Zoë Marsland

Zoë Marsland

Zoë Marsland is a playwright from Toronto. She has presented work across Canada as well as at English Theatre Berlin and Judson Church in New York.

Plays

  • Subject: Re: Family Drama by Zoë Marsland
    Cast: 
    7–9
    ·
    Genre: adaptation, tragedy
    Genre: adaptation, tragedy
    Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come: the Irwin patriarch is dead. But certain family members are weeping too hard and for the wrong reasons, all because Zoë, the wayward granddaughter, got drunk and stumbled on a dark family secret. Based on Ibsen's The Wild Duck, a play about life-lies and a deranged quest for truth told through group texts and mass emails that probably should have never been sent.
  • Hot Verisimilitude by Zoë Marsland
    Cast: 
    2
    ·
    Genre: farce
    Genre: farce
    Over the course of a historically irrelevant 2018, a playwright is trying to create a blistering drama of “real relevance.” Meanwhile her “brogrammer” boyfriend has taken a mysterious new job at an undisclosed campus, somewhere north of the city. Faced with a blank document and boundless internet, our playwright sifts through the fragmented backlog of her boyfriend’s online presence and begins to project her...
    Over the course of a historically irrelevant 2018, a playwright is trying to create a blistering drama of “real relevance.” Meanwhile her “brogrammer” boyfriend has taken a mysterious new job at an undisclosed campus, somewhere north of the city. Faced with a blank document and boundless internet, our playwright sifts through the fragmented backlog of her boyfriend’s online presence and begins to project her own sinister performance of manic surveillance.
  • Gertrude by Zoë Marsland
    Cast: 
    4–8
    ·
    Genre: adaptation, farce
    Genre: adaptation, farce
    Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s age-defying, gender-shifting picaresque, Orlando, Gertrude follows
    the titular character as they gallop through time, and traipse across gender(s). Beginning with a
    Tenth-Century peasant girl, who earnestly believes the tumour growing out of her face is a human man,
    continuing to a 17th century veteran actor who finds himself suddenly disposable once “real women...
    Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s age-defying, gender-shifting picaresque, Orlando, Gertrude follows
    the titular character as they gallop through time, and traipse across gender(s). Beginning with a
    Tenth-Century peasant girl, who earnestly believes the tumour growing out of her face is a human man,
    continuing to a 17th century veteran actor who finds himself suddenly disposable once “real women”
    take to the stage...Nuns, lepers, bike couriers, pestilential fever, first love...Gertrude explores the performative opportunities foreclosed to our rigidly gendered selves; the un-lived lives that haunt the lives we do inhabit, and the profound sadness that attends the realization of our limitations.
  • PLAIN PEOPLE/PERVERT PEOPLE by Zoë Marsland
    Cast: 
    8
    ·
    Genre: comedy
    Genre: comedy
    New Salzberg is a township in transition. Most of the people there are Mennonites, whose guiding principles include radical forgiveness, extreme humility and, most relevantly, a rejection of contemporary technology. With a large wave of city people showing up, overpaying for services while they stake out their McMansions, the local community struggles to retain its authenticity. This play explores the...
    New Salzberg is a township in transition. Most of the people there are Mennonites, whose guiding principles include radical forgiveness, extreme humility and, most relevantly, a rejection of contemporary technology. With a large wave of city people showing up, overpaying for services while they stake out their McMansions, the local community struggles to retain its authenticity. This play explores the similarities between religious and sexual ecstasy—how both draw on taboos, rituals, and fetish objects—all against a backdrop of gentrification and technological dehumanization.