The Manitoba Association of Playwrights has named the best locally-created theatre piece of this year’s Winnipeg Fringe Festival. 

Happy Valley, written by and starring Winnipeg theatre creator and disruptor Debbie Patterson, was named the 2026 winner of the Harry S. Rintoul Award at the festival’s conclusion on Sunday night. The award is presented annually by the association to the best new Manitoba-made theatre piece. 

A desolate, mined-out landscape with a couple of bare trees in it. The words Source: Winnipeg Fringe Festival.

 

Disability meets derision 

A solo stand-up-oriented show, Happy Valley featured Patterson telling her family story based in her hometown in northwestern Ontario which is widely considered to be one of the most polluted places on Earth due to mining operations. Patterson uses her trademark unabashed and caustic humour to share how mining practices and pollution impacted people in that community, including her.

“It’s a play about our bodies and the earth and disability and reconciliation,” Patterson said in an interview with Classic 107 earlier this month. “These are the things I love to talk about and things that I feel really intersect in really interesting ways.” 


 

The play marks one of the first projects in a new chapter for Patterson. Earlier this summer, the erstwhile performer and creator announced that she would be stepping down as artistic director of Sick + Twisted Theatre, the Winnipeg company creating space for performers of all abilities that she had led for over a decade. 

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Spotlighting local talent 

Happy Valley was chosen out of a field of six local works that were presented over the past two weeks. The nominees this year included Kevin Reid’s Unzipping the Cat, Sonya Ballantyne’s How Bono Saved My Life (Three Times), Logan Stefanson’s The Ghost of a Flea, and Dead Chef by brothers Cuinn and Connor Joseph, Ian Ingram and Monique Gauthier.

Two children stand in frustration with each other looking in opposite directions. An animated-style stained glass window larger than both of them looms in the background.The poster for ‘Our Father’ at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. (Source: Winnipeg Fringe Festival)

 

In addition to naming the winner, the Manitoba Association of Playwrights named Ethan Stark’s Our Father as an honourable mention. The play centres on a pair of estranged siblings who reunite to plan their father’s funeral, and marks the second time that Stark has received a Rintoul honourable mention. 

The award comes with a $750 cash prize, with $250 awarded to the honourable mention.