By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Think big. That’s the not-secret agenda of the festival that returns to the Citadel Friday. The Collider Fest, named for the collision of artists and forms, is all about developing new plays for size large and x-large performance mainstages, here and in the big wide Elsewhere.
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As associate artistic director Mieko Ouchi points out, that’s a part of the theatre ecology that the Citadel is uniquely positioned to support and nurture, a niche not occupied by Edmonton’s smaller theatres and indies. “We didn’t want to replicate what other theatres do very well,” she says.
Chosen for the readings are five new scripts poised for future productions on larger stages. The line-up for the four-year-old festival includes readings of two plays commissioned by the Citadel. One is an adaptation — “a fresh new take” as Ouchi puts it — on Cyrano de Bergerac, the Edmond Rostand classic, where wordplay meets swordplay. Playwright Jessy Ardern has retained the 17th century Paris setting, and in an homage to the dexterous verse form of the original adapted it entirely in rhyming couplets. As Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran has said, it has an appealing “contemporary resonance.” Amanda Goldberg directs the Collider reading that opens the festival Friday. And her production is the grand finale (May 2 to 24, 2026) of the Citadel’s upcoming 60th anniversary season.
The other Citadel commission is from playwright Mac Brock (Boy Trouble), the managing producer of the Common Ground Arts Society. And it’s especially created for the Citadel’s Young Company, a pre-professional teen ensemble training program. A cast of a dozen or so will play characters their own age, the 16 to 21 range, in a prairie story of “two siblings investigating the disappearance of their mother,” as Ouchi describes. The goal of the commission includes “helping young people discover how to approach new work.” The June 22 reading is led by Mel Bahniuk.
Collin Doyle’s new play The Riverside Seniors Village Theatrical Society Presents: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet gets a Collider reading June 21. “A really funny, very charming script,” as Ouchi describes, “that takes us backstage, into auditions and rehearsals at a seniors’ drama club that’s decided to put on Romeo and Juliet.” A “somewhat former” actor-turned-librarian gets talked into directing the show by her aging auntie. And the backstage collision of egos, bodies, and faulty memories in a story about young love, is a rich vein of heart-tugging comedy, says Ouchi who directs the reading.
In this the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, Katherine Koller’s adaptation of Persuasion gets a reading at the festival June 21 at 2 p.m. The Edmonton playwright is an expert on all things Jane. And among Koller’s preparations for creating the script designed for a cast of 10”, she toured every location mentioned in Austen’s sprawling final novel, published in 1817. And there were a lot. The biggest challenge was “distilling key moments, key scenes,” says Ouchi. Workshop West’s Heather Inglis directs the Collider reading, co-presented by Script Salon.
Nowhere With You: An East Coast Musical, by Calgary-based playwright James Odin Wade, is “another approach to adaptation,” Ouchi says. Wade, who’s originally from the Maritimes, culls from the songbook of the well-known singer-songwriter Joel Plaskett.
Citadel associate artistic director Mieko Ouch. Photo supplied
As Ouchi (who directs the reading) describes, at the centre of Nowhere With You is a musician who’s stalled and looking for renewed creative energy. He returns to his hometown of Halifax, and to his parents’ garage where his career really began in jam sessions, to be with his people and find that spark. The homecoming is complicated by relationships with his relatives, his friends, an ex-lover. Wade’s musical is designed for a cast of actor-musicians, says Ouchi, who directs the reading. And Plaskett’s music invites theatre artistry because “his hallmark is that his songs are incredibly conversational…. They flow beautifully from text into song, and back into text.”
Tapping “original source material, with the extra hook of being somewhat familiar to audiences” is something of a theatre trend happening across the country,” says Ouchi of the appeal of adaptations. Which is why Collider includes a workshop on that subject, led by Amiel Gladstone (Onegin). Beth Graham and Ainsley Hillyard, collaborators on Mermaid Legs, lead a workshop on “equitable devising with choreography and playwriting.”
Full schedule of Collider Festival events: citadeltheatre.com. The readings are free; donations are welcome at the door.
