By Liz Nicholls,
Make yourself at home, people; you’re already at the theatre. All you have to do is step outside your door, and it’s showtime in your own personal venue.
Theatre Yes, specialists in theatre that happens in unusual configurations in unusual places, will bring three new 20-minute Canadian plays, by a trio of up-and-coming playwrights, to you — on location, at your place May 20 to June 1. The Doorstep Plays are custom-tailored for your own backyard.
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For a flat $150 fee, “you can invite as many people as you want. The Doorstep Plays can be just for you and your partner. Or if you want to have a whole garden party, you can,” says the ebullient Theatre Yes resident producer Monica Gate. “We don’t care! It’s a unique experience to each yard…. The audience has much impact on how the story is told as the actors do.”
Gate is, I venture to say, the only theatre producer in town who hears advance commentary from audiences like “I’ve prepared my deck!” or “I’ve picked up all my dog poop!” or “I’ve got a reverse-pie lot.” She says “it’s pretty endearing to see how excited people are.”
Each performance is BYOC (bring your own chair). “We don’t supply lawn chairs,” says Gate. “OR you can do ‘standing room only’, maybe leaning on your neighbour’s fence,” says veteran playwright Beth Graham, Gate’s partner in curating the submissions, mentoring the creative team and dramaturging the new Doorstep pieces by Mhairi Berg (Caw CAW), Sebastian Ley (WAR!), and Autumn Strom (Squirm).
And, hey, “you don’t have to worry about parking,” as she points out.
For the audience The Doorstep Plays is an unusual adventure in theatre accessibility. As for emerging artists, Gate “pitched it (to Theatre Yes co-artistic director Max Rubin and Ruth Alexander) as a mentorship opportunity…. There’s no warmer audience than the people who invite actors to their home. It’s a great opportunity to put emerging artists in front of audiences who want their work. It’s a unique, special, intimate relationship when artists are invited to people’s homes.” It’s no accident that support for the new project came from the Edmonton Arts Council’s “connections and exchanges” program. This is all about community. As Gate says, “so many people post-COVID don’t even know their neighbours! This is a great way to meet them.”
Theatre Yes’s call for submissions last year was an invitation to “emerging playwrights,” a descriptive which, for Theatre Yes, has nothing to do with age. As curators, Gate and Graham were looking for playwrights who’d never had a professional production of their work. They got 15 submissions in the first two weeks, and then months later, 20 more an hour before the midnight deadline one Sunday night. Thirty-five in all, and encompassing a wide variety of creative responses to the mandate: a 20-minute play with a cast of three actors.
“They were idea pitches,” says Graham. “Beth and I were looking for a proposal that made the best use of the space of a backyard,” says Gate. And choosing the trio for The Doorstep Plays, with a through-line that would link the three in some way as an evening’s entertainment, wasn’t easy.
“Three very different artists, three very different worlds,” says Graham of the Doorstep lineup, from an intimate two-hander to a wild and crazy HOA (Home Owners Association) meeting, to a three-girl set-up in the back country. And they’ve made very different imaginative uses of the backyard space.
Gate and Graham started working with the playwrights in October; there was a week-long workshop at the end of February. And the playwrights had till the end of April to make adjustments. Gate is still wonderstruck by “the level and the quality of the writing.”
The three actors — Sophie May Healey Meegan Sweet, Julia Van Dam — have risen impressively to the challenge of learning three characters in three different plays, and in record time (a two-week rehearsal period). “It takes a certain kind of actor to engage in this way,” says Graham of the unique Doorstep challenges, which include a different performance space for every single performance. “That’s the pain and the joy of it!” she smiles. “ Scary but an adrenaline kick.”
In addition to the emerging playwrights there’s an emerging director (Brett Dahl), and an emerging stage manager (Sarah Yorke) too. “I’m not an emerging producer,” says Gate of her career history on both sides of the Atlantic, which includes the extreme complications of community-building in Theatre Yes’s two-night sin which scenes were assigned to 20 Edmonton performance groups. “But this, The Doorstep Plays, were certainly an emerging dramaturgy project, to be working with playwrights in this way.”
She laughs. “I’ve just come to expect that working at Theatre Yes. Every project is something you’ve never done before. That’s the beauty of it…. Even if we do this again next year, it’s not going to be the same: three different stories and totally different challenges!”
Gate has her Doorstep mantra: “Go big or go to someone else’s home!”
PREVIEW
The Doorstep Plays
Theatre: Theatre Yes
Written by: Mhairi Berg, Sebastian Ley, Autumn Strom
Mentor and dramaturg: Monica Gate and Beth Graham
Produced by: Monica Gate
Directed by: Brett Dahl
Starring: Sophie May Healey, Meegan Sweet, Julia Van Dam
Where: your backyard
Running: May 20 to June 1
Further information and full schedule: theatreyes.com
Booking: email producer @theatreyes.com
