Category: Interview

Matt Dy: Director of Script Competitions Austin Film Festival

Posted on by James Hutchison

If you have ambitions of pursuing a career as a screenwriter or television showrunner then I’d highly recommend you attend the Austin Film Festival. I attended the 2018 Austin Film Festival Writer’s Conference and found it to be a very rewarding and exciting opportunity to connect with industry professionals as well as up-and-coming writers. This interview with Matt Dy, the Director of Competitions about the Austin Film Festival will give you a comprehensive overview of what the festival is about and why you should enter the competition.

Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Austin Film Festival Barbara Morgan talks with the 2017 AFF Awardees: Walter Hill, Keenen Ivory Wayans, and Kenneth Lonergan.

We all have favourite stories – favourite films – favourite television shows and books and plays – because these stories somehow reach us. They make us laugh, or cry, or reflect more deeply about life, or simply give us a momentary escape from our troubles.

That’s why I’m really excited to announce that my play Masquerade is a finalist in the stage play competition at this years Austin Film Festival – which is a festival that’s dedicated to story. Masquerade is about an empty nest couple, Sarah and Glenn, that have drifted apart. They were talking divorce and selling the house until they discovered a book called: A Good Marriage is Just a Fantasy by Dr. Ravi Shasta. Basically, it’s a book about exploring your sexual fantasies with your partner. Unfortunately, sometimes what is real and what is fantasy can become blurred and what was intended to bring a couple closer together can sometimes drive them apart. 

The Austin Film Festival is a celebration of film and television that focuses on story and the people who write the screenplays and teleplays. The festival features industry professionals as well as up and coming writers. I’ll be flying down to Austin to participate in the festival as well the staged reading of my play. I gave Matt Dy, the Director of Competitions for The Austin Film Festival, a call to talk to him about how the festival began and what participants can expect.

Gabbi Lindgren, Script Competitions Coordinator & Matt Dy, Director of Script Competitions – Austin Film Festival

JAMES HUTCHISON

The Austin Film Festival was founded in 1993 by Barbara Morgan, who still serves as Festival Director, for the purpose of furthering the art and craft and business of screenwriting and filmmaking. So, I’m curious over the last twenty-five-year history of the festival how have those founding goals been developed?

MATT DY

The Festival was also co-founded by Marsha Milam who is still involved in a limited capacity, but Barbara Morgan is sole Executive Director for the Festival now. The two of them started the festival because they felt there was a need for a community like this. There really wasn’t a writer’s festival let alone very many screenplay competitions at the time. There were maybe a handful and now there are hundreds of them in existence, but we’re one of the original ones which is a really nice thing to be able to say.

The thing that still remains intact over the twenty-five-year history of the festival is our goal and mission to champion the screenwriter. We’re now open to playwrights and eventually we may become more of a hub for all forms of story because we’re also expanding into fiction podcasting and we have a digital series component as well – content for the web – so there’s a lot of different formats that we’ve embraced over the years but the mission to champion the writer is still the same.

First Day of the Austin Film Festival in 2017 – a room full of storytellers.

JAMES

You know when I think of successful screenwriters they might have different success stories but I’m wondering if there might be a couple of qualities that sets the successful screenwriter apart and I’m thinking one of those qualities is having a dedication to the craft. In what way do you think a dedication to the craft benefits a writer’s career and development?

MATT

That is absolutely essential and it’s easier said than done. I’m a writer as well and I tend not to take my own advice – to write every day you know – you hear of people who have nine to five jobs and they’re married, and they have kids, and maybe they have a second job, and they still make time to write. So my thing is to not make excuses anymore and just do it. It is about dedication. It is about finding time to write because, as a writer, you want to treat the writing as if it’s going to be your job. You need to set deadlines and goals and that’s why competitions are a great thing for writers because you work towards a deadline to get your script in for the competition.

It’s also teaching you about persistence. You’re a finalist in our Stage Play Competition. You’re in the top three out of 655 plays that were submitted but a lot of people that didn’t make it as far as you have may actually have a really good play and we may have overlooked it because – it’s a little bit of the luck of the draw – trying to find a good match for the reader that might respond to it. It’s a human process, and it’s incredibly subjective, so you’re going to get different results from different competitions, and so it’s also about being persistent and moving on and entering the next competition 

JAMES

Enter other ones or give it a rewrite and enter again.

MATT

Yeah, and you’ll find that exists in every creative field. And if you pick any popular film or stage play that has gotten produced – if you talk to those writers they will tell you consistently that they had so many doors closed on them – so many people told them this would never get produced or shouldn’t be produced and yet they still got it produced.  And so the writer’s process is to write every day and stay persistent, stay focused, and write the story you want to tell.

Writer, director, actor Dennis Hopper at the Austin Film Festival in 1997.

JAMES

You said you’re a writer yourself so I’m just wondering from your own perspective – because you’re surrounded by writers – what does keep someone going? I mean those rejection letters are piling up and you work for years for little money…what is that keeps writers going? Why do they keep writing stories?

MATT

Passion. Love. A lot of playwrights are incredibly passionate – they love their work – they do it for the love of the art – and I think a lot of screenwriters feel the same way. It’s a dream and if you don’t have a dream it’s hard to find the motivation to get up each day and work on that passion project

JAMES

I wonder if part of it might be realizing that when you sit down at your desk to begin the research, the writing, the outlining or just diving into writing your script you might be starting a ten or fifteen or twenty-year journey in order to realize that project.

MATT

Absolutely. Everybody has their own process. There are some writers who end up having one project that they spend their entire lives working on, but there are other writers who work on many different projects all at the same time because they know their one pet project may not be the one that gets them discovered.

JAMES

The festival has a number of writing competitions. You’ve got the feature-length drama. You’ve got the comedy feature. Horror. Sci-fi. So you’ve got lots of different categories, but I’m wondering, regardless of the genre, do you notice anything that the winning scripts seem to possess? Something in them that makes this writing stand out.

MATT

I think if I had to pin it on one thing it would be stories that have that unique voice – that unique perspective. Those stories end up winning or advancing in the competition. It’s always their unique spin on a familiar story. A different perspective so that when you’re reading it you go, “Oh that’s brilliant. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Each writer is going to have their own perspective on the world and so their version of a story is going to be different than someone else’s version of the story, and you can tell when they’re writing something for themselves for the passion and for the love of their story rather than when they’re trying to write something for the masses that they think would sell.

Writer/Director Robert Altman – M.A.S.H., McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and The Player talks with screenwriter and actor Buck Henry – The Graduate, Get Smart, and Catch 22 at the Austin Film Festival.

JAMES

You bring up an interesting point because I just watched Get Out which was a huge hit last year and so I’m wondering when you have a hit like that – a film that, you know, is well made, does well at the box office, gets awards – does the success of that film, in the marketplace, influence the types of scripts you see being entered into the festival?

MATT

Oh yeah, not just the marketplace but also the climate – and what’s happening politically and what’s been happening in the industry with movements for diversity. All these different ancillary things that are happening in the world obviously effect what people are writing and submitting to the competition. You can definitely feel that when you’re reading scripts, and you’ll find that there are many people who are commenting on the current President and many of the other things that are happening in the Zeitgeist because we write to talk about and make sense of the world we live in.

Of course, there are going to be people who are going to try and anticipate what is marketable and usually if they try to emulate what’s popular right now they’re too late because those projects were long in gestation and they’re striking a cord now. As a writer, you should just continue to write what you’re passionate about and then something might happen to make your script a timely subject. There was a playwright here from last year in the playwriting competition who happened to write a play about immigration on a border town in Texas. It was a play she had written a long time ago that never got produced but she pulled that back out of her drawer because she knew this is the time for it.

JAMES

Well, let’s talk a little bit about the festival. There are two components. There’s the film festival and there’s the conference and the conference is filled with industry professionals and established as well as up and coming writers. What’s the conference part of the festival about?

MATT

I like to call it summer camp for screenwriters except it’s only four days. It sort of has that Kumbaya feel when you first arrive. It’s palatable – at least for me. You know you can stereotype writers and say they’re all an isolated bunch who are very introverted who don’t like to converse or be communal, but I find that even the most introverted screenwriter, deep down, really wants to connect, and I think when they realize that wow, I’m not the only one who feels that way, and they come to a conference where it’s a bunch of introverts and a lot of thinkers and creative types who are just like them then the walls start to come down. And we try to make it easy for them to get to know each other and just converse and make friends. Usually without fail that’s what happens.

Samuel Weller, Allison Norlian, Sean Collins-Smith, and Emily McGregor at one of the many mix and mingle functions at the 2017 Austin Film Festival

MATT

I also think a lot of people come to the conference with the goal of getting their script sold and produced or getting an agent or manager but that rarely ever happens at the festival. I like to think of the festival as an incubator where things just take time to develop. Like you’re planting the seeds. You’re making connections with people you wouldn’t normally be able to meet. If you place in the competition you’re going through a special track of panels with people who are just like you – quality writers, talented people with great ideas, so you’re in a very talented room with people that you’re going to several events with and you never know you might find your next collaborator or somebody who would love to read your work and would introduce you to somebody that they know in the industry and so usually those are where most of the success stories come from.

JAMES

As a participant in the conference there are panels there are readings what kind of things are happening?

