Chloë Whitehorn

Chloë Whitehorn

Described as "Dorothy Parker meets Neil Labute meets M. Night Shyamalan", Chloë Whitehorn is an award winning playwright, actor, and wearer of black dresses. A graduate of Queen's University's theatre program, Chloë’s work often examines taboo moralities, tragic love, and the broken bits of ourselves we all try to hide. Born in California, Chloë's hippie-artist mother raised her in a...
Described as "Dorothy Parker meets Neil Labute meets M. Night Shyamalan", Chloë Whitehorn is an award winning playwright, actor, and wearer of black dresses. A graduate of Queen's University's theatre program, Chloë’s work often examines taboo moralities, tragic love, and the broken bits of ourselves we all try to hide. Born in California, Chloë's hippie-artist mother raised her in a world of circus artists, puppeteers and activists until moving to Canada where she spent her days figure skating, writing short stories, and developing a love of theatre. Her plays have been performed across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and published in various collections, including "Divine Wrecks and Other Morally Questionable Tragedies".​ For more information please visit: www.chloewhitehorn.com

Plays

  • Blood River
    Unfortunately Timely, Blood River is set in a post Roe v Wade overturned place where women's health rights have been reduced significantly. Abortion is illegal and the line between religion and law has blurred to non-existence. Karen rows a boat across the river to a different state where women are not prosecuted for putting their lives ahead of their unborn children. This world premiere was commissioned...
    Unfortunately Timely, Blood River is set in a post Roe v Wade overturned place where women's health rights have been reduced significantly. Abortion is illegal and the line between religion and law has blurred to non-existence. Karen rows a boat across the river to a different state where women are not prosecuted for putting their lives ahead of their unborn children. This world premiere was commissioned by Theatre Kingston and examines women's agency and the plight presented by the predatory political agendas of the patriarchy.
  • Mourning After the Night Before
    When a family moves to a small coastal town to recover from a tragedy, they struggle to rediscover who they are and if they're worth saving. Lucy doesn't know who she is anymore. Everett is falling in love. Drew has lost so much already. Fenwick is just trying to keep her family afloat. And Pippa, well Pippa is drowning.
    Mourning After the Night Before explores the rippling impact of loss and...
    When a family moves to a small coastal town to recover from a tragedy, they struggle to rediscover who they are and if they're worth saving. Lucy doesn't know who she is anymore. Everett is falling in love. Drew has lost so much already. Fenwick is just trying to keep her family afloat. And Pippa, well Pippa is drowning.
    Mourning After the Night Before explores the rippling impact of loss and the repercussions of drowning in every way a person can drown.
  • Divine Wrecks
    Drama, 3F 3M (or 2F 2M 2X)
     There are many different types of love: first love, true love, obsessive love, and that other type of love. A high school god falls for the wrong girl. His teacher. ​ A modern take on a classic story, this dark tale of heart break and revelations explores the nature of love without boundaries.
  • Dressing Amelia
    A daughter struggles to reconcile the past she thought she knew with a wardrobe full of roles to try on. Upstairs Amelia is still angry with her mother and refuses to leave her childhood room because she doesn’t have anything appropriate to wear. Downstairs her grandmother is entertaining the guests who have arrived while Thomas and Grace indulge Amelia’s retrospection on her childhood. Amelia’s missed some...
    A daughter struggles to reconcile the past she thought she knew with a wardrobe full of roles to try on. Upstairs Amelia is still angry with her mother and refuses to leave her childhood room because she doesn’t have anything appropriate to wear. Downstairs her grandmother is entertaining the guests who have arrived while Thomas and Grace indulge Amelia’s retrospection on her childhood. Amelia’s missed some things over the years, including her mom’s questionable relationship with her high school neighbor. In a dizzying journey of crayons, circus acts and lavender martinis, Dressing Amelia is a lovingly penned letter for the mothers and daughters seeking to connect through states of mania and inherited trauma. Sometimes it’s just a dress and sometimes it’s so much more.
  • The Pigeon
    Full length Drama, 1M 2F
    What could Jegger, a young punk, and Malone, a past middle-aged woman, possibly have in common? Drawn together by their mutual hatred for the woman who damaged them both, they plot her destruction. Some say revenge is bittersweet, and sometimes it’s like a box of chocolates.
  • How to Not Die Horribly in a Fire
    Comedic Monologue, 1F
    Claire has just been proposed to. As she considers her response she reflects on advice her mother gave her in an ice cream shop, her gold star rating system for men, and how likely she is to die in a fire.
  • Love, Virtually
    A play about our storybook romance expectations and how real life struggles to live up to the fantasy lives we've created for ourselves. "It's like Shrodinger's cat: as long as you stick to online dating without really getting to know someone, you're perfect together without actually being in a relationship."
