By Liz Nicholls, .ca
A rush of new Canadian plays is happening this week in this theatre town. And the timing couldn’t be better for a made-in-Canada festival.
With the return Tuesday of Springboards, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s signature new play festival, comes our annual chance to experience all-Canadian works-in-progress at every stage of their development en route to opening night.
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Their creators are playwrights at every stage in their careers, beginners to emerging writers to veteran Canadian stars. And their new work will get staged readings of every size, and breathe their first public air, in a cabaret setting at the Gateway Theatre.
For the two dozen playwrights in this year’s edition of Springboards, it’s an indispensable chance to see and hear their ideas brought to life by actors and directors, with design suggestions, in front of an audience. For us, the audience, it’s an invitation — “a backstage pass,” as Workshop West artistic director Heather Inglis has often said — to the world of creation, where ideas get hatched, honed, reworked. And not only that, to be part of the creative process, by engaging with artists up close, responding, offering feedback. As the Springboards archive attests, it’s a first glimpse at plays-in-the-making that may well end up in a mainstage season. Conni Massing’s Dead Letter and Stephen Massicotte’s Stars On Her Shoulders, for example, both found their initial footing at Springboards.
“A script isn’t a play,” says Inglis. “It’s a recipe for a play.” And it’s a recipe that includes an audience. As playwright Beth Graham puts it, Springboards is the introduction of 3-D, “the lift-off from the page into the third dimension.” Graham’s new play Amber Hope Porter, which gets a staged reading Wednesday directed by Annette Loiselle (with actors Melissa MacPherson, Cody Porter, Meegan Sweet), is one of the festival’s quartet of most stage-ready offerings.
playwright Beth Graham
One of the country’s premium playwrights, Graham (Mermaid Legs, The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, Pretty Goblins, Weasel) says of her latest that it began as an idea for a mother/teen daughter play, at the Citadel Playwriting Unit in 2014. “It’s one of my first plays ever that’s not a memory play…. It happens in real time.” She imagines a stage divided between two apartments. The title teenager and her newly divorced mother move into one. In the other lives a widower in his ‘40s. An unlikely friendship between the teen and widower develops, along with dramatic complications. “I think I’m playing with loneliness, and how it seems to be growing, blossoming, blooming in our time,” says Graham. “And also loss. How it affects our lives and how we interact with people…. I wanted to explore divorce, the pain of it that isn’t always recognized.”
“It’s been a good thing for me to try moment-to-moment realism,” Graham thinks. “And also to experiment with space.” Springboards comes at an auspicious moment for the new play. “It feels like a great step. I have the play, and now I can hear it from actors’ mouths, with their feedback and questions. And I can listen with everyone and see how the audience experiences it, what kinds of questions they have, what everybody’s taking in.”
playwright Darrin Hagen, whose new play Pansies gets a staged reading at Springboards, Workshop West. Photo supplied
At a Springboards staged reading, the director’s goal, Inglis thinks, is “to show the playwright more of their play,” what it is, what it might be. Inglis herself directs Tuesday’s staged reading of Darrin Hagen’s nine-actor new play Pansies, a theatrical tour of the locales and stars of the Pansy craze that swept Prohibition era New York City. It was a vibrant culture that embraced queer and gender-fluid performers, and made them stars — in bars and on Broadway stages, in vaudeville and music halls. In the end it was lost to homophobia. Hagen first brought his research to life onstage in The Pansy Cabaret, at the 2022 Fringe. Now it’s expanded and evolved into a large-scale play. “The period mirrors the Weimar age,” says Inglis, “an age of sexual experiment, vibrant lively nightlife, lots of drag and cross-gender characters.”
Actor/ playwright/ composer/ musician Andrea House takes on the Mae West role for the reading, a co-presentation of Workshop West and the U of A drama department. Her cast-mates include Jason Hardwick, Jake Tkaczyk, Davina Stewart, Caley Suliak, Doug Mertz, Josh Travnik, Michael Watt, and D’orjay.
Natalie Meisner’s SubHuman, Saturday night’s offering, its its inspiration from a true story of the 1980s, in which highly trained Canadian military officers, tasked with protecting the country’s eastern seaboard from Russian submarines, were fired — for being lesbians. Lana Michelle Hughes directs; her cast includes Nadien Chu, Stephanie Wolfe, Michelle Todd, David Ley, and Paul Morgan Donald.
Gifted is by Lynda Celentano, an experienced writer of prose who’s taken up theatre in a big way. Her new play concerns the intricacies of a friendship between two girls. And the Springboards reading on Friday is directed by Amanda Bergen, with a cast that includes Sophie May Healey, Abby McDougall, Robyn Clark, Garett Ross, Michele Fleiger, Kaeley Jade Wiebe, and Hayley Moorhouse,
The festival lineup includes two cabarets. For the annual EdmonTEN, Thursday, the Alberta Playwright Network has chosen five new 10-minute plays by both seasoned and emerging playwrights. This year’s pieces in this hugely challenging form are by Nicole Moeller, Lily Davies, Gavin Bradley Evelyn Rollans, and Stephanie Swensrude. Amy DeFelice directs.
The Springboards Sunday night grand finale, as always a hot ticket, is a freewheeling and unpredictable cabaret featuring excerpts from new plays, interspersed with new music. This year’s edition of the Springboards Cabaret, live CanCon at its most exuberant, is curated by Darrin Hagen and directed by Brian Deedrick.
Springboards New Play Festival runs Tuesday through Sunday at the Gateway Theatre. Tickets and a detailed schedule: workshopwest.org. All tickets at Workshop West are pay-what-you-will.