MATT

Everything that happens at the conference is about the creative and business sides of story, so if you want to learn about other people’s writing process and how you can apply that to your own writing you can do that, or if you’re really wanting to understand how it works in the TV writers room we usually have that covered. We have pitching opportunities, we have script reading workshops, we have an indie filmmaker track as well if you’re a filmmaker and want to learn more about microbudget filmmaking. We have a playwriting track. We have a panel that covers writing for webisodes. We have a script to screen series where writers will show a few clips from their film or show and show the process of what they wrote and how that translated to the screen. We have a conversation series with people who just talk about their career in general and usually, those are the bigger people and in particular our awardees like Tony Gilroy

Barbara Morgan co-founder and Executive Director of The Austin Film Festival hosts In Conversation with Kenneth Lonergan the writer/director of Manchester by the Sea.

JAMES

Why don’t we talk a little bit about that since you brought it up? As part of the festival, you honour screenwriters and filmmakers, and the very first person that was honoured at the festival was Horton Foote who wrote Tender Mercies and adapted To Kill a Mockingbird for the screen, and then last year you had Kenneth Lonergan at the festival who wrote and directed Manchester by the Sea. Who are you honouring this year and why?

MATT

I mentioned Tony Gilroy who is a screenwriter and filmmaker. He’s somebody that we’ve tried to get for a very long time. We try and find people that have a rich history of contributing to storytelling and also have an ability to be accessible to our audience because that’s something we also pride ourselves in is that you have an opportunity to meet Tony Gilroy and talk with him or meet somebody like Vince Gilligan the creator and showrunner for Breaking Bad who took the time to meet everybody when he was here for the festival.

Tony Gilroy is the writer/director of the Oscar Nominated thriller Michael Clayton starring George Clooney. He also wrote the first three Bourne films and co-wrote and directed the fourth film in the franchise. More recently he is the co-writer of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the writer/producer of the political thriller Beirut starring Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike.

MATT

Another awardee we have this year is Daniel Petrie, Jr. who we’re giving our Heart of Film Award and we invited him because he’s been involved with the festival for such a long time and he really loves our festival and he’s very giving and he comes almost every year and we even gave his production company a category the Enderby Entertainment award because his company produced a finalist script from I think 2008 or 9 from our competition and it premiered here at the festival, and they’ve worked with many writers that they’ve met here at the festival. And so usually we try to find in an awardee who has left a mark on the industry and is somebody who can share words of wisdom for the next generation of creators. 

Daniel Petrie, Jr. will receive the Heart of Film Award for his many contributions to the film and television industry and his service to the screenwriting community. Dan’s screenwriting credits include the Oscar-nominated Beverly Hills Cop as well as The Big Easy, Shoot to Kill, and Turner and Hooch. Dan is also a two-term past president of the Writers Guild of America West and a long time panelist and supporter of the Austin Film Festival.

JAMES

And you’re also honouring Roger Corman. How many careers has he helped launch?

MATT

Yes, I know that’s another reason it was very clear why we chose him because when you find out all the careers he’s started you wonder why he hasn’t received more credit. It was clear for us that he needed to be an awardee.

Roger Corman has been credited with discovering such talent as Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Diane Ladd, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and James Cameron. He is the director of over 500 films including Little Shop of Horrors, Death Race 2000, and The Pit and the Pendulum. Corman’s company New World Pictures was also a distributor of foreign cinema including the work of Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini.

JAMES

And then you’ve got Larry Wilmore.

MATT

Yes, and he’s somebody else who has been so great as well. Somebody who has been great talking with our attendees and very giving and very accessible as well. 

Emmy Award winning Larry Wilmore has been a television producer, actor, comedian and writer for more than 25 years. Wilmore created the Bernie Mac Show which ran for five seasons on FOX and recently helped launch ABC’s Black-ish. On camera, Wilmore was the “Senior Black Correspondent” on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and was the host of his own show The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore for two years on Comedy Central.

JAMES

So, my play Masquerade is a finalist in this year’s Stage Play Competition and I’m really excited to be attending the festival, but I was curious about why you decided to add a stage play category to the film festival?

MATT

It was our Executive Director who had the idea to do it because we work with many playwrights, and we find that many screenwriters and tv writers aren’t just screenwriters and tv writers they also have plays and a lot of these people have been asking us to start a playwriting competition. A lot of playwrights living in New York City, for example, find it hard to make any money as a playwright so a lot of them make their money in TV. The Americans, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black those writer’s rooms took place in New York and a lot of them consisted of playwrights. We started the screenplay competition in 1994 because there was a need for something like that and so we thought this would be a great way for playwrights who want to make that transition into film and television to utilize the resources that we already have in place. And also to give recognition to your own play because the placement and the exposure your play gets from the festival could help get it produced because every playwright still wants to have their play produced.   

JAMES

Let’s talk about the other aspect of the festival – so you’ve got the conference part but it’s also a film festival and the film festival runs for an additional four or five days after the conference ends. What are some of the highlights coming up this year as far as films go?

Closing Night Film at the 2018 Austin Film Festival is The Front Runner starring Hugh Jackman. Based on the real-life story of politician Gary Hart whose 1988 run for the Democratic Presidential Nomination was sidelined by reports of an extramarital affair with Donna Rice.

MATT

What I love about our film festival is that our mission to honour the writer still exists. All the awards that are handed out for the different categories in the film competition are handed out to the writers of the film. Not the director or the producer. You know when you watch award shows or you’re at a film festival and they announce the best picture they usually hand out the awards to the director and the producing team.  Unless it’s a writer/director but usually the writer isn’t involved with directing or producing they just wrote the script. But at our festival, the writer is the one who actually receives the award. We put a stronger emphasis on the quality of the writing than the marketability or the production values of the films that are chosen to be in the festival. So story really is the thing that we look for the most.

Greta Gerwig the writer and director of the Oscar-nominated film Lady Bird attends the 2017 Austin Film Festival screening of her film.

MATT

The thing that’s nice about our festival is that we’re after Toronto after Venice – after all the bigger film festivals that have those Oscar contenders – and so we have a lot of those big films that end up getting nominated for Oscars. Last year, I think, we might have had nine or ten of them. We had Lady Bird, Three Billboards, I Tonya, Mudbound, and Call Me By Your Name.

JAMES

That was quite the lineup.

MATT

And while a lot of people are going to be gravitating towards the bigger marquee films that we have this year like The Favourite or Boy Erased or Widows you don’t want to miss out on all the other films that are playing within the film festival competition because those are films that you might not be able to see anywhere else anytime soon.

JAMES

So, as I mentioned this is my first time going to the conference. What basic tips or advice can you tell me about coming to the festival that I should know and would help prep me or anybody else who is going?

MATT

Well, get familiar with our list of panelists that are attending the festival and the conference. Find out if your screenwriting heroes are going to be here because they’re going to be out during the festival. They’re going to be at the Driskill bar and they’re going to be at the partner parties and their badge is just going to say their name. It won’t tell you any of their credits or if they’re a panelist. So you never know who you’re going to be standing next to and if you recognize them you can respectfully introduce yourself like, “Hi I’m a finalist in the playwriting competition.” And there aren’t very many finalists. There’s about fifty of you and that’s a huge difference from the ten thousand five hundred scripts that were submitted this year. And your badge will say finalist and you should wear that badge proudly and introduce yourself, “I’m James, I’m a finalist in the playwriting competition.”  And that is something that will hopefully open doors. “Oh, you’re a finalist. Okay, tell me about your play.” And of course what’s also going to happen next is, “Well what else are you working on?” And so be prepared to talk about other work that you’ve written and of course be ready to talk about your play.

2017 Panelists Amy Berg, Eric Heisserer, Megan Amram, and Raamla Mohamed attend the Writers Guild of America West Welcome Party

MATT

You’d be surprised how many writers come here and they have a fantastic piece of work but they don’t know how to talk about it to people. So, just be prepared for that elevator pitch but I wouldn’t necessarily call it pitching at the festival because nobody really likes to be pitched to. A lot of these agents and managers and producers who are here are here to have a good time and to meet writers and contribute to the festival. They don’t want to be treated as if the only reason you’re talking to them is so you can send them your script – there’s so many people that are after them that they just want to be treated like a human being.

JAMES

Well, treat them like you would want to be treated if you were in their position.

MATT

Yeah, exactly and as a manager, it’s all about the relationship and so if that’s how you’re going into it they’re probably going to think I’m not sure I want a relationship with this person. And don’t forget about your fellow writers that are sitting right next to you because you know everybody comes here wanting to try and meet the panelist or agents and managers but it’s a chance for you to meet other writers like yourself and develop your network and friendships and your professional relationships.

JAMES

I was thinking about the legacy of the festival. And I have to say I really like what you guys are doing with the Austin Film Festival – On Story. Tell me a little bit about how that started and what you guys are doing with that part of the festival.

MATT

So, Barb our Executive Director had always envisioned that we would have a TV show and so she had the foresight to record all of our panels during the festival and to keep a record of it so that we could utilize it in some way one day. And we also had a lot of people who attended our festival asking if we had any recordings so there was a demand for it. And so we went through our archives and created a quality product that PBS loved and picked up and our marketing team has gotten us in almost all the markets for PBS and now On Story has expanded into a book and a radio show on PRI and we have a podcast as well. So On Story has really become its own brand and people really love it. 