    3F, 4M
    In a virtual world where you can pretend to be...
    A play about our storybook romance expectations and how real life struggles to live up to the fantasy lives we've created for ourselves. "It's like Shrodinger's cat: as long as you stick to online dating without really getting to know someone, you're perfect together without actually being in a relationship."
    3F, 4M
    In a virtual world where you can pretend to be anyone, how do you find someone who will love you for who you really are? Love, Virtually is set in present day, predominantly in a coffee shop, which is both the ideal location for a casual first date as well as the best place to gossip with your friends about those dates. Interspersed with glimpses of online dating personalities largely derived from interviews and real life profiles, it is the fictitious account of Laurel, a thirty year-old singer songwriter who, as the play opens, is being pushed to dive into the world of online dating both for new song material and to help her move past the loss of a former love.
    Laurel’s agent and best friend Eden, a cougar in the making, believes Laurel should seek out a new romance to help her get out of her songwriting slump, and to help her do that, Eden has set up an online dating profile for Laurel. Laurel’s married friend Jennifer, a high school teacher and Eden’s diabolic opposite, agrees with the plan, if only so she can live vicariously through Laurel. And so the dating begins.
    A range of dating options parade before us, among them: MrExtraordinary whose hobbies and interests include “wine tasting in Napa Valley, exotic car racing in Monte Carlo, learning to cook Thai food in Bangkok,”; Techie81 who speaks several languages including Klingon, Elvish, and binary; Big_Stick_Playa, a hockey loving guy whose pickup line is “let’s face off and see if we can score a goal together”; and former classmate Matt, whom Laurel never noticed in high school but who now offers a fresh perspective on her past.
    Laurel believes Noah, the coffee barista who serves her biscotti to cheer her up, is perfect for her, and after watching them interact we also wonder “why aren’t they together?” In a series of repeated scenes reliving the few moments she had with Noah, the young man who might have been The One, we learn that he is perfect for her, except for one thing. He’s dead. That doesn’t seem to stop him from interfering with Matt’s plans to finally win the heart of the girl he’s loved since high school. Matt has a connection to Noah as well, they were best friends. The memory of Noah seems to haunt Matt as well as he tries to overcome Laurel’s reluctance to open up to the idea of loving anyone but Noah. Her quirky best friends tell her they think she’s keeping her heart in a box, shielding herself from both potential pain and love. "It's like Shrodinger's cat. As long as you stick to online dating without really getting to know someone, you're perfect together without actually being in a relationship."
    All of Laurel’s relationships are challenged when Jennifer and Eden walk in to the coffee shop to find Laurel on a date with one of Jennifer’s high school students as a result of Jennifer using Laurel’s online profile as an example in her sociology class about the impact of internet communications on social interaction. Laurel is furious that Jennifer would invade her privacy like that and Jennifer is frustrated that Laurel has posted private, intimate details about herself online for anyone to see. Matt confronts Laurel with the news that the love song she based her love of Noah on was in fact written not by Noah but by him, and that she never really knew Noah at all. To which Laurel points out Matt also has been in love with Laurel without ever actually knowing her. Everyone has storybook romance expectations and real life struggles to live up to the fantasy lives they create for themselves.
    Chosen as Toronto Best of Fringe 2011, Love, Virtually is a love story, a comedy, and a glimpse into the lives of people ironically seeking intimacy through the most impersonal and detached way, the internet.
  • Verona Heights
    A love story, a comedy, and a glimpse into the tragic possibilities of high school violence and hate. Romeo and Juliet for a modern audience. Can be gender swapped or cast creatively with pronoun changes.
    Intended for High School Production

    In the hallways of Verona High another fight breaks out between the Capulet Crew and the Montague Boyz, the high school’s rival cliques. It seems that...
    A love story, a comedy, and a glimpse into the tragic possibilities of high school violence and hate. Romeo and Juliet for a modern audience. Can be gender swapped or cast creatively with pronoun changes.
    Intended for High School Production

    In the hallways of Verona High another fight breaks out between the Capulet Crew and the Montague Boyz, the high school’s rival cliques. It seems that Samantha, one of the cheerleaders, publically insulted another girl on Snapchat and the principal (”Yo, call me Prince ‘cause I’m your pal”) tries unsuccessfully to mediate between the students. Verona Heights is a present day adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, exploring the role peer pressure plays in breeding an atmosphere of violence and the tragic consequences caused by the hierarchy of high school social groups.

    Interspersing Shakespeare’s original prose with modern day teenage slang, Verona Heights follows the original plot using language teenage audiences and actors relate to. Juliet’s older sister Cydney, captain of the cheerleading squad and head of the Capulet Crew, believes Juliet should stop hiding in the library and start acting like the future prom queen she should be. Dating Paris, the new exchange student, would be a step in the right direction. Romeo’s friends can’t fathom why, when he’s got the swag that he does, instead of ruling the school with the Montague Boyz he’s moping around over some girl. And then they meet.

    Verona Heights is a love story, a comedy, and a glimpse into the tragic possibilities of high school violence and hate.
  • Vintages
    Elizabeth's bedroom mirrors show every threat of impending wrinkles and reflect the carefree youth she wasted on a man. How can she live in the moment when the future looks bleak and the past is so seductive?
    (10 minute play) 3F, 1M
  • Lei in Love's Shadow
    Mark brings the two women he loves to a theme hotel for a memorable romantic weekend with unexpected results.
    (15 minute play) 2F, 1M
    Originally commissioned for Humber River Shakespeare Company, inspired by William Shakespeare’s sonnet 43 and set in the Victorian bedroom of historic Montgomery’s Inn.
  • The Deepest Trench
    An almost love story about the ways we protect the people we love, trench warfare as a version of a fairy tale ending, and a pair of ducks.
    When you love someone, what lengths will you go to protect them? The Deepest Trench is set in present day in a hospital waiting room and scattered remembered locations spanning the key moments of a relationship. Emma, a generation Y woman with a sarcastic wit and a...
    An almost love story about the ways we protect the people we love, trench warfare as a version of a fairy tale ending, and a pair of ducks.
    When you love someone, what lengths will you go to protect them? The Deepest Trench is set in present day in a hospital waiting room and scattered remembered locations spanning the key moments of a relationship. Emma, a generation Y woman with a sarcastic wit and a dirty sense of humour, is going to die soon. And she knows it.
    2F, 1M
    Ryan, a comic-book loving National Geographic watching geek in the coolest way possible, is in love with Emma. Not that he thinks she’s at all aware of him. Emma’s best friend Kate, Ryan’s older sister, agrees to have Emma move in with them after another of Emma’s relationships ends due to her inability to commit. Kate is very supportive of Emma’s live for the moment attitude, as long as that doesn’t include Kate’s younger brother Ryan, whom she wants to protect from the inevitable heartbreak she knows he’ll feel when Emma dies.
    The play shifts between the hospital waiting room where Kate and Ryan wait for news of Emma, and the moments in the past that pulled Emma and Ryan closer together. Ryan discovers how his sister knew of Emma’s impending death and thought she was protecting him from getting hurt by keeping Emma and him apart, as Kate realizes the depth of the love between her brother and Emma and the loss her brother will feel for never having had the chance to know how much he was loved back.
    How important is it to hear someone say “I love you”? As Emma says, “Maybe the last thing said shouldn’t be “I’ll miss you”, or “I love you”, or “I’m so happy you let me in to your heart even though that just allowed me to tear it open from the inside when I left”. Maybe it’s right that you’re just there, and then you’re not. And they’re left with the memories. Maybe that’s enough.”
  • Clarissa on Her Deathbed
    Clarissa’s world of make believe is a place where archeologists uncover magical birthday presents, tea is served to avoid talk show tragedies, Russian spies reveal their feelings in finger paintings, and stuffed animal bunny rabbits protect your darkest secrets. A coming of age story about the resilience of children and their ability to believe in fairy tales and ‘happily ever after’ in the face of real life....
    Clarissa’s world of make believe is a place where archeologists uncover magical birthday presents, tea is served to avoid talk show tragedies, Russian spies reveal their feelings in finger paintings, and stuffed animal bunny rabbits protect your darkest secrets. A coming of age story about the resilience of children and their ability to believe in fairy tales and ‘happily ever after’ in the face of real life.
    Full length dramatic comedy, 2F 1M
  • Voyeur Seeking Audience
    Ten-minute drama, 1F 5F/M/non-binary
    When Jamie brings friends to see Zanna's performance art they all see something different. But what does it mean, and does it have to mean something or can it just entertain, and does art imitate life or is life art, in which case who is the audience, and WTF is art really anyways?
  • Hurricane Tails
    While Carol and Doug are stuck inside during a hurricane, they learn how they really feel about each other.
  • Wasting Time
    Ford hates her job. She hates her life. She wants the life she could have had, if only she could figure out what went wrong and what happened on that day that turned her into who she is. A journey through alternate timelines with fate altering consequences.
    (10 minute play) 2 M/F