Judith Thompson

Judith Clare Thompson, OC (born September 20, 1954) is a Canadian playwright who lives in Toronto, Ontario. She has twice been awarded the Governor General's Award for drama, and is the recipient of many other awards including the Order of Canada, the Walter Carsen Performing Arts Award, the Toronto Arts Award, The Epilepsy Ontario Award, The B'Nai B'rith Award, the Dora, the Chalmers, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award (a global competition for the best play written by a woman in the English Language) and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, both for Palace of the End, which premiered at Canadian Stage, and has been produced all over the world in many languages. She has received honourary doctorates from Thorneloe University and, in Nov. 2016, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

Thompson was born in Montreal, Quebec, the daughter of W. R. Thompson, a geneticist and the head of the Department of Psychology at Queen's University, and Mary, who taught in the Queens Drama Department for many years. She is also the sister of Bill Thompson, a Professor of Psychology who composed the music for a number of Judith's radio and stage plays. Thompson was raised in Middletown, Connecticut and then Kingston, Ontario. She studied drama at Queen's and then studied acting at the National Theatre School of Canada (NTS) in Montreal. Thompson worked as an actor for a while, but then concentrated on playwrighting.

While in a mask class at NTS, Thompson developed the character Theresa, a mildly mentally handicapped Aboriginal woman based on people she had met while working as an assistant social worker during summers in Kingston, Ontario. This character was to provide the core of Thompson's first play The Crackwalker (1980), which focuses on Kingston's sub-proletariat class. In 1991, CBC reviewer, Jerry Wasserman called the Vancouver Fringe Festival production, The Diamond among the pebbles ... Maybe the most powerful play ever written in Canada about two down and out couples in Kingston Ontario living on the edge, the outer edge of respectability, and trying to make some sense of their lives – to find love and a kind of domestic normality under the worst conceivable conditions. It's a very, very disturbing play and I think a deeply tragic play about the lowest depths one can imagine in a Canadian city. About a Vancouver production at the Firehall Arts Centre in 1993, The Vancouver Sun's Barbara Crook wrote, The Crackwalker is not theatre for the timid. Judith Thompson’s first play is a graphic, harrowing glimpse at life on the edge, at individuals battered by poverty, ignorance and hopelessness. It is also a brilliant piece of stagecraft that makes use of every well-chosen word and powerfully dramatic moment to force audience members to confront their own darker sides. If you're looking for theatre that takes you to the edge of hell, The Crackwalker fits the bill.

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