JAMES

I watched a couple of them on YouTube and shared them through Facebook, and Twitter and Instagram. I watched Carl Reiner talking about the early days of working on the Dick Van Dyck Show and it was really interesting, and I watched Kenneth Lonergan who you had here last year and I thought it’s nice to have those things available.

Vince Gilligan creator of Breaking Bad & Better Call Saul at the 2013 Austin Film Festival

MATT

And we’re proud to say we’re an Emmy award winner as well. We won an Emmy for our episode featuring Vince Gilligan whom I had mentioned earlier and actually, we’re nominated this year for an Emmy for our episode featuring Eric Heisserer the writer for Arrival. 

JAMES

I’ll have to hunt those down and watch them. Are there any legendary stories from the festival that you can share?

MATT

Oh God. Legendary stories. Well from the first year the winning script in our competition actually got optioned and produced rather quickly. It was called Excess Baggage and it was written by Max D. Adams. It had Alicia Silverstone and Benicio Del Toro in it.

I believe the first screenwriters’ conference for AFF happened at Willie Nelson’s old opera house, but it was run down, and it was rainy but somehow it brought people together, and you know we said magic happened there. I wasn’t around for it but this is what our director Barbara Morgan has said repeatedly over and over again – that magic happened there despite all the chaos because everybody was there because they believed in story and telling their stories. And a lot of big influential people from Columbia Pictures were there as well and they felt the magic too, and I think that helped encourage them to become more involved with us and to see us as a legitimate resource for writers, and they optioned that first script and produced it and that’s really what put us on the map.

Austin Film Festival 2017 Awards Lunch (L to R) Walter Hill, Extraordinary Contribution to Film, Keenen Ivory Wayans – Extraordinary Contribution to Television, Kenneth Lonergan, Distinguished Screenwriter

MATT

And you know what feels legendary for me each year is the Awards Luncheon and hopefully you’ll see that and feel that too when you’re here because the awards luncheon is where we celebrate the winners in the competition and win or lose it’s still a really great event because on that stage we are awarding up and coming writers from our competition and we’re also honouring the established writers like the Tony Gilroys, the Larry Wilmores, Roger Corman, Dan Petrie and so they’re all on the same stage together. And what’s so beautiful is that one of those awardees, almost without fail, will comment on what they’ve seen from the up and coming writers. They’re deeply moved by the time they get up on stage because they’re also not sure what to expect at our festival.  So, when they see we’re really championing the writer and they’re hearing all the winner’s stories and we even have a young filmmakers award so they end up seeing young kids going up there and accepting awards too it makes an impact.  And these kids are in awe of what they are seeing – you know these teenagers are seeing people from different backgrounds and ages winning our script competition and our film competition and then they’re seeing highly established people as well and so that’s really inspiring for the next generation of young people who are going to continue to create and write and tell stories. And for me, that feels legendary because everybody always comes away feeling so invigorated and inspired.

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The Austin Film Festival and Writers Conference runs from October 25th to November 1st. You can check out all the details regarding the Festival at their website online.

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AFF is pleased to announce the 2018 Script Competition Finalists and Winners. 51 scripts were chosen for the Final Round with one winner to be determined in each of the 13 categories. The winners were announced during this year’s Conference at the Awards Luncheon held on Saturday, October 27 at the Austin Club. (Winners in Bold.)

COMEDY FEATURE SCREENPLAY
Presented by Sony Pictures Animation

Sex APPeal by Tate Elizabeth Hanyok
Darryn the Bold and the Sword of Boldness by Justin Best
Meet Cute by Noga Pnueli
My Date Is Kate by Carlin Adelson
Orientation by Eve Symington

 ***

 DRAMA FEATURE SCREENPLAY
Presented by Writers Guild of America, East

Horsehead Girls by Wenonah Wilms
The Death of Colm Canter by Revati Dhomse & Hector Lowe
Dig Two Graves by Jared Schincariol
The Huntress by Abdullah Alhendyani
The Innocent and the Vicious by Dominique Genest & Nick Kreiss

 ***

SCI-FI FEATURE SCREENPLAY
Open to science fiction, fantasy, horror, surrealism, myth/legend and fantastical storytelling.

Our Own Devices by Paul Vance
Darryn the Bold and the Sword of Boldness by Justin Best
No Man’s Land by Jeffrey R. Field & Michelle Davidson

 ***

HORROR FEATURE SCREENPLAY
Open to thrillers, dark suspense, sci-fi, and macabre themes.

The Patience of Vultures by Greg Sisco
Blood of Israel by Davey Morrison
Shaky Shivers by Andrew McAllister & Aaron Strongoni

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ENDERBY ENTERTAINMENT AWARD
For feature scripts in all genres with an original concept and distinctive voice that can be produced for under $10 million. The production company was founded by Rick Dugdale and Daniel Petrie, Jr.

Project Horizon by Charles Morris
Grit N’ Glitter by Seth Michael Donsky
 The Patience of Vultures by Greg Sisco
Put Your Hands In by Warner James Wood
 Surfmen by Christopher Rhoads

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AMC DRAMA TELEPLAY PILOT
All Semifinalists will be reviewed exclusively by AMC who will determine the Finalists and eventual Winner.

Worth by Stuti Malhotra
Double Time Dames by Davia Carter
Liberty Falls by Robert Attenweiler
Lifers Anonymous by Sean Collins-Smith
Mindset by Ethan Solli & Ziba Sadeghinejad
Ticker by Connie O’Donahue & Jeremy Nielsen

 ***

COMEDY TELEPLAY PILOT

What Will Jessie Do? by Kevin Luperchio
Band of Mothers by Sabrina Brennan
Bastards by Erin Muroski
The Last Abortion Clinic in Kansas by Tammy Caplan
Rice, Fish, and La Croix by Naomi Iwamoto

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DRAMA TELEPLAY SPEC

The Handmaid’s Tale: Rebels by Angela Jorgensen
Billions: Trust by Amanda Parham
The Handmaid’s Tale: The Abduction by Todd Goodlett

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COMEDY TELEPLAY SPEC

 Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Volunteers! by Maggie Gottlieb
Better Things: Goy Vey by Robert Axelrod
 Master of None: Headspace by Honora Talbott

 ***

SHORT SCREENPLAY

Ruby Throat by Sarah Polhaus
Seat 23B by Eliott Behar
 A War on Terror by Peter Haig

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SCRIPTED DIGITAL SERIES
Presented by Stage 13

Epizootic by Daniel Young
Halcyon by Jonathan Marx
hello, world\ by Michelle Sarkany

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STAGE PLAY

Particular Disposition by Benjamin Fulk
 Masquerade by James Hutchison
Disposable Necessities by Neil McGowan

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FICTION PODCAST

The Rest Stop at the End of the Universe by Samuel Suksiri
Alethea by Katrina Day & Phillip R. Polefrone
Forces by Len Sousa
Welles D-11 by Simon Nicholas

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JOSEPHSON ENTERTAINMENT SCREENWRITING FELLOWSHIP FINALISTS
In addition to this year’s Script Competition Finalists, we are proud to announce the Finalists for the inaugural Josephson Entertainment Screenwriting Fellowship. This new opportunity will provide a one-on-one mentorship with producer Barry Josephson and his team in Los Angeles for the writers of one feature screenplay and one teleplay pilot. 

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Feature Screenplays

The Death of Colm Canter by Revati Dhomse & Hector Lowe
Darryn the Bold and the Sword of Boldness by Justin Best
Meet Cute by Noga Pnueli
The Patience of Vultures by Greg Sisco
Sex APPeal by Tate Elizabeth Hanyok

***

Teleplay Pilots

Lifers Anonymous by Sean Collins-Smith
Band of Mothers by Sabrina Brennan
Mindset by Ethan Solli & Ziba Sadeghinejad
Ticker by Connie O’Donahue & Jeremy Nielsen
Worth by Stuti Malhotra

***

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Revised on November 26, 2018.

Interview with Barb Mitchell – Do What You Love

Posted on by James Hutchison

You might know Barb Mitchell as the cohost of Calgary’s first morning show for Global back in the early nineties. Or you might remember her as Miss Calgary back in the early eighties. Or more recently you might have seen her on television as a judgmental church lady in the gritty Depression-era drama Damnation. I sat down with Barb, just after this year’s Calgary Stampede, to talk with her about her experiences as a broadcaster and her career as a stage and television actor.

JAMES HUTCHISON

So, your first experience on stage was playing Piglet from Winnie the Pooh in Junior High – certainly one of the more complex characters in the hundred-acre wood.

BARB MITCHELL

Yes, I did a deep dive into Piglet.

JAMES

Was there anything from that performance that ignited your love for the stage?

BARB

Well, I loved my drama teacher, Miss Main. She was incredible and fun, and we got to escape and experiment and I loved it – so when they didn’t have enough kids turn out for the play and she asked me to be in it I jumped in and did it.

Barb takes a “deep dive into Piglet” from the Hundred Acre Wood

JAMES

It’s nice to be in demand.

BARB

Yeah.

