Building Houses
From the playwright who brought you Our Eliza and Falling Trees, Megan Gail Coles’ newest play Building Houses takes the stage this August at the Gros Morne Theatre Festival.
Mid summer 1828. Newfoundland is a British Colony maintaining undefined treaty rights with the French along the north coast where residents are labelled squatters by the crown.
Shanawdithit has been taken from her family and is being kept at a plantation house in St. John’s by European explorer staking his reputation on her cooperation. In the Straits, young Suzanna Williams is sent to live with her grandmother Hosanna while an Indigenous guide named John is tasked with searching for Beothuk on the Great Northern Peninsula.
A bold retelling of family, greed, resilience and grit, Building Houses asks you do reconsider what you believe about our shared origin story. And why.
The Driftwood Trilogy
Hot on the heels of 2025’s Falling Trees, comes Building Houses, the second installment in Coles’ Driftwood Trilogy!
Following a Great Northern Peninsula family through 200 years of colonial rule, each play stands firmly on its own while collectively examining the real and imagined histories of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Driftwood Trilogy calls into question what we have been taught as accurate, by whom and for what purpose as Coles asks the audience to reconsider the foundational narrative of this island and its first peoples. What do you believe to be true? Or rather, what do you think is most likely?
* Shanawdithit house image source: Digital Archives Initiative, courtesy of Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University Libraries.
The Driftwood Trilogy is a co-production with Theatre Newfoundland Labrador and Poverty Cove Theatre Company
Show Dates
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Project Details
Dates:
August 22nd – August 30th, 2026
By:
Megan Gail Coles
Directed by:
Emma Tibaldo
