Rose Scollard
Individual
Roles
Producer, WriterBiography
Rose Scollard is a playwright with over thirty professionally produced stage and radio dramas. Her play Shea of the White Hands, a modern-day version of the Tristan and Isolde legend, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an international award for literary excellence in work by women playwrights. She was a co-founder of Maenad Productions, western Canada’s first woman-centred theatre. For over a decade Maenad produced more than 50 plays in addition to holding a yearly Fem Fest, a goddess festival in which women from all over the country as well as from the United States and Europe performed their own work. Along with Co-Artistic Directors, Nancy Jo Cullen and Alexandria Patience, she wrote Aphra, a tribute to the first woman to earn a living as a playwright, and one of Maenad’s best-received productions. In 1997, Rose was appointed playwright-in-residence at the University of Calgary as part of the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program. During her residency she completed Caves of Fancy, a play about Mary Shelley, Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft, and the famous “Frankenstein’s monster,” that was workshopped by the Drama department and presented at an international Shelley/Wollstonecraft conference at the University of Calgary. Caves of Fancy was later published as part of the anthology Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. In 1999, she co-founded Frontenac House, a small literary press based in Calgary for the purpose of publishing poetry. Husband David Scollard assisted with editing and production and in 2006, on retiring from Husky Oil, became co-Publisher. The list was extended from Poetry to include art books, aviation books and political satire. Many of the books were shortlisted for or won literary prizes. In 2003, her play Firebird was translated into German and produced by Freie Kammerspiele of Magdeburg, Germany for two years as their Christmas play, Feuervogel. The company was sold in 2016. Since then, Rose has continued to write both plays and fiction. Recent productions include I Ain’t so Tough, Urban Stories Theatre, 2016, Firebird, Guelph Little Theatre, 2018, Aphra, untitled theatrics, 2022, and Bad Hair Day in Las Vegas, Ward One Acts, 2022.National New Play Exchange, 2024