Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre is mounting four plays this season based on CanLit titles. From left: A Fine Balance, All’s Well, Fall On Your Knees, and Rogers v. Rogers. (Image courtesy Crow’s Theatre)

This week, Toronto-based theatre company Crow’s Theatre opens their 2026–2027 season with a play whose title may be familiar to Canadian readers: a stage adaptation of Rohinton Mistry’s 1995 Giller Prize-winning novel A Fine Balance.

The play, adapted from the book by Anosh Irani, is the first of four page-to-stage adaptations Crow’s Theatre is mounting this season through its Canadian Literature Adaptation Fund. The fund, which Crow’s Theatre launched in 2022, was a way to create work that would get audiences excited about theatre-going after theatres had been closed for months during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“We were in the midst of an existential crisis – would the theatre be able to come back from 18 months of closure? We were trying to think deeply and in an open-ended way about what we could do that would recharge, reignite people’s passion for theatre-going,” artistic and general director Chris Abraham says. “The thesis was there was this really exciting and widely loved [intellectual property] out in the world that audiences, readers, theatre-goers, and non-theatregoers had profound emotional connections to, and that could be a part of our strategy of coming back after the pandemic.” 

Crow’s approached the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation with a proposal to start the fund, and set about undertaking the work to bring existing Canadian literature to the stage and see whether this thesis was valid. 

The first stage adaptation was of André Alexis’s novel Fifteen Dogs, which won Canada Reads in 2017 as well as the 2015 Giller and Writers’ Trust Fiction prizes, by Marie Farsi, who also directed the production. First performed in January 2023, the play was an instant hit. 

“We optioned the book, commissioned the adaptation, and we found out immediately that we were right,” Abraham says. “Readers who loved the book came to see the show in unprecedented numbers. The run sold out more or less before it opened. That was validation, and we started to option more books and commission more adaptations.”

Subsequent projects undertaken through the fund were based on nonfiction titles: 2023’s The Master Plan, an adaptation by Michael Healey of Josh O’Kane’s book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, and last year’s Rogers v. Rogers, an adaptation of Alexandra Posadzki’s 2025 National Business Book Award–winning Rogers v. Rogers:The Battle for Control of Canada’s Telecom Empire, also by Michael Healey. 

This season, Crow’s lineup includes the adaptation of Mistry’s award-winning novel as well as three more plays based on Canadian literary works: All’s Well, an adaptation by Erin Shields of Mona Awad’s 2022 novel of the same name; a new production of Anne Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees, co-created by Hannah Moscovitch and Alisa Palmer, which premiered in 2023 as a co-production by four Canadian theatres; and a second run of Rogers v. Rogers. 

The inclusion of four page-to-stage works this season is partly the result of serendipitous timing – adapting a work for the stage can be a months- or years-long process, and it’s not always clear how long it will take, Abraham says – but also a choice to make the most of the current geopolitical situation.

“My whole career as a theatre director has been in part to try and convince audiences that Canadian work, Canadian plays matter, and that reflecting our own experience back to ourselves is a really important thing that artists do,” Abraham says. “We’ve noticed, since Trump has begun to make threats to our sovereignty and trade, that audiences have been much more interested in Canadian stories, so when we were programming last year, this felt like a moment to lean into that appetite and give it a shot.”

This decision has already paid dividends: subscriptions for the theatre’s 2026–2027 season, which opened on August 25 and runs to June 2027, had doubled as of mid-August, and Abraham is confident they may sell out the entire season. 

The adaptations are also making their way to stages beyond Toronto: Crow’s Theatre will be touring Rogers v. Rogers nationally this season, including runs in Vancouver and Ottawa, and it will tour All’s Well in 2027. The Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg and Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary are mounting new productions of Fifteen Dogs this season. 

Crow’s Theatre is looking ahead to more adaptations in the future: work is already underway on 10 more Canadian books, with two more titles to be confirmed next month. To support the adaptation work – the optioning, commissioning, production, and touring – they are planning to launch a $2.5-million fundraising campaign to replenish the Canadian Literature Adaptation Fund. Abraham estimates this will allow the adaptation work to continue for the next three to five years. 

The success of these homegrown works is not typical – over the course of his career, Abraham says that programming Canadian plays has typically been the riskier choice instead of selecting Tony Award– or Pulitzer Prize–winning works by American or British playwrights. But over the last few years, as Crow’s Theatre has programmed these stage adaptations of Canadian books, that pattern has changed. 

“It doesn’t matter the awards or the pedigree that the American or British plays bring to Crow’s Theatre, they do okay, but any time we have done a project through our CanLit [Adaptation Fund] we have explosive sales,” Abraham says. “That is so exciting for us, especially for those of us that have been trying to find a way to champion [Canadian work] and find a hook for audiences. We just don’t have to work that hard, and that’s been really hope-inducing about where we are culturally. 

“Canadians really do have a hunger to have their own myths, their own current affairs, their own beloved literary experiences reflected back at them in new ways.”