Continue reading “Interview with Barb Mitchell – Do What You Love”

Interview with Haysam Kadri: Artistic Director The Shakespeare Company

Posted on by James Hutchison
Haysam Kadri Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Company

Haysam Kadri Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Company talks about Hamlet, theatre, and just how the Shakespeare Company’s Madness in Great Ones season came about. Hamlet will be haunting several Calgary stages over the coming year as The Shakespeare Company along with Hit & Myth Productions have partnered with Vertigo Theatre, The High Performance Rodeo, and Alberta Theatre Projects, to bring Calgary audiences four different tellings of the melancholy Dane’s tragic tale. It’s a full season of Hamlet!

JAMES HUTCHISON

I was wondering as the Shakespeare Company what are some of the challenges you face mounting a large cast show with a really short rehearsal period?

HAYSAM KADRI ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE SHAKESPEARE COMPANY

We have the best mandate and the worst mandate at the same time because we always have to populate the stage with ten to fifteen people which always has its challenges. Anytime anybody does Shakespeare you never have enough time, but what the Shakespeare Company has found out is that brevity is the soul of wit. When you trim some of the fat that Shakespeare gives you we find it makes the plays more accessible to an audience and we find that it’s better for the process technically of rehearsing and putting up a play. Because it’s not a kitchen sink drama. There are a lot of things going on. There are supernatural elements. There’s war. There’s fight scenes. There’s these extraordinary characters in extraordinary circumstances.

JAMES

These are big stories.

HAYSAM

They are big stories. It’s never easy to put them up in three and a half weeks let alone five weeks or six weeks. When it comes down to it it’s about money and ultimately you have to be lean and mean which is our company motto and as efficient as possible.

JAMES

When you’re mounting a play you’ve done before and you’re familiar with it as an actor or director does getting a second or third chance at it make it easier to mount?

HAYSAM

The first time we remounted a play was when we put on The Scottish Play with Vertigo Theatre. The Vertigo patrons just loved it and so what happened was they snatched up a lot of the tickets and then our patrons came on board and the run was already sold out. So, it was incumbent upon the Shakespeare Company and myself to reprogram it for the following season. Number one because there were a lot of our patrons that didn’t get a chance to see it and number two as a company for efficiency. The sets were already built. The production is in hand. The rehearsal process is shortened. And so it was a no-brainer and you know it’s been the most successful show in the history of the company.

Anna Cummer as Lady Macbeth and Haysam Kadri as Macbeth in the Vertigo Theatre Production of Macbeth. Directed by Craig Hall. A Coproduction of Vertigo Theatre, The Shakespeare Company and Hit & Myth Productions. Photograph Benjamin Laird

JAMES

You took over the company in 2012. How have the last six years gone in terms of what you wanted to do with the Shakespeare Company and where you’re at now?

HAYSAM

You know when I took over the company in 2012 I had never run a company before, so I had a clean slate and I was able to start building the culture that I wanted. I really wanted to build and increase the skill set of the performers and the performances. So, I felt it was really important to start developing a strong core of equity actors to comprise half the company. That’s a very expensive initiative but I felt it was really important.

The other important thing was to make Shakespeare much more accessible to a larger audience. All our Shakespeare plays are two hours with a fifteen-minute intermission and since I took over we’ve increased our audience by four-hundred and fifty percent and we’ve extended all our runs to three weeks and we hire on average six equity actors per show and we’ve developed and built a core audience.

We really wanted to key in on those young students in high school that get a bad taste in their mouth for Shakespeare because they think it’s three hours long and it’s boring and it’s in a foreign language and so we’ve done everything we can to make it really accessible. And you know that’s one of the benefits of being in the studio theatre. You see the blood on the Scottish King’s face and it’s visceral and it’s present and it’s intimate and so we benefit from a small space even though we’d love to expand to a bigger space which we will be doing for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

And as our high school contingent has grown into young professionals or gone on to university they’ve been coming on their own. They’re not coming in school groups anymore they’re single ticket buyers and they’ve become part of the fabric of our patronage. So, our 18 to 25 demographics are unreal and amazing and has been our biggest success.

Cast members in Alberta Theatre Projects’ presentation of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. A Shakespeare Company and Hit & Myth Production. Photo: Benjamin Laird. (Set: Scott Reid. Lights: David Fraser. Costumes: Hanne Loosen)

JAMES

So, let’s talk about the new season since you mentioned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and that’s the first play of your season focused on Hamlet. Where did the idea for Madness in Great Ones originate?

HAYSAM

I’ll confess, I didn’t think I was going to do an all Hamlet season, it wasn’t an epiphany that I had. What happened was I was in talks with Craig Hall the Artistic Director at Vertigo Theatre and we wanted to collaborate again because Mackers was such a big success and we would be totally remise if we did not entertain another partnership. And Craig and I had always wanted to do Hamlet because Hamlet is a ghost story and Vertigo Theatre is a mystery theatre and so we started with Hamlet and Vertigo.

HAYSAM

And then I talked to David Fraser the production manager over at ATP and I said, “Hey, what would it take for us to be in your space?” And David and I just started talking and then he talked to the artistic team and the artistic team came back to me and they said give us a couple of proposals for plays. And I’ve always wanted to do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and I thought well we could always have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Hamlet in the same season so I pitched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to the artistic team at ATP and they thought it was great programming for Alberta Theatre Projects.

JAMES

A good fit.

HAYSAM

Yeah, and for us.

JAMES

Let’s talk a little bit about that one because it’s coming up right away here and interestingly enough it’s being directed by the same director you worked with on The Virgin Trial and The Last Wife.

HAYSAM

Yes, Glynis Leyshon.

JAMES

So that’s exciting and you’ve got quite the cast lined up.

HAYSAM

It’s pretty stellar.

Myla Southward, Christopher Hunt, and Julie Orton in Alberta Theatre Projects’ presentation of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. A Shakespeare Company and Hit & Myth Production. Photo: Benjamin Laird. (Set: Scott Reid. Lights: David Fraser. Costumes: Hanne Loosen)

JAMES

You’ve got Julie Orton and Myla Southward and I see Mark Bellamy in there as well…

HAYSAM

…Christopher Hunt…

JAMES

…and Tenaj Williams is going to be Hamlet.

HAYSAM

Julie and Myla are a dynamic duo together on stage and they’re a perfect fit for the characters. And Glyniss Lyshom is a big Tom Stoppard fan and a great mentor of mine and a great director and someone that I trust implicitly with everything especially with text and the classical works and I had her in mind before we knew it was going to be an ATP coproduction. I really wanted to bring her on board and it just worked out perfectly. It’s a really exciting cast and I just think this play is ridiculously brilliant and funny.

JAMES

So, now you’ve got these two plays in place – then what happened?

HAYSAM

Well, then I was talking to the High Performance Rodeo because I wanted to partner with the Rodeo and I’ve always wanted to do Drunk Shakespeare. Negotiating Shakespeare sober is a challenge in itself but adding another element to it, I think, is really exciting. So, we’re going to create Hammered Hamlet and if I do Hammered Hamlet I can’t just stop there I have to go full throttle on this and so I thought of creating a season based on Hamlet where you see four different interpretations of a story.

HAYSAM KADRI Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Company

Then I got this idea to do a movement piece and I phoned Denise Clarke who is a genius and a Canadian legend and truly a gem in our city and I just pitched the idea. I said Denise, I love your Radioheaded series they’re fresh and innovative and I want to see if you can transplant that into Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And her eyes and ears and everything just lit up and we went back and forth on it and we decided we wanted to do Hamlet Frequency which is an ensemble piece and a reimagining of Shakespeare’s story choreographed and staged by one of Canada’s greatest choreographers.

So, it’s a bold season and I think it’s exciting and I’m really curious to see how it’s going to unfold and I think a lot of people are really excited about the idea of doing four different interpretations of the same play.

JAMES

What are some of the things the Shakespeare Company has done marketing wise to sell tickets?

HAYSAM

Well, we’re constantly trying to find more ways to be creative with social media and to get people in the door. The other thing – partnerships – partnerships are the way of the future because if you cross-pollinate your audience you maximize your resources because you’re collaborating – there are many benefits to being partners with other organizations.

JAMES

One of the companies that you partner with is Hit and Myth productions how did that partnership evolve?

HAYSAM

Joel Cochrane who is the Artistic Director of Hit and Myth productions is passionate about theatre and particularly Shakespeare and so he’s been an amazing partner and supporter of our company and he’s been a huge part of the success of our organization. Joel has a strong business background and so you know as an Artistic Producer you have to balance the left and the right brain. You’re not just worrying about the art you’re worrying about how you make the art happen and so a guy like Joel who has a strong – business acumen I value because I’ve learned so much from him and many other companies.

JAMES

And he’s a pretty good actor too.

HAYSAM

Yeah, he’s a great actor. He’s really cut his teeth over the last ten years – now he’s a force on stage, and I really like watching him and working with him.

Joel Cochrane as Don Pedro in The Shakespeare Company with Hit & Myth Productions Production of Much Ado About Nothing – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

So, is Hamlet mad or is he playing mad? What is your own personal take on the madness of Hamlet?

HAYSAM

I think Hamlet is thrown into an extraordinary situation. Just imagine yourself in a situation where you find out that your dad was poisoned by your uncle and now your uncle is married to your mom and you’re a prince and you live in a castle and the tabloids are all around. So, to me, I can’t help but not think that there is a touch of madness that permeates his being because he’s faced with the task of taking action and revenging his father’s death. And to me, Hamlet’s a bookworm. He’s doing his Ph.D. over at Wittenberg University and he’s a head case – literally, he’s in his head. He’s cerebral and then he’s asked to use his body, his heart, and his soul.

