Marianne Ackerman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marianne Letitia Ackerman (born 1952) is a Canadian playwright, novelist, journalist.

Born in Belleville, Ontario, Ackerman received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science (Honours) from Carleton University in 1976. She spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris studying French language and culture before receiving a Master of Arts in Drama from the University of Toronto in 1981.

From the early 1980s, Ackerman lived in Montreal, where she worked as a freelance journalist and as theatre critic for the Montreal Gazette, winning the Nathan Cohen Award for theatre criticism.

In the late eighties, she founded a bilingual theatre company, Theatre 1774 which staged her plays L'Affaire Tartuffe, Woman by a Window, Céleste and Blue Valentine as well as her adaptations of August Strindberg's Miss Julie and William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. The company also staged The Echo Project, a play developed by Robert Lepage from Anne Diamond's book of poetry, A Nun's Story and Ackerman worked with Lepage on Alienouidet, a play about the actor Edmund Kean in Canada. Ackerman subsequently wrote another play about Edmund Kean, called Venus of Dublin, which was staged at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal in 2000. Ackerman has also written a novel, Jump (2000).