While in a mask class at NTS, Thompson developed the character of Theresa, inspired by a young woman she had met while working as an assistant social worker during one summer in Kingston, Ontario.

This character was to provide the core of Thompson's first play The Crackwalker (1980), which focuses on four people struggling with economic hardship, anger issues resulting in domestic abuse, and patronizing societal attitudes.

It is also a brilliant piece of stagecraft that makes use of every well-chosen word and powerfully dramatic moment to force audience members to confront their own darker sides.

Lion in the Streets (1990) uses a structure similar to Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde to follow violent and cruel impulses from one character to another, a route which the ghost of a young murdered girl, Isobel, uses to track down her killer.

Productions of the play have been held in a wide variety of North American locations, including Toronto, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Vancouver, but also Łódź, Poland.

Sled (1997), which began life as a seven-hour play called The Last Things, but was later cut down to three hours, attempts again to pursue human violence back to its sources.

Thompson first wrote Perfect Pie as a short monologue for television in 1993, but in 2000 expanded the story into full-length play about two teenaged girls whose lives diverge dramatically after a violent incident.

In 2002, Perfect Pie was also made into a feature film of that name, which, while satisfying in itself, offered a more conventional version of the uncanny story told in Thompson's play.

Habitat, which premiered in 2001 at CanStage, the major regional theatre in Toronto, shows how a middle-class community is torn apart into factions when a group home for troubled youth is established on a quiet residential street.

Capture Me, which premiered in early 2004 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, is centred on a kindergarten teacher who, while searching for her birth mother, is stalked by her violent ex-husband.

She wrote and performed her play Watching Glory Die in 2014, premiering at The Cultch in Vancouver, and then produced at the Berkley Street Theatre later that year.

In the spring of 2015, Rare Theatre was awarded a Trillium grow grant, which has enabled the company to develop three new projects with differently abled and BIPOC artists.

The play is inspired by tragedies such as the death of Reteah Parsons, a Nova Scotia girl who was raped and then cyber bullied, and finally took her own life.

While the ambitiousness of her scope can occasionally result in plays which seem somewhat unwieldy in their form, she has an astonishing gift for providing theatrical experiences which incisively reach the deepest recesses of her audience's imaginations.