JAMES

He’s asked to put down the pen, and pick up the sword.

HAYSAM

Put down the pen and pick up the sword and therein lies the great conflict and the exciting dramatic action where he takes all his time to get the courage to do something that other people would have done the second they heard.

JAMES

One of the brilliant things about Shakespeare is when you look at different forms of storytelling – the novels great strength is that it can go into the mind of its character right – often we say a play is dialogue driven but by using monologues Shakespeare is able to let the audience in on the mind of the character. He uses the device of novels in stage plays.

HAYSAM

I think that’s why when the Richard the thirds and the Iagos of this world turn to the audience and they go, “I’m a complete asshole now watch me do this.” audience members walk away going, “Oh my God, I loved Richard the third!” But how could I love a guy who is hell-bent to kill and murder, but it’s because you’re complicit – because he invites you in – because he shares his plot with you – and so you become a part of that story as you watch it unfold. That’s why you connect with these characters because of this device. And it’s exciting to explore those types of characters. Characters who explore the darker sides of their humanity. Those are fun characters to play.

Glenn Davis as Othello and Haysam Kadri as Iago in the Shakespeare Company production of Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Ron Jenkins. Photograph Benjamin Laird.

JAMES

Well, look at Walter White in Breaking Bad.

HAYSAM

Walter White is the perfect parallel.

JAMES

It’s not his good side that we’re fascinated by it’s that evil bit that nasty bit. Or Dexter

HAYSAM

The serial killer who kills serial killers.

JAMES

These are interesting guys.

HAYSAM

And that’s the Richard the third that we were talking about. You watch this underdog character navigate his way through the world in a very unconventional way. Those are interesting people to me.

Haysam Kadri Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Company’s Madness in Great One’s Season of Plays

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead By Tom Stoppard – October 9 – 21, 2018

Up first and in partnership with Alberta Theatre Projects is the Tony Award Winning comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. It’s the story of Hamlet as seen through the eyes of Hamlet’s ill-fated university friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  The show is running in the Martha Cohen Theatre and ATP has a pay what you can preview plus that $10.00 ticket thing for students. Regular tickets start at just $30.00 and can be purchased online at the ATP website or by calling the box office at 403.294.7402.

Julie Orton and Myla Southward in Alberta Theatre Projects’ presentation of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. A Shakespeare Company and Hit & Myth Production. Photo: Benjamin Laird. (Set: Scott Reid. Lights: David Fraser. Costumes: Hanne Loosen)

CAST:  Julie Orton as Guildenstern, Myla Southward as Rosencrantz, Mark Bellamy as Polonius/Ensemble, Daniel Fong as Alfred/Ensemble, Natascha Girgis as Gertrude/Ensemble, Braden Griffiths as Horatio/Ensemble, Christopher Hunt as The Player, Robert Klein as Claudius/Ensemble, Natasha Strickey as Ophelia/Ensemble, and Tenaj Williams as Hamlet

CREATIVE TEAM: Glynis Leyshon – Director, Scott Reid – Set & Properties Designer, David Fraser – Lighting Designer, Hanne Loosen – Costume Designer, Allison Lynch – Musical Director, Composer & Sound Designer, Haysam Kadri – Fight Director, Jane MacFarlane – Text & Vocal Coach, Ailsa Birne – Stage Manager, Ian Lane – Assistant Stage Manager, Derek Paulich – Production Manager

Hammered Hamlet January 23 – 26, 2019

Then the fun continues at this year’s High Performance Rodeo with Hammered Hamlet – in the tradition of the John Barrymore school of acting actors will try to navigate the tricky plot and intricate text of Shakespeare while consuming enough shots to trip up even the most well-trained tongue. Tickets will go on sale in November.

Hamlet: A Ghost Story Adapted by Anna Cummer – March 20 – April 13, 2019

Then Vertigo Theatre and the Shakespeare Company reimagine one of the Bard’s greatest works by presenting Hamlet as a ghost story, a detective story and a revenge story all rolled into one classic plot.  Agatha Christie would be proud. Brought to you by the same creative team that created the chilling and supernatural Macbeth.  Hamlet: A Ghost Story is a macabre reimagining of one of the Bard’s greatest works. Tickets are just $35.00 and available online at the Vertigo Theatre website or by calling the box office at 403.221.3708.

The Hamlet Frequency Directed and Choreographed by Denise Clarke – May 16 – 25, 2019

For the final show of the season you’ll meet Hamlet and the rest of the murderous and murdered ghosts of Elsinore as they wander and haunt the halls of the theatres that play them and stagger to their feet on an electromagnetic wave, ready to start all over again only this time they will grieve, plot and rage through the music of their minds in this reimagining of Shakespeare’s story, choreographed and staged by Denise Clarke with One Yellow Rabbit’s education troupe beautifulyoungartists. Tickets are just $35.00 for adults and $25.00 for students and are available through the Shakespeare Company website.

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The Shakespeare Company is Calgary’s lean and mean classical theatre company, highlighting the best of the Bard in all his comedy, tragedy, and bawdiness. Since 1995, we have brought the Bard alive for Calgarians through both Shakespeare and Shakespeare inspired plays. We are committed to making Shakespeare accessible through innovative performances and inspired directing. Alongside our mainstage productions, we have two community initiatives: Page to Stage Outreach Program and DiVerseCity.

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Haysam Kadri Artistic Director has been with The Shakespeare Company since 2012 and has worked to elevate its main stage productions and outreach programs in Calgary. A graduate of the Birmingham Conservatory for classical training at the Stratford Festival, Haysam spent six seasons as a company member with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada. He has worked extensively as a Theatre Arts instructor with Red Deer College, Mount Royal University, and the University of Calgary. Haysam is an Actor, Director, Fight Choreographer, and Teacher. Since 2012, The Shakespeare Company has enjoyed countless nominations and rewards under his leadership.

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Hit and Myth Productions is a professional independent theatre company based in Calgary, Alberta. Hit & Myth was established in 2006, and since that time has produced over 30 professional shows, engaging numerous local actors, directors and designers.  Hit & Myth collaborates with small to mid-sized sized theatre companies and independent artists to co-produce theatre that is provocative, modern, sensational, and above all else, entertaining. Our productions strive to reflect the dynamic and diverse theatrical community of Calgary and Calgary audiences.

This interview with Haysam Kadri Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Company has been edited for length and clarity. Last revised August 20, 2022.

Interview with Artistic Director of Verb Theatre Jamie Dunsdon: The Wolves

Posted on by James Hutchison
Verb Theatre Jamie Dunsdon
Jamie Dunsdon – Artistic Director and Founder of Verb Theatre

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“I work really hard to pick plays that I feel are important or valuable or ground-breaking in some big way, at least to me, and there is an immense satisfaction in sharing that kind of experience with others. I’ve been transformed by theatre, and I want to offer that gift to others. And although I don’t think theatre is the most efficient tool for social change, I do think it’s a high-impact tool for inquisitive thinking. We need more complex thinking and feeling in this universe, and I truly believe that if you can open an audience member’s heart or mind just enough, it will stay open after the show.”

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David Rooney from the Hollywood Reporter describes The Wolves by Sarah Delappe as “A dizzying whirl of attitude,  anxiety and adolescent hormonal volatility…” He goes on to say that DeLappe’s “…dialogue has the unwritten sound of real conversation, much of it inconsequential, even banal or endearingly silly. But out of that jumble of words comes an imperceptibly shaped snapshot of the tricky gulf separating girlhood from maturity, a portrait spilling over with humor, insight and, in the closing stretch, searing pathos — all of it undiluted by the distorting filters of the male gaze.” 

That sounds like a good evening of theatre to me and Calgary audiences are rather fortunate because The Wolves is being produced and directed by Jamie Dunsdon the Artistic Director and founder of Verb Theatre. The show runs from October 4th to 13th at the West Village Theatre and tickets are a steal at just $20.00 for adults and $15.00 for students and are available online at the Verb Theatre and Calgary Young People’s Theatre websites.

I sat down with Jamie to talk about The Wolves, her experiences running a local theatre company and her approach to directing.

JAMES HUTCHISON

Jamie, as the Artistic Director of a small Theatre Company what do you find to be some of your biggest challenges and how have you been able to address them?

JAMIE DUNSDON

The boring answer is money, but you’ll hear that from every producer.

When we’re in the thick of it, and we’re opening a show, I always wish we had more resources to get more people out to our shows. Marketing is expensive, but at a small company like Verb where our work is so carefully chosen for strong impact, I care way more about audience response than about getting audience money. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve let into Verb shows for free because they showed up 30 minutes late to whatever is happening in the big theatre down the hall, and I don’t want them to leave the building without having their heart touched.

We struggle with that sometimes, especially when doing small-cast shows, because we don’t have the financial resources for large ad buys or massive outreach campaigns or the time to do it ourselves. I’m often directing our shows as well, which means the week before show is artistically intense, but also not full of loads of free time to think about last-minute outreach strategies. It’s why we value audience members who share their experiences with others. Word of mouth is big.

