Jason Sherman
Bill Glassco Playwright-in-Residence
Jason Sherman is a multi-award-winning playwright and screenwriter based in Toronto. Many of his plays were written and first produced during his previous residency with the Tarragon Theatre from 1992 to 1999; among them are are The Retreat, Patience, An Acre of Time, and three plays directed by Richard Rose: It's All True, Remnants, and Three in the Back, Two in the Head, which received the Governor General's Award for Drama. He has also received four other Governor General nominations. Jason also worked with Richard on an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov for the Stratford Festival in 2005, the same year that his contemporary version of The Cherry Orchard (After the Orchard) premiered at the National Arts Centre. Among his other plays are The League of Nathans and Reading Hebron which, together with the work-in-progress United Nathans, form a trilogy about the nature of Judaism.
For radio: Jason created the war serial Afghanada, which ran for over 100 hundred episodes on CBC, as well as National Affairs and PMO.
For television: He most recently wrote an adaptation of the political satire The Best Laid Plans, which earned him a Canadian Screen Awards nomination. Other work for the camera includes We Were Children, a docudrama about the residential school system in Canada, which won a Banff Rocky Award and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award; Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, an eight-part series for TMN; and a number of dramas concerning the dogged detective work of one sort of investigator or another. Jason has won three Canadian Screenwriting Awards and been nominated seven other times. He recently created and wrote a 16-part podcast series called The Complete 150, about the rollout of Canada's sesquicentennial celebrations; it can be streamed at the website of Soulpepper Theatre, which produced the project. He is also finishing a feature documentary called My Tree, which follows Jason as he attempts to find the tree that was planted in his name in Israel 40 years earlier.