Beverley Rosen Simons

Beverley Rosen Simons is a Canadian playwright. Her plays explore artistic form, as well as assumptions of class and gender with a perspicacity ahead of second generation feminism of the 1960s, which influenced her youth.

Rosen grew up in Flin Flon, Manitoba and attended high school in Edmonton, Alberta. She identified as an artist early, and had difficulty deciding whether to study as a pianist or to go into creative writing. With the help of a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts, she decided to pursue writing and eventually enrolled at McGill to study English literature in 1955. At McGill, Rosen became increasingly involved in theatre, helping to found the McGill University Players. After transferring to UBC, she graduated with a BA degree in English and Theatre in 1959.

Rosen's first full-length play, "The Elephant and the Jewish Question", was a "well-made" domestic drama staged by the Vancouver Little Theatre for the 1968 Dominion Drama Festival. Subsequently, she avoided the conventions of the "well made" form; her travel and extensive reading about theatre in Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and India led her to feel "cramped and dissatisfied…in traditional drama forms of the West" (application to the Canada Council, 1970).

Rosen's second full-length play, "Crabdance", was greeted by critics as a brilliant, controversial work. It remains Rosen's best-known play. It has received six professional stagings, dramatizations by CBC Radio and CBC TV (never aired), an ACCESS video of the 1976 Citadel Theatre production, and two editions by in Print publications and Talonbooks.

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