 performances featuring roughly 50 actors. The theme of the season is all about embracing the darkness to move towards the light – with bravery, honesty, radical self-acceptance and laughter.

Performances run Tuesdays through Sundays at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. and are typically 50 to 75 minutes in length.

“With all the pressure, fear and anger that has been present for so many over the last couple of years, our aim this season is to stay fiercely playful, curious and to keep our hearts wide open. Oh, and to take some risks too,” says Artistic Director Fiona Mongillo.

The Falstaff Family Centre is a beautiful 1929 neo-Gothic former school, now a designated Ontario Heritage building. It’s located in Stratford at 35 Waterloo Street, between William and Elizabeth streets.

The theatre company will be working closely with Huron-Perth Public Health again this year to ensure the safety of patrons and artists alike.

Here For Now Theatre Company was founded in 2012 by Artistic Director Fiona Mongillo. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the evolving artistic environment in 2020, Fiona took a calculated risk and created an open-air festival of intimate, tech-lite theatre with a strong focus on storytelling as a way to bring the community together and to provide local artists with a creative platform. This first full summer season was a huge success, fully surpassing expectations of the community, the company and audiences alike. In 2021, the company commissioned 10 world premiere productions and ran over 160 performances. The theatre company, now into its third season is known for its high quality, imaginative storytelling.

Season Details

Ale Wives by Mark Weatherley

Directed by: Sara-Jeanne Hosie

Beer Brewers.

700 years ago.

Almost exclusively women.

These were the Alewives. Inventive, industrious, and determined women, always having to kick back at a society that distrusted and dismissed female entrepreneurs.

This is the story of two of them.

Agnes and Margaret are two brewers in a small English village in the 1300s, forced to fight the Reeve, the priest, the Aletaster (yeah that really was a thing) and the Bailiff for the right to chart their own destiny.

Raucous, raunchy, witty, thought provoking, and oddly timely considering it takes place in the middle ages.


Joyful Little Noise by Devan Ballagh, Paige Ballagh and Stephen Ingram

Directed by: Devan Ballagh and Paige Ballagh

Studio 410’s brilliantly inspiring take on how we can all make a difference by using our own “Joyful Little Noise” will leave you full of hope! Featuring beautiful original music by London composer, Stephen Ingram, the talented youth cast chronicles the importance of the “little” things; all the things that remain when all else falls away. The last couple of years have been hard, but we can take the dark and make it art…we can celebrate and lean into things that are always there for us; love, music, dance, kindness. “Joyful Little Noise” is fun for the whole family, and is sure to touch everyone in a personal and meaningful way.


Forty-Seven by Deanna Kruger

One birthday. Two sisters. Forty-seven photographs. A decades-long family tradition is coming to an end. Forty-Seven is a funny and tender new play about grief, sibling love, nocturnal animals, surviving the saddest year of life, and figuring out who you really are.


Girls & Boys by Dennis Kelly

Directed by: Lucy Jane Atkinson

Cast: Fiona Mongillo

An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn.


Every Day She Rose by Andrea Scott and Nick Green

Directed by: Monique Lund, Associate Director: Tiffany Deriveau

The personal becomes political in this collaboratively created new work from playwrights Andrea Scott and Nick Green. When racial and queer politics collide at the 2016 Toronto Pride parade, two best friends discover that the things that brought them together may now drive them apart. A hilarious and heartbreaking stare-down of privilege and oppression


Take Care by Ellen Denny

Directed by: Jan Alexandra Smith

“Artist moms are different cause they need lots of sleep, except at night.”

Having paused her career to raise her daughter, 42 year-old writer Johanna Dunham is finally plotting her grand return. She’s even one-upped Virginia Woolf and found the perfect 'house of one's own’ where she can write. But when her husband suffers a stroke, Johanna is thrust into life as a caregiver spouse and single mom to Lucy. After a disastrous visit to a caregivers’ support group, Johanna is on the brink of driving off into the night, when she nearly runs over Len, the handsome young firefighter-next-door longing for an escape of his own…

A funny, messy, honest look at surviving life’s curveballs.


The Pomegranate Project co-created by Jessica B Hill and Marion Adler (Reading)

Somewhere, somehow three women are living together underground. Are they in a cave, or a psychiatric institution or perhaps the mysterious kingdom of Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology? They bicker and gossip. They reminisce and repine. And they plot their impossible escape. But they are helpless until the arrival of a very experienced but very bewildered world famous spelunker.

The Pomegranate Project is an exploration of a variety of real and mythic underworlds, and the women who inhabit them, willingly or otherwise.


Spit by Noelle Brown

Cast: Gillian Buckle, Seána O’Hanlon and Siobhan O’Malley

We can choose our friends, but not our families.

Nicole loves yoga, her sister Jessica loves red wine. Heartbroken at the death of their mother, the sisters’ lives are suddenly impacted by the arrival of a stranger searching for answers. Unravelling a complex legacy, the sisters are forced to confront their grief against a backdrop of shame. Spit by Noelle Brown, co-writer of the critically acclaimed POSTSCRIPT, is a funny and moving play about siblings, secrets and what it means to be a family.


The Real Poems by Robert McQueen

Co-directed by: Damien Atkins and Andrew Kushnir

Composed by: Laura Burton

Cast: Robert McQueen

When our world went into lockdown in March of 2020, the air outside my apartment was suddenly still and my calendar was suddenly empty.

From inside that still-emptiness I sat at my kitchen table and began to write out my experiences as a young queer man, living between Vancouver and New York City during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and 90’s.

The Real Poems is spoken witness to the joy of youth, discovery and wild adventure. It is memorial to the lives of colleagues, lovers and friends lost.

Visit www.herefornowtheatre.com.