JAMES

So, what is it about theatre and running your own company that keeps you going because it’s a lot of work…it’s a lot of time and energy…what’s the big payoff?

JAMIE

I believe in the work! I work really hard to pick plays that I feel are important or valuable or ground-breaking in some big way, at least to me, and there is an immense satisfaction in sharing that kind of experience with others. I’ve been transformed by theatre, and I want to offer that gift to others. And although I don’t think theatre is the most efficient tool for social change, I do think it’s a high-impact tool for inquisitive thinking. We need more complex thinking and feeling in this universe, and I truly believe that if you can open an audience member’s heart or mind just enough, it will stay open after the show.

But I’ll be honest with you. There are days where it’s hard to see the payoff, as you put it. Those days are rough. They happen often.

The other thing about running my own company is that I get a lot more control over what kind of ideas are being put into the universe, and how they are being delivered. I get to pick the stories that are valuable to me. If I went freelance, I probably wouldn’t have as much agency in that, and I’d probably get restless and end up self-producing my own work as well anyway.

JAMES

This year you’ll be directing The Wolves by Sarah Delappe – this play was a winner of the 2015 Relentless Award for Playwriting which was established to honour Philip Seymour Hoffman and it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Those are both extraordinary honours and the play has received wide praise and positive reviews. What was it that attracted you to this particular play?

JAMIE

I found it very funny. I found it very real and resonant. This play is surgical in its exploration of female relationships. No detail is too small. One of the characters is described as “wearing eyeliner” as defining character trait, and I don’t know if you can appreciate the significance of that, but it’s huge and it’s different than describing a girl as “beautiful in that next-door-neighbour kind of way” as we often see in casting calls. A girl who wears eyeliner on the soccer field is a very particular kind of person, and the playwright allows for her to be that and be rich and three dimensional. And this play asks questions about what breaks girls apart and what brings them together in ways that I’ve never heard vocalized before.

But I also just needed a play like this.

I took the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016 pretty hard. I have a ton of empathy for her as a woman in leadership, a woman who has been misunderstood, as a woman whose passion is often obfuscated by fear and misogyny in those around her. I was finding certain roadblocks in the theatre world that resembled in some small ways the roadblocks she stumbled on. Plus, I kind of look like her. Anyway, I read The Wolves shortly after Donald Trump began his presidency. It was like I was feeling solid ground under my feet after treading water for a year. These were real teen girls speaking the way real teen girls speak and I work at Calgary Young People’s Theatre as well, so I know a thing or two about how teen girls speak. And this script allowed them to be real. They were allowed to be smart and stupid, insightful and oblivious, moral and immoral. And I think I needed that. After 2016, I needed to see girls being allowed to be themselves. I’d grown weary of watching girls have to fit into someone else’s mold.

Jamie Dunsdon - The Wolves director at West Village Theatre in Calgary 2018. (Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media)
Mya Welsh, Nadia Kolesnikova, Dana Prather, Tess Larson, Sarah Shepherd, Haley Mowatt, Thea Libin, and Vicky Pablo in the Verb Theatre and The Young People’s Theatre production of The Wolves by Sarah Delappe. Direct by Jamie Dunsdon. (Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media)

JAMES

The play is about a girl’s soccer team and the action of the play takes place as the girls warm up and practice throughout the season. There’s a certain attraction to having characters perform real activities but I’m wondering what sort of challenges does that pose for the actors as they try to do both the physical actions required and also tell a dramatic story.

JAMIE

Um. We have to keep eyes on soccer balls, because an errant ball can disrupt the flow of dialogue. Luckily this cast gets that and understands how to adapt.

I think the activity really helps ground the performances. When you’re kicking a soccer ball or stretching or doing some kind of exercise, that takes up the same brain space that would otherwise kick in and start over-thinking about things like what do I do with my hands? So the task allows them to just exist in the world.

It’s been a bit different for me, though, because most of the tools in my directorial kit have to do with how characters move as a response to their objectives in the scene. But when characters are moving because they have to as part of a stretch or exercise, it changes the way physicality functions onstage. Fascinating and thrilling to navigate that.

JAMES

Do you have a consistent approach as a director when you’re doing a play or do you adjust your style of directing depending on whether or not you’re doing a comedy like The Importance of Being Earnest which you directed a few years ago or a drama like Blackbird which you directed last year or The Wolves which you’re directing this year?

JAMIE

No, I don’t have a directorial method, if that’s what you’re asking. Or if I do, it’s simply to learn what each play needs and learn to direct all over again based on those requirements. But every play is so different, as is every artist, so I’m constantly adjusting my process.

I carry around a director’s tool kit in my head, and the more experience I get, the more tools I have, which make me a better director. I collect them. Steal them. Some tools are for shaping, some are for cutting away. Some are for actors, others are for designers, others are for me. But the trick is to know which tool to use when, and to recognize when you don’t actually possess the tool yet… and to know where to look to find it.

JAMES

Theatre and television and movies have focused on male stories for a long time but now we’re starting to see more stories about women and their struggles and challenges in life. Do you think The Wolves might be the start of a movement towards more female stories and if so have you seen other playwrights and theatre companies that are working to give those stories a platform?

JAMIE

I’m seeing it more in film and TV, with all-female treatments of certain stories or with female-dominated worlds like Orange is the New Black or GLOW, which both have some pretty amazing female perspectives in them. But there’s also a lot of sexual objectification in those worlds as well. The pilot episode of GLOW has Alison Brie take off her shirt for absolutely no reason.

In theatre, we’re certainly seeing a push toward gender equity and ethnic diversity, which is encouraging, but I don’t know if there’s a movement toward more complex female characters just yet. I think a lot of female actors have been culturally trained not to think that way, so it might take some time.

JAMES

Last year I saw your production of Blackbird and can easily say it was one of the best productions I saw over the course of the year. It’s a powerful play and you had two extraordinary actors Curt McKinstry and Camille Pavlenko in the lead roles. It was a raw and emotional theatrical experience. But that was mostly with a cast of two so you can really focus the energy and the emotion. But with The Wolves, you’ve got a cast of ten. How do you build and control the dramatic energy of a play when you’ve got such a large cast and so many storylines?

JAMIE

The Wolves and Blackbird have a lot in common – both are written in that hyper-naturalistic style that tries to capture the way real humans speak. Both explore nuanced grey zones of human experience. Both have Rachel Mah in them. Rachel is an amazing young actor who appeared as the “girl” in Blackbird and who plays our goalie in The Wolves.

But The Wolves is written to be experienced differently than Blackbird. Blackbird is strung up by a thread, so you follow a very intricate and specific story the full way. The Wolves, however, has many threads, and it’s impossible to just focus on one… which means the audience will get a bit more of a collage effect. The girls talk over each other a lot, so there are entire chunks of the play where you simply CAN’T hear any one conversation. Instead, hopefully, you absorb the effect. The big picture. If Blackbird is a taut thread, The Wolves is a taut tapestry. There are some who would argue it’s a bit more of a feminist structure in that regard, but I’ll leave that to the scholars.

Jamie Dunsdon The Wolves The Calgary Young People's Theatre Company present The Wolves by Sarah Delappe at the West Village Theatre. (Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media)
Back Row left to right: Rachel Mah, Sarah Shepherd, Haley Mowatt, Thea Libin. Front Row left to right: Tess Larson, Mya Welsh, Dana Prather, Nadia Kolesnikova. The Wolves by Sarah Delappe. Produced by Verb Theatre and The Calgary Young People’s Theatre Company. Directed by Jamie Dunsdon. (Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media)

JAMES

Why should someone come to see the show, and when they do what are you hoping audiences will get out of seeing The Wolves?

JAMIE

Everybody should see this show because it might make them feel something. And we live in a time that is very unfeeling. Everybody should see this show because it might make them question something. And we live in a time that is very uncurious. Everybody should see this show because it stars a cast of 9 outstanding young female actors from diverse backgrounds, and they are our future and they will make you feel better about our future. Everybody should see this show because Anna Cummer makes a cameo in it that is worth the ticket price alone! Everybody with a teenager should see this show. Everybody who was a teenager should see this show.

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The Wolves a Co-production between Verb Theatre and Calgary Young People’s Theatre opens Thursday, October 4th and runs until Saturday, October 13th at the West Village Theatre. Evening performances begin at 7:00 pm and there is a 2:00 pm matinee on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are just $20.00 for adults and $15.00 for students and are available through the Verb Theatre and the Calgary Young People’s Theatre Websites.

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Plus, mark your calendars, Jamie will be directing Death Trap by Ira Levin which runs at Vertigo Theatre from January 26th to February 24th, 2019. Death Trap is a fun and twisted tale of murder and intrigue and stars an outstanding cast including Mark Bellamy, Barbara Gates Wilson, Tyrell Crews, Karen Johnson-Diamond, and Kevin Corey. I’ll be talking to Jaimie more in the new year about her experiences running a theatre company and her approach to directing Death Trap.

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The Wolves by Sarah Delappe

Cast: #00 – Rachel Mah, #02 – Haley Mowatt, #07 – Nadia Kolesnikova, #08 – Thea Libin, #11 – Tess Larson, #13 – Mya Welsh, #14 – Dana Prather, #25 – Sarah Shepherd, #46 – Vicky Pablo, Soccer Mom: Anna Cummer

Creative Team: Director: Jamie Dunsdon, Stage Manager: Sara German, Costume Coordinator: Rebecca Toon, Sound Design: Kristin Eveleigh, Lighting Design: Ajay Badoni, Assistant Director: Shea Heatherington

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Jamie Dunsdon is the Artistic Director of Calgary’s Verb Theatre, Artistic Producer of Calgary Young People’s Theatre, and a sessional instructor for the University of Lethbridge Calgary Campus. She is also an active director and creator, and occasional designer. In 2013/14, Jamie was the Artistic Associate at The Grand Theatre in London. Directing Credits (Selected): Blackbird, Easter Island, Sextet, Lungs, The Dandelion Project, NOISE, Marg Szkaluba: Pissy’s Wife, Jim Forgetting, John and Beatrice, The Shape of a Girl (Verb Theatre); The Importance of Being Earnest, Playwrights Cabaret (The Grand Theatre); Unity 1918, Macbeth, Village of Idiots, Richard III, The Lost Prince, A Little Princess (Calgary Young People’s Theatre); Bridge to Terabithia (Storybook Theatre). Upcoming: In 2018/19, Jamie will be directing The Wolves for Verb and CYPT, and Deathtrap for Vertigo Theatre.

VERB Theatre:  TOMORROW’S THEATRE, TODAY Here at Verb, our mission is to provide for our audiences theatrical experiences that explore cutting-edge ideas in cutting-edge ways. We look to explore conversations and theatrical forms that will be important to our audiences tomorrow with our surprising, important, and innovative performance. And as for you? We simply invite you to expect the unexpected.

Calgary Young People’s Theatre: OUR MISSION STATEMENT: We aim to inspire and encourage the next generation of the theatre community by providing a safe, creative space where young people can freely express themselves and their ideas. Through this we hope to foster in them a strong sense of community, passion and appreciation for the arts.

Revised September 8th, 2020

Red Rock Diner is Summertime fun at Stage West Calgary – Interview with Red Robinson & Ben Cookson

Posted on by James Hutchison

This summer if you want a great show, a fantastic meal, and a night out that will leave you feeling optimistic and happy in these strange and uncertain times head on down to Stage West Calgary and catch Red Rock Diner. Director and choreographer David Connolly has assembled an energetic, youthful, fun, and talented cast for this tribute to the early music of rock ‘n’ roll.

Lee-Anne Galloway, Ben Chiasson, Scott Beaudin, Ben Cookson, Carter Easler, and Sarah Higgins singing Johnny B Goode in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan is a rockabilly jukebox musical that celebrates the music of the fifties and features plenty of classic hits like Johnny B. Good, Who Wrote the Book of Love and Great Balls of Fire! The play is loosely based on the early career of Canada’s champion of rock ‘n’ roll music DJ Red Robinson who started spinning rock ‘n’ roll records on Vancouver’s CJOR while he was still in high school in 1954.

1954 was also the year the transistor radio – that marvel of modern technology – made it’s debut and made music portable. The first transistor radios were manufactured by Texas Instruments and sold for $49.95. That’s about four hundred and fifty bucks in today’s dollars, and even though the price was steep, Texas Instruments sold 150,000 units. Soon other companies jumped into the market and started manufacturing and selling their own radios and the price dropped and the radios sold, and the music spread. It spread because of DJ’s like Red Robinson who made it their mission to give the teens the music they wanted.

Red Robinson & Ben Cookson who plays Red in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner

I spoke with both the original Red Robinson and Ben Cookson who plays Red in the show. Red, who is 81, still has a youthful energy and infectious enthusiasm for rock ‘n’ roll more than 70 years after he first heard and helped spread the music of Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, The Big Bopper and Elvis. I asked Red where the idea for the play Red Rock Diner came from.

RED ROBINSON

Well, it started in the brain of Dean Regan who had written things like A Closer Walk with Patsy Kline and other things like that. And he came to me one day and said, “I’m doing a play, a musical, about you.” And I said, “Why the hell would you do that?” “Red,” he said, “when I saw you getting into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame I said, I went to school with that guy and I’ve got to write something.” And he did. And that’s how it was born.

JAMES HUTCHISON

So, you guys know each other from high school. Isn’t that cool. I didn’t know that connection. You know when I look at the show there’s a lot of great songs in it. But, I’m wondering – did he consult you about the music?

RED

Oh yeah, for sure.

JAMES

How did you decide what music to put in the show?

RED

Well, when he has the script for what’s going to be said then you can place the music. You know it’s like photography. Years ago, when I had an ad agency the girls would come to me and say look, “We’ll write this up and then get a picture to go with it.” And I said, “You’re doing it backwards. You get the picture and then you write it up.” That’s the way plays work too, musicals, you have the script and then you place the music and I think it was incredible his brain remembered the music from that period and he made it all match.

Sarah Higgins, Lee-Anne Galloway, Carter Easler, Scott Beaudin, and Ben Chiasson in The Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES

There’s a lot of great songs in the show like Rock Around the Clock, Stand By Me, and Tequila. What are some of your favourites

RED

Oh, there are so many, I like Roy Orbison of course, he was a good friend for twenty-three years and he really was a gentleman. And I like Rebel Rouser, which was my theme, and it was really how I was. (Chuckles) A rebel without a cause.

JAMES

Well, you had a cause though, didn’t you?

RED

Oh, I did. It was to make rock ‘n’ roll acceptable to the public. People forget it was not welcomed by anyone except the youth – the teenagers.

Carter Easler, Lee-Anne Galloway, Ben Chiasson, Ben Cookson, Scott Beaudin, and Sarah Higgins in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES

What do you think it is about rock ‘n’ roll that was so appealing to the kids?

RED

You could get up and dance to it. And that’s one of the ways you met girls. It was incredible. Jan and Dean told me they started Jan and Dean because they just wanted to go out and meet girls.

JAMES

There’s a lot of musicians who learned music and picked up a guitar so they could meet some girls.

RED (Laughs)

No question are you kidding?

Lee-Anne Galloway in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES

You know you bring up an interesting thing because there’s a lot of male acts from that day but what about the girls? What about the females?

RED

We wanted more but we had a limited edition. There was a rockabilly singer by the name of Wanda Jackson – she was terrific. Elvis dated her for a while but then who didn’t he date? Brenda Lee was one. When she started singing my God it was amazing. This little girl who was not even five feet not really – belts out music like she was born to it. Well, she was, no question. Connie Francis another. I loved those ladies they were great, but it was very limited.

When I joined CKWX in Vancouver they had a playlist on the wall in the control room. Male, female, and this comes up in the play, male, female instrumental and group. And the program director called me in and said, “Hey you’re not following our format.” And I said, “How can I?” “What do you mean?” he said. And I said, “We got two maybe three female singers and that was it.”

JAMES

That’s certainly changed when you look at how many big stars are females today.

RED

Oh, it’s the opposite. It’s the opposite. Totally changed. And for the better.

JAMES

I do have an acting question. Ben Cookson is playing you in Red Rock Diner. What acting advice would you give Ben for portraying Red Robinson?

RED (Laughs)

That’s an odd feeling watching somebody play you. I think my advice to him would be to have fun and to just to act naturally – you know just like the song says by Ringo Starr. Get up there and have fun, act naturally but have compassion for the music and the people – the audience.

JAMES

So, you were there at the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll. Did the stars align for you or were you pushing in some way to get into that position? How did you end up being the person introducing rock ‘n’ roll to Canada?

RED

Nobody else would take a gamble, and they didn’t know what they were doing, and I’m not being rude. I was a kid. I was seventeen, and I knew what the kids in high school wanted. You know the teachers would throw a dance and play Glenn Miller, but in truth we all went down to a little restaurant called The Oakway at the corner of Oak and Broadway – it’s not there anymore. And the guy had a jukebox and he played rhythm and blues and we were all getting up and dancing to it and that’s where the idea of Red Rock Diner came from you know the title of the play. We just had fun.

Scott Beaudin in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES

How did you discover the music to put on the air?

RED

Well, I’d go down to the music stores in those days and you’d ask for it and they’d reach under the counter and put it in a brown paper bag and give it to you like it was pornography. It was unbelievable. And I think it was because they were black artists – that was the problem – and you know that all changed – thank God.

So, I’d buy my own records and when I couldn’t get them fast enough I would go to a little record store in Billingham Washington just across the border, and I made a deal with a company called Stark Music and every new record that came in I took them. And I’d drive down – it’s about sixty miles – I’d drive down – get them and come back home and play em on the radio. By the time they were pressed in Canada and mailed out it would be another week to ten days.

JAMES

So, you were offering something that was fresh and on the cutting edge.

RED

That’s right.

JAMES

Where did the confidence come from? How did a seventeen-year-old guy have so much confidence and such a clear picture about what to do?

RED

Well, you know the story on teenagers. You think you can never die, and so what if you fail. I mean it meant nothing to me to fail. And I didn’t. I had a dream. I had a vision and I went ahead and I pursued it. And I think any young person who has a passion for anything whether it’s computers or whatever – they’ll make it so long as they’re dedicated to it internally.

JAMES

No fear of failure is powerful at that age.

RED

Oh absolutely.

Red Robinson spinning Rock ‘n’ Roll Tunes

JAMES

I went to your website Red Robinson – Home of the Legends and I listened to one of the programs you have on your website through Soundcloud about a concert in Vancouver on October 23rd, 1957. That’s the concert where you were introducing all the acts – it’s called – I think The Biggest Show of Stars.

RED

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

JAMES

Oh my God, what a lineup. Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Paul Anka.

RED

I’ve got a poster from that year and it is unbelievable.

JAMES

Did you get it autographed?

RED

Ha, ha, no I didn’t.

JAMES

Damn.

Red Robinson and Buddy Holly

RED

I’ve got Buddy Holly’s autograph. And that was where I got my first interview with Paul Anka and he was fifteen at the time and was full of self-confidence and all the same things I was. I played it for Paul in later years and he said, “Oh my God I’m a kid.” And there was Fats Domino, Jimmy Bowen, Buddy Knox, Buddy Holly and the Crickets and so many acts it was just unbelievable. The story is Irvin Feld who owned Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey saw rock ‘n’ roll as I guess a circus and he decided to take it on the road.

JAMES

You had all these amazing acts and they’re coming out and only doing a couple songs.

RED

Well Buddy Knox said, “We come out” – and well they only had a couple of hits at that time – “and we do the two hits and then we’d do one more and if we had enough applause or whatever we had an encore and you had to come out and do another song. That was it.” But I mean how can you have more than that with all the acts they had.

JAMES

What are some of your special memories because we’re talking about this show from 1957 and then there’s your radio days and the Expo in Vancouver in 86 where you presented The Legends of Rock ‘n’ Roll – you mentioned Roy Orbison was a friend for twenty-three years, for example.

RED

Oh, yeah, he was a good friend. As a matter of fact, we were going to buy a radio station at one point. He always liked to invest in the arts. During the Expo in Vancouver in 86 we got the whole list of everybody we wanted and we wanted Roy but he was on the comeback trail with the Travelling Wilburys and he was a little reluctant but he said, “You know Red, you and your partner in the promotions department by the name of Les Vogt were the only guys who ever bonused me.”  We gave him a couple extra grand because he made us a lot of money and that bought a house for me and one for Les – in a sense because we were both able to put down the down payment. That’s the kind of relationship we had in those days. The disc jockeys and the recording artists.

JAMES

You know I love the Traveling Wilburys that was a wonderful album. So, sad he passed away right then. What a voice.

RED

What a voice and what a gentleman.

JAMES

You know I think even though Red Rock Diner is a play that appeals to the memory of people who grew up with that music this music appeals to everybody today.

RED

No question. I’ve had – my grandkids say to me – I wish we grew up in your era – your music was fun. I think that people were just trying to get the thoughts of the wars and everything on the back turntable if you know what I mean. Then the message songs came along during the Vietnam War years but for me, I think music is like movies they should be an escape. That’s what it is to me. But then, I’m not the authority on all this stuff, I just think that to play music that’s fun and uplifting is the right thing to do.

Ben Chiasson, Sarah Higgins, Scott Beaudin, Sarah Higgins and Carter Easler in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES

I understand that Michael Bublé was in the original cast

RED

He was. I saw him yesterday by the way.

JAMES

How’s he doing?

RED

Oh fine. He’s back from the road and he’s waiting for the third baby to be born. So, he’s home for that. He’s just a wonderful rooted guy. He’s never let the ego take over his life. And he’s got a grandfather who inspired him to listen to music other than rock ‘n’ roll and he listened to Sinatra and Dean Martin and Elvis. Everybody says he’s Frank Sinatra but no he’s not. He likes Bobby Darin and Elvis Presley. That’s the truth. He’s a wonderfully talented kid. You’ve got to go to his show. This guy’s got a built-in sense of humour you can’t believe. And he’s down to earth.

JAMES

Did he play you in the play?

RED

He played the Elvis part. Here’s a quick story. Bruce Allen manages him and I’m on the phone on a long-distance call with David Foster and Paul Anka and they said, “Red would you talk to Bruce and tell him to sign Michael Bublé?” I said, “Is he reluctant?” And they said, “Oh yeah.” And so I said to Bruce, “You saw Red Rock Diner but you didn’t see what was going on behind the scenes. After the show every night the girls would swamp – you know I’ve got David Foster and Paul Anka listening – they would swamp the backstage trying to get an autograph from Michael. And he wasn’t even established yet and Paul Anka says on the phone, “Oh that brings back some memories.” (Red laughs) Bruce signed him after that. I don’t know if I was responsible, but I think I gave him a new light – a new look at him.

JAMES

Well you know musicians need their champions, right? I think that’s a good way to think about you. You were a champion for that music and for those artists.

RED

I really was, and I believed in it. And I’ll tell you one thing I never told anybody. I traveled by airplane all around this province doing sock hops, taking my own music with me, taking giveaways, and you know only because I believed in it and I wanted the music to spread and so if anyone hates rock ‘n’ roll you got to hate me.

Red Robinson & Elvis

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Bringing the character of Red Robinson to life on stage is Ben Cookson. Ben bears an uncanny likeness to the young Red Robinson and has the same infectious positive attitude and smile.

Scott Beaudin, Sarah Higgins, Carter Easler, Lee-Anne Galloway, Scott Beaudin and Ben Cookson in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES HUTCHISON

So, when thinking about Red Rock Diner are there any particular numbers that really stand out for you? Because there’s a lot of great stuff in it.

BEN COOKSON

I get to rock out to every single tune on stage while it’s being played and performed and it’s hard to choose a favourite, but I really like Sh-Boom and one of my other favourites is Cry that Carter gets to sing in the second act.

Carter Easler in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES

You know one of my favourites is the one you do.

BEN

Oh Boy?

JAMES

Yeah, Oh Boy. I saw the show on Friday and you were absolutely fantastic. Loved the song. Loved the feel of that. It was a beautiful moment.

BEN

Thank you so much. It opens up the second act. It’s a difficult voice to imitate because Buddy Holly was so unique and distinct in his sound and quality.

JAMES

Why do you think this music still resonates today?

BEN

This music still resonates today because the eighty-year-olds are still playing it for their kids and grandkids. I think rock ‘n’ roll introduced a heartbeat into music. I think it’s a heartbeat that appears in all genres today. Rock ‘n’ roll creates this internal feeling that you can’t help but move to.

JAMES

Is it a little something primal maybe?

BEN

Yeah, exactly. You get hooked on it right away. And I think that’s why that music is still being played.

Sarah Higgins, Carter Easler, Scott Beaudin, Ben Chiasson, Ben Cookson, and Lee Ann Galloway in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES

What’s it like for you to perform in a show that’s running for a couple of months?

BEN

A show like Red Rock Diner – especially for the other five guys – is a heavy breathing show. They’re working their butts off. And it definitely becomes easier over time and that allows us to sink into the text of the songs and the actual beats of it and the reaction of the audience a little more, but it’s all for the audience because it’s their first time seeing the show even though it may be our sixtieth time doing the show. We owe it to them to give it our best every time.

JAMES

What type of research did you do?

BEN

I definitely looked into reel to reel tape and how that was used in radio production because at the time they were doing some pretty intense physical editing and changing records and Red would do all that himself. He’d be in the DJ booth changing records – changing 45s – and then going reel to reel in order to play the next commercial and he was constantly doing things. And I definitely listened to a lot of music. That’s not a bad assignment for homework. I listened to a lot of music a lot of the fifties stuff.

Ben Cookson as Red Robinson in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

JAMES

Did you listen to a lot of music growing up?

BEN

Well, my parents are both singers themselves they’re not professional but it’s a hobby they certainly love doing. So, music was a part of my childhood. My parents listen to all kinds of music. Elvis Presley was in the mix – the musical Jesus Christ Superstar was played every Easter, a lot of Celtic stuff, East Coast, Great Big Sea was a huge one growing up.

I did a lot of performing growing up in choirs and then I did the Grand Theatre’s High School Project in London Ontario where you get a chance to work with real professionals in the industry and see what it’s actually like to put on a full-scale musical. I did it two years in a row. I did Footloose and then I did My Fair Lady and I played Willard in Footloose and Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, and then I went to Sheridan College for their Honours Bachelor Musical Theatre Performance Program. That program was intense. It was everything I needed. It was the training I needed and it helped me make the connections that I needed

JAMES

Are there particular musicals that you want to do in the future?

BEN

I have soft spot for golden age musicals, but I definitely would love to do Les Mis. Les Mis is probably one of my favourite shows. I’d love to play Jean Valjean later in life or just one of the guys in the ABC Café…it’s a show where I could play any role and enjoy it.

JAMES

So, here’s a question for you. Did you like the movie?

BEN (Laughs)

I did. I’m one of the few who actually really enjoyed it in my friends’ circle. I enjoyed the rawness of it. I enjoyed the power and it was all about the music for me.

JAMES

I loved it. However, my sister completely disagrees with me and thinks I’m an idiot.

BEN

Yeah, a lot of people disagree with me as well.

JAMES

I think it’s competing against the love of the stage play.

BEN

It is. I enjoy the stage play more than the movie, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the movie. I really enjoyed the movie, but I love the stage production of it. I love it so much it makes me weep it makes me cry. It makes me laugh. It’s everything to me.

JAMES

So, tell me about working with this group of talented folks you share the stage with every night on Red Rock Diner.

Scott Beaudