Renowned Stratford Festival commissions new Anne of Green Gables play

Toronto-based playwright Kat Sandler has been tapped to adapt Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 bestseller about an orphan who blossoms on Prince Edward Island for a 2025 audience.

That means whimsical Anne Shirley will be taking a trip from Avonlea to the Avon Theatre at the revered Stratford Festival in southwest Ontario, in a new non-musical theatrical production that will run from April to October. 

"I'm obsessed with it. I love it," Sandler said of Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables during an interview this week.

"I grew up with the audio cassettes … and the miniseries, so it's just such an honour to get to touch this piece of Canadiana that so many people have such beautiful, beautiful memories and experiences with."

She wants to share that love with a new generation not familiar with the story, some of whom lurk within her own family.

"My little sister was like, 'Oh, that's the girl from Newfoundland with the potatoes.' And I said, 'No, no, no, no, no, wrong on all counts.'" 

Back in 2016, Sandler received the Dora Mavor Moore Award for an outstanding new play for her work Mustard, about a troubled teen's strangely persistent imaginary friend. She is now the artistic director at Toronto's Theatre Brouhaha, and the latest of her 17 plays include BANG BANG and the double bill The Party and The Candidate.

So when Stratford Festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino's team started talking about commissioning a new play based on Anne of Green Gables, "Kat Sandler was one of the first people that was mentioned," said Keith Barker.

Barker's the director of the Foerster Bernstein New Play Development Program at Stratford, carrying out the mission of negotiating and nurturing original theatre projects for the festival. So he got in touch with Sandler.

"The first moment I spoke to her, she was like a superfan and started talking about [how] she read all the books and how much she loved it," he said of Sandler's reaction to hearing the words "Anne of Green Gables" come out of his mouth. 

"It was just a perfect marriage."

The Canadian copyright for Montgomery's most famous work of fiction ended in 1992, leaving the book in the public domain in terms of adaptations. But the lack of copyright fees to be paid was a small part of the decision to take another look at Anne, Barker said. 

"We're also really excited around the idea of bringing families into theatres," he said, and the ability "to have a new take on it while still honouring its East Coast roots." 

Sandler's written a full draft of her version, and it's been workshopped during the process of ironing out kinks.