John Demmery Green

John Demmery Green (BFA'12) is a playwright currently based in London, England.

Born in Toronto, he later moved with his family to Victoria, BC. A graduate of the University of Victoria's Theatre and Writing departments, John's first produced work, Revenge in the Countryside, won the Young Playwrights Festival (Kaleidoscope) in 2006. In 2008 a second play, Area Code 419, Africa Calling, was produced in the same festival.

At UVic's Phoenix Theatre in 2010, John directed the premiere of his play Three Angry Pigs, a short, comic twist on the classic folktale, produced by the Student Alternative Theatre Company (SATCo). This was later followed by student productions of his plays Enlighten-mints and The Rakshasi.

In 2011, John founded Da Vinci's Kitchen Dramatick Theatre Productions Companie (sic) with fellow Phoenix alumnus Graham Roebuck. Their first production debuted at the 2012 Victoria Fringe Festival. A double-bill titled Awkward Hangouts of History, John wrote and directed the first play of the two, The Flying Corporals, a humourously dark reimagining of a factual state flight taken by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini over the Eastern Front in 1941.

Da Vinci's Kitchen's most recent full production, The Occupied Mind of Mr. K., appeared in 2013's Victoria Fringe. Previously workshopped in Intrepid Theatre's YOU Show series, the play concerns the bizarre scheme of three down-and-out friends to use psychic meditation techniques to take over the brain of Michael Karabatsos, a recently-deceased billionaire.

In November 2014 Da Vinci's Kitchen joined forces with Fair Vote Canada in a series of staged readings of John's new play Hubris in Athens. The play, set in 4th Century BC Greece, is a ribald, satirical story of democracy pro-rogued and justice left undone, with more than a few winks at Canada's own political dysfunction. One particular subplot focuses on problems of (mis)representation in democracies and the urgent need for electoral reform.

John most recently staged a new work, titled Kit Marlowe is Dead Again. The play is a historical dramatization of the facts and mysteries surrounding the life and death of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, along with his friendships with fellow "play-makers" Thomas Kyd and William Shakespeare. The first public reading of the play took place December 2015 in Deptford, south London, just minutes from Marlowe's final resting place in St. Nicholas churchyard.