• Age: 15 to 18
• Grade: 10 to 12

Controlled Damage explores the life of Canadian civil rights icon Viola Desmond and how her act of bravery in a Nova Scotia movie theatre in 1946 started a ripple effect that is still felt today. An ordinary woman forced to be extraordinary by an unyielding and racist world, Desmond never gave up -- despite the personal cost to her and those who loved her. Andrea Scott's highly theatrical examination of Desmond and her legacy traces the impact that she had on our culture, but also casts light on the slow progress of the fight for social justice and civil rights in Canada.

Andrea Scott’s play Eating Pomegranates Naked won the RBC Arts Professional Award and was named Outstanding Production at the 2013 SummerWorks Festival. Better Angels: A Parable won the SummerWorks Award for Outstanding Production. Both were published by Scirocco Drama in 2018. Don’t Talk to Me Like I’m Your Wife, which won the Cayle Chernin Award for theatre, ran at SummerWorks in 2016. 2019 saw her co-written play with Nick Green, Every Day She Rose wow audiences at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Her play about Viola Desmond, Controlled Damage, had its sold-out world premiere at Neptune Theatre in 2020 and will open at the Grand Theatre in 2022. She won the Magee Diversity Screenwriter’s Award for her first TV script, Dust to Dust. Her dark comedy Bad Habits landed her a job in the all Black writer’s room of The Porter (BET/CBC) which she followed up with snagging a spot pitching to Netflix with her supernatural drama Cassidy Must Die. 2021 saw her winning $10,000 from Amazon and the Indigenous Screen Office, pitching her coming-of-age dramedy DONE! She’s currently working in the writer’s room on the fifteenth season of Murdoch Mysteries while co-creating a one-hour drama for Sienna Films. She lives in Toronto.

Andrea Scott's profile page

There's so much interest in seeing Desmond's story dramatized that it's actually a tougher ticket to get than Hamilton. (The Globe and Mail)