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Judith Clare Thompson (born September 20 , 1954 ) is a prominent Canadian Playwright who lives in Toronto , Ontario. '' The Globe And Mail '', Canada's national newspaper, once declared that "...in this country, a playwright as good as Judith Thompson is a miracle." 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. Thompson was raised in Kingston, Ontario , and 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 year, but then gave it up to pursue writing. While in a mask class at NTS, Thompson had developed the character Therese, a mildly mentally-handicapped Aboriginal woman based on people she had met while working as an assistant social worker during in the summers in Kingston. This character was to provide the core of Thompson's first play ''The Crackwalker'' (1980), which focuses on Kingston's sub-proletariat class. Thompson's second play, ''White Biting Dog'' (1984), was an expressionistic and poetic black comedy about an eccentric and wildly self-destructive family. ''I Am Yours'' (1987), while containing similarly expressionistic elements, attaches these to the fears and fantasies of the central characters, to create an even more powerfully compelling theatrical experience. ''Lion in the Streets'' (1990), which is perhaps her strongest play, uses a structure similar to Arthur Schnitzler 's La Ronde to follow violent and cruel impulses from one character to another, a route which the ghost of a young murdered girl, Isobel, uses to track down her killer. A penultimate scene which Thompson cut after the first workshop production of the play, was restored for the 1999 Theatre Kingston production, and Thompson has since then included the scene in published editions of the play as one of two alternative versions. ''Sled'' (1997), which began life as a seven-hour play called ''The Last Things'', but was later cut down to three hours, attempts again to pursue human violence back to its sources. Thompson first wrote Perfect Pie as a short monologue for television in 1993, but in 2000 expanded the story into full-length play about two teenaged girls whose lives diverge dramatically after a violent incident. In 2002, ''Perfect Pie'' was also made into a feature film of that name, which, while satisfying in itself, offered a more conventional version of the uncanny story told in Thompson's play. ''Habitat'', which premiered in 2001 at CanStage , the major regional theatre in Toronto, shows how a middle-class community is torn apart into factions when a group home for troubled youth is established on a quiet residential street. ''Capture Me'', which premiered in early 2004 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, is centred on a kindergarten teacher who, while searching for her birth mother, is stalked by her violent ex-husband. In 1991, she adapted and directed Henrik Ibsen 's '' Hedda Gabler '' for the Shaw Festival . Her translation of Serge Boucher 's ''Motel Hélène'' appeared at the Tarragon Theatre in 2001. Thompson's work embraces visceral and subconscious elements of human experience which are seldom seen on stage. While the ambitiousness of her scope can occasionally result in plays which seem somewhat unwieldy in their form, she has an astonishing gift for providing theatrical experiences which incisively reach the deepest recesses of her audience's imaginations. In 2005, she was made an Officer of the Order Of Canada . She is currently a professor at the University Of Guelph , where she teaches acting and playwriting courses. MAJOR WORKS BY THOMPSON
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