The Pacific Shaw Festival was a Canadian west coast offshoot of the Shaw Festival and was sponsored by the Coconut Theatre Society in Vancouver. It lasted for one season, 1990-1991.
The Papec Machine Company was founded in 1901 in Lima, New York by Billy Hamlin. The company's full name is Pneumatic and Propeller Ensilage Company. After licensing a patented ensilage cutter/filler from the Paris Plow Co., the company grew very quickly. In 1909 they relocated to a larger premises in Shortsville. With additional room, they were able to expand their catalogue of agricultural machinery.
The Pedlar People Limited was a sheet metal stamping company that was founded by Henry Pedlar in 1861, in Oshawa, Ontario. The original location was at the back of Pedlars hardware store. The company was expanded by his son, George H. Pedlar, to be one of the largest sheet metal factories in the British Empire. The company was in operation until 1982 when it was forced into receivership.
Penguin Theatre (aka Penguin Productions) was founded in Ottawa in 1976 by Artistic Director Don Bouzek and Production Manager Al Cushing. The company's mandate centered on “intimacy and innovation” while working in small spaces to allow interaction between the audience and performers.
The core group that developed this company had a history of working together in the Ottawa area under other theatre organization titles, like SPACE Theatre and Sequitur Theatre. The company produced Canadian works, recent international plays, and modern classics while exploring the concept of intimate performance space. It also developed Canadian created plays and productions, while primarily supporting the innovations of Ottawa’s artistic community. They moved towards a mixture of programming with high production values.
The company was originally offered an artist-in-residency with the Ottawa Separate School board and paid minimal rent for performance and administrative space, in exchange for mentoring the youth and providing theatrical education opportunities. The company promoted audience development through the education system and touring school productions. These community involvement efforts were supported by the government through grant funding.
For the first two years, each show operated on a minimal budget of with artists essentially volunteering their time. During the 1978/1979 season, the company became financially stable enough to make equity payments to the artists. They were the first of the small theatre 70s groups to become fully professional. The company operated out of two venues and began fundraising efforts to replace one of the theatres with a larger theatre space in a more financially viable section of town. The new space would feature touring productions and season productions, while the smaller theatre space could continue to produce workshop productions while renting the space to local emerging artists and companies.
Despite the positive community intentions that quickly established Penguin Theatre as a vital producer in Ottawa, private company affairs led to an artistic shift in 1980. Private documentation shows that Don Bouzek was forced to resign as Artistic Director, despite his integral contributions to the founding and advancement of Penguin Theatre.
The company press releases claimed the board was uncomfortable with making a financial commitment to a new space. Despite claims to remain devoted to their artistic mandate, they also stated their intentions to shift away from their established community-oriented activities to focus on the bilingual nature of Ottawa instead. Numerous planned productions were cancelled due to this “financial” decision. The board’s decision proved disastrous. By 1983, the company had closed.
The Percival Plow & Stove Company was founded in 1887 by Roger Croft Percival and his son Harvey, as a reorganization of the Magee and Pearson Foundry Co. By 1913 the company employed 100 men. In 1916 the business was sold to the P.T. Legare Co., Ltd. of Quebec CIty. In 1993 the ownership was acquired by Karl & Linda Feige and the name was changed to Alloy Foundry.
The Perkins Engines Limited company is a primarily diesel engine manufacturer for various different markets, including agricultural, construction, material handling, power generation, and industrial. It was founded by Frank Perkins and Charles Wallace Chapman in 1932 in Peterborough, England. Since 1998, it has been a subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc.
The Peter Hamilton Manufacturing Company was established in 1848 in Peterborough, Ontario. The company produced a range of agricultural implements, including cultivators, reapers, and threshers.
After being founded by Keith Digby in Edmonton in 1981, Phoenix Theatre's first venue was situated in the Student Union Building of the University of Alberta. It focused on Canadian works like those by John Gray and Harvey Fierstein. Eventually, Phoenix Theatre settled in the Kaasa Theatre in the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium but also began to do experimental work in a small venue in Edmonton. The company ceased operations in 1993.
Play Actors operated out of Toronto from 1953-1958.
Playwrights Guild of Canada is a national association mandated to advance the creative rights and interests of professional Canadian playwrights, promote Canadian plays nationally and internationally, and foster an active, evolving community of writers for the stage. Originally called the Playwrights Circle in 1971 and the Playwrights Co-op by 1972, by 1979 it was known as Playwrights Canada. A number of its members founded the Guild of Canadian Playwrights in order to protect Canadian works and improve the status of Canadian Playwrights in Canada and abroad. By 1984, the Co-op and Guild came together to form the Playwrights Union of Canada. Incorporated as a for-profit publishing company in 2002, it’s changed to its current name, the Playwrights Guild of Canada.