Michael Healey is a Canadian playwright and actor.
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Life and career
He graduated from the acting programme at Toronto's Ryerson Theatre School in 1985.
Healey trained as an actor at Toronto's Ryerson Theatre School in the mid-eighties. He began writing for the stage in the early nineties and his first play, a solo one-act called Kicked, was produced at the Fringe of Toronto Festival in 1996. He subsequently toured the play across Canada and Australia, and in 1998 it won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Original Play (Independent Theatre).
The Drawer Boy, his first full-length play, premiered in Toronto in 1999 and won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play, a Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, and the Governor General's Award for English-language drama. It has been produced across North America and internationally, and has been translated into German, French, and Japanese. It was adapted into a film in 2017.
His other plays include The Road to Hell (co-authored with Kate Lynch), Plan B, Rune Arlidge, The Innocent Eye Test, The Nuttals, and Are You Okay? From 2008 to 2012 he created a trilogy of plays about Canadian values and politics, entitled Generous, Courageous, and Proud. His plays have won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Original Play (General Theatre) five times in total.
He has also adapted works by George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, Ferenc Molnár, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
Michael Healey has several TV acting credits, including a regular role as lawyer James Ryder on the CBC comedy-drama This Is Wonderland. His stage acting credits include the plays of Jason Sherman (The League of Nathans, Reading Hebron, and Three in the Back, Two in the Head) and George F. Walker (The End of Civilization and Better Living).
Plays
1996: Kicked
1999: The Road to Hell: Two One-Act Comedies, with Kate Lynch
1999: The Drawer Boy
2002: Plan B
2004: Rune Arlidge
2006: The Innocent Eye Test
2007: Generous
2010: Courageous
2011: The Nuttalls
2011: Are You Okay?
2012: Proud
2017: 1979
2023: The Master Plan
2025: Rogers v. Rogers
