La Seizième

Project under creation: Boréalis

Mishka Lavigne (she/her) is a playwright, screenwriter, and literary translator. Her works have been produced and developed in Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia, Haiti, and Mexico. She was a finalist for the prestigious Siminovitch Prize in 2023. Her play Havre, premiered by La Troupe du Jour (Saskatoon), won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2019. Copeaux, produced by Théâtre de Dehors (Ottawa), received the same award in 2021, along with the Jacques-Poirier Prize. Murs, initially produced as a podcast by Transistor Média, Créations In Vivo, and Théâtre populaire d’Acadie, received recognition in France, was staged in 2023, and was a finalist for the Michel-Tremblay Prize in 2024. Mishka also writes in English. Her play Albumen, produced by TACTICS in 2019 (Ottawa), received the QWF Playwriting Prize. Her play Shorelines, presented in Ottawa by TACTICS in 2023, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2024, the QWF Playwriting Award, and the Carol Bolt Award. As a translator, working both from English to French and French to English, Mishka has translated nearly twenty works of theatre, prose, and poetry. She is the playwright behing a three-piece project, Boréalis, gathering the texts Granite, Lichen and Loup-Cervier. The shows will be in creation throughout the 2026-2027 season, with six Canadian theatre participating.

Project in writing: Micah et la maison sous les arbres

Laurie Léveillé is an author, screenwriter, and translator who graduated from the Playwriting program at the National Theatre School of Canada and the Screenwriting Development program at the École Nationale de l’Humour. In September 2024, she published Coup bas, a short novel for young readers and one of the first three titles in La courte échelle’s new Micro collection. The book garnered multiple honours, including the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award in the Young People’s Literature – Text category and the Alvine-Bélisle Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2025 Prix des Libraires in the Young Adult Literature category. She is currently adapting Coup bas into a television series. In recent years, she has also established herself as a fiction translator through numerous theatre and literary projects. Most recently, she translated and adapted the musical parody Titanique (Just For Laughs), which was widely acclaimed by critics. Her next book, a graphic novel for teens, is slated for publication in fall 2027.

Beginning in the 2026–2027 season, Laurie Léveillé will receive support from Théâtre la Seizième to develop her young audiences play Micah et la maison sous les arbres, with a view to a production in 2027-2028 in collaboration with the Centre de la Francophonie at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Micah et la maison sous les arbres is a playful ode to children who hear adults shouting far too often. Freely inspired by Gilbert Bécaud’s song La maison sous les arbres (The House Beneath the Trees), this theatrical work for elementary school children is a modern fable about how children experience their parents’ anger.

Micah is terrified of his father, who shouts too often. His hearing is gradually fading, as though his ears are becoming selective about the sounds that pass through them. At the back of the yard stands a fragile little shack where Micah takes refuge whenever his father gets angry: the house beneath the trees. Accompanied by the imaginary adults he encounters – the helmetless bicycle courier, the old woman walking her dog in a stroller, and the jogger with extraordinarily long hair – Micah hides in his secret house and writes a letter to his father asking him to shout less. He fears that he will lose his hearing forever if his father’s voice continues to echo so loudly through the house.

This project is created with the support of University of British Columbia, UBC Community Engagement and the Centre de la Francophonie de UBC.