Second-year Concordia student Justin Hebert won the English Department Drama Award in 2018.
“It’s just a relief to have people who are reputable in this field of work acknowledge your writing, tell you that you’re good and that you have a lot of potential in, basically, your dream field of work,” he says.
Hebert’s drama explores the complicated nature of family. “It’s about the relationship between a young, troubled, violent son and his estranged father, and how they’ve been forced under unfortunate circumstances to live together again,” he says. “It’s about the conflict that arises from that forced living situation. And it’s about addiction, largely, and gambling and substance abuse.”
Although the plot may sound dark, Hebert says it’s a little bit more lighthearted than one would expect. “It’s not too dark — it’s more of a dark comedy than anything, if you can imagine,” he says.
Hebert is majoring in creative writing at Concordia and hopes to pursue a career in writing for the screen. “I ideally want to go into screenwriting, working in television or film,” he says.
After a summer internship at a video production company, Hebert is one step closer to achieving his goal. “For my internship, I did the storyboarding and scriptwriting. It’s definitely a foot in the door and having a little bit of background in playwriting definitely helps in terms of actually throwing a script together, understanding dialogue and understanding space,” he says.
“It’s all been extremely helpful and I am extremely grateful to Concordia for offering the program.”