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Posted On: October 14th 2026, 01:00 pm
The Playwright of the Month for October 2026 is Candace Hagen (PEI)!
We asked Candace: What are some plays that have stayed with you or influenced your work?
"Saying 'Equus' feels like an unhinged answer. To be honest, I didn’t grow up with scripts or theatre in my bones; Richard Lemm forced it on me during my undergrad creative writing classes. After taking every course offered at every level, I had become a virtuoso of dialogue avoidance. I went to extraordinary lengths to ensure no one in my writing spoke directly to anybody else.
I think it was a thimble having an internal crisis over deforestation — in an exercise meant to explore dialogue — that prompted his next assignment: five pages, two people talking to each other. Only dialogue. Nothing else.
I wrote it sweating and half drunk in a coffee shop that has since been gentrified. Those intensive forty-five minutes became the foundation for 'Salty.' One scene was eventually staged; the rest remains neglected in multiple drafts in my Google Docs. But I was hooked. I threw my poetry manuscripts in the trash and started writing plays.
All of that to say, I could research and Google the names of scripts I’ve read or plays I’ve watched — but that isn’t what stays with me; it’s the moments of writing and witnessing in collaboration with others that influence my work. Local theatre inspires me — watching radical creatives like Brynn Cutcliffe, Jay Whitehead, Rebecca Parent, Rosie Shaw, John MacCormac, Graham Putnam, and Benton Hartley...I could go on.
What stays with me is the bravery of those who put their work on a stage, any stage, and the privilege of watching artists thrive and grow together. It’s the people, the symbiosis, the osmosis of collaboration. For someone who had to be forced into writing a script, I am an accumulation of every creative I’ve worked with who had the gorgeous audacity to take up space."
Read the full interview with Candace at our website.
We asked Candace: What are some plays that have stayed with you or influenced your work?
"Saying 'Equus' feels like an unhinged answer. To be honest, I didn’t grow up with scripts or theatre in my bones; Richard Lemm forced it on me during my undergrad creative writing classes. After taking every course offered at every level, I had become a virtuoso of dialogue avoidance. I went to extraordinary lengths to ensure no one in my writing spoke directly to anybody else.
I think it was a thimble having an internal crisis over deforestation — in an exercise meant to explore dialogue — that prompted his next assignment: five pages, two people talking to each other. Only dialogue. Nothing else.
I wrote it sweating and half drunk in a coffee shop that has since been gentrified. Those intensive forty-five minutes became the foundation for 'Salty.' One scene was eventually staged; the rest remains neglected in multiple drafts in my Google Docs. But I was hooked. I threw my poetry manuscripts in the trash and started writing plays.
All of that to say, I could research and Google the names of scripts I’ve read or plays I’ve watched — but that isn’t what stays with me; it’s the moments of writing and witnessing in collaboration with others that influence my work. Local theatre inspires me — watching radical creatives like Brynn Cutcliffe, Jay Whitehead, Rebecca Parent, Rosie Shaw, John MacCormac, Graham Putnam, and Benton Hartley...I could go on.
What stays with me is the bravery of those who put their work on a stage, any stage, and the privilege of watching artists thrive and grow together. It’s the people, the symbiosis, the osmosis of collaboration. For someone who had to be forced into writing a script, I am an accumulation of every creative I’ve worked with who had the gorgeous audacity to take up space."
Read the full interview with Candace at our website.
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