DWELL was created in a collaborative process to explore the theme of “home” through movement, text, narrative, and imagery. Examining themes of belonging and displacement through a Jewish lens, this piece explored the ways our private lives overlap and intersect with those of our neighbours in urban living, sharing the many unique stories contained within a community.
In researching and creating this work, experienced professional dancers of diverse abilities joined with members of the JCC Inclusion Program, serving adults with mental health challenges and developmental disabilities to explore the personal movement language of the project contributors through a choreographic process that values community, difference, and care.
DWELL was supported by a grant from the Betty Averbach Foundation.
Photo Credits: Flick Harrison
Nancy Chaulk’s Alzheimer’s is progressing and so her son Evan, who was born with Cerebral Palsy, finds himself leaving Canada’s west coast. Along with his new wife, Sarah, he returns to his fundamentally wheelchair-inaccessible home in Newfoundland — where Nancy must face an uncertain future, and Evan and Sarah must find their places in it.
Set against the backdrop of a Newfoundland family Christmas – steeped in tradition and treacherous winter weather – Lights is about making room for change: in family, health, perspective, and each other. Audiences join Evan, Nancy, and Sarah days before Christmas Eve, as they lose some common ground, find more, and struggle to accept the times and places where there may be none.
Produced by Touchstone Theatre
Directed by Roy Surette
Featuring Susinn McFarlen, Adam Grant Warren, and Leslie Dos Remedios
In the media: Stir Vancouver, CBC On The Coast, VancouverPlays
Photo Credit: David Cooper
As part of Vancouver’s Artstarts in Schools Program, All Bodies Dance Project created this touring show designed to inspire the celebration of diversity, difference, and the power of the moving body.
The show engages young audiences in activities, demonstrations, and conversations designed to explore the connections between people of all abilities — to uncover what each unique dancing body has to say. Addressing themes of communication, expression, and connection, See & Be Seen uses foundational skills in contemporary dance and improvisation to challenge the image of the “normal” body and leave viewers with new ideas of what it means to be included, to move, and to be moved.
As part of the touring team, Adam appeared in British Columbia schools throughout 2019.
Photo Credit: Chris Randle
Originally developed with the assistance of a New Chapter grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, Translations was an integrated dance performance aimed at exploring a multi-sensory approach to the experience of dance for audiences that include patrons with low-vision or blindness.
Through its long development process, and thanks to extensive collaboration with consultants from Vancouver’s blind and low-vision community, Translations emerged as an intimate performance for audiences of ten audience members wearing sleep masks… and a cast of eleven dancers drawing on text, airflow, and the soundscape of the moving body.
From Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour comes an audacious new theatrical experiment. Each night a different performer joins the playwright on stage, while the script waits unseen in a sealed box…
Touchingly autobiographical yet powerfully universal, it is a striking theatrical demonstration of how language can both divide and unite us.
Direct from playing to sold-out audiences around the globe and a successful run in New York. NASSIM follows Soleimanpour’s globally acclaimed White Rabbit, Red Rabbit.
Tickets at thecultch.com/events/nassim
Photo Credit: Studio Doug
In October of 2018, Adam appeared as Joey in Touchstone Theatre’s production of Kill Me Now, Brad Fraser’s “frank, fearless, and ferociously funny” play that follows the Sturdy family as they “consider the possibility of saying goodbye”.
Father, Jake Sturdy (Bob Fraser), is a single dad and cares for his teenage son, Joey (Adam Grant Warren), who has a severe disability. But when Jake develops a serious medical condition of his own, he becomes the one to rely on the people around him, and Joey suddenly finds himself thrust into the position of care partner. An ethical dilemma troubles the household as the picture of Jake’s future with Joey suddenly changes and the realities of illness — and of love — settle on the Sturdys.
Directed by Roy Surette
Written by Brad Fraser
Featuring: Bob Frazer, Adam Grant Warren, Braiden Houle, Luisa Jojic, Corina Akeson
For critical reviews, visit the media page.
Last Train In is drawn from Adam’s lived experience. It is not, however, a typical story of disability and triumph over adversity. It is not about finding a way despite overwhelming odds. Instead, it’s about travel, romance, career expectations, and the all-too-human tendency to… embellish.
Moving back and forth in time, Last Train In follows Adam through his first year as a high school teacher in a small town outside of London, England – a year that ends with Adam literally trapped in a UK train station, between two flights of stairs and without an elevator, for over an hour. That’s where audiences find him at the opening of the play. Because now, almost ten years later, there is still a part of him that’s trying to leave that station behind.
CREEPS premiered at Toronto’s Factory Theatre in 1971. In the more than 40 years since, Real Wheels Theatre's Vancouver production was the first in Canada to bring together a cast of professional actors – with and without disabilities – in order to capture the play’s stirring portrayal of life for people with disabilities in the “sheltered workshops” of the time.
Adam played the role of Jim Harris. For more about the production and its critical reception, visit the Media page.
Photo Credit: Tim Matheson
The follow-up to 2015’s See & Be Seen, TRACE featured Adam in a number of pieces, including his own: InTerruPted. For more from TRACE – segments from InTerruPted, Verbatim, and other selections – check out the show’s teaser video via a link on the Media page.
Photo Credit: Chris Randle
Adam has worked on a number of films as either writer or director. But Conocerlos marks his first production as both.
This short film takes a broader look at the notion of barriers: in language, communication, culture, disability, and family. It follows young couple, Jared and Maya, as they find out what can happen when all of those barriers are in place in a single house, on a single night, over a single dinner with family.
Conocerlos was produced with the assistance of the British Columbia Arts Council, and it earned Adam a BC Film Award nomination for Best Screenwriting. In the role of Luz, Gabriela Reynoso Cerecero was also nominated for Best Female Performance.
Image Credit: Kenneth Lau
Originally created in 2015 for Kickstart Arts’ Mouthpiece performances, Verbatim was (and is) a joint effort between Adam and his collaborating partner, Naomi Brand. The piece, which still shows quite frequently, is an examination of place, space, connection, and isolation within community. It’s a balance of original text and movement, and finding that balance – where both text and movement were necessary to the piece as a whole – was one of the most satisfying challenges Adam has ever taken on with a partner.
Photo Credit: Chris Randle
I Love Mondays follows lead characters, George and Peggy, though a friendship that grows over a deceptively simple series of Monday afternoon chats. The play has been performed to critical acclaim throughout much of Canada, but Theatre Terrific’s 2015 production was the first to feature an inclusive cast of professional actors – including Jonah Killoran, who played the lead role of George.
Like his character, Jonah is cognitively different, and the choice to cast him as George led to a singularly honest and forthright production of the play that both honored the source material and spoke to the need for genuine representation of character and experience in theatre-making practice. Adam was proud to appear alongside Jonah and the rest of the ILM cast.
As Adam’s second production with Theatre Terrific, I Love Mondays deepened his appreciation – and expanded his toolkit – for the making of inclusive theatre.
Photo Credit: Alanna Milaney
Co-created in collaboration with the members of the Theatre Terrific company and its Artistic Director, Susanna Uchatius, Stuffed asked its audiences to think about what was most important to them. Though a collection of personal stories as told by the performers, the show set out to boil a society lost in its quest for material possession down to a handful of personally significant objects. In the end, its creators and its audiences alike found that those things held most important were rarely, if ever, the things they’d expected.
Stuffed marked Adam’s first experience in community-devised, inclusive theatre. That experience continues to influence and inform his professional practice to-date.
Photo Credit: D.M. Gillis
Late in 2011, Adam happened to be sharing a tiny office with some of the most talented creatives in Vancouver. One day, the office internet went down. No email, no social media, nothing. For the kinds of people Adam typically shares offices with, small spaces and no internet connectivity usually result in things like… breaking into song!
Someone hummed a few lines. Someone else hummed a few more. And pretty soon they realized they could write a musical that centered around the awkwardness of office romance in the age of electronic communication. So they did. And it went on to win Pipedream Theatre a "Pick of the Fringe" award, with Adam as director and librettist.
As long ago as it went up, Adam still considers CAPS LOCK one of the best things he’s ever been part of in the city.
Image Credit: Kristian Guilfoyle
Produced with funding from the BRAVO Foundation for the Assistance of Canadian Talent, Float follows Tom Preston (Ben Ratner) and his wife, Judy (Nancy Sivak). Tom is afraid of water, but with Judy’s help, he finally makes it into the pool, where his first swimming lesson quickly becomes a lesson in living without his wife – in keeping her with him, while staying afloat all on his own.
Adam wrote the screenplay for Float. It was directed by Juan Riedinger, and in 2012 it took home the honors for Best Canadian Short at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Image Credit: Tony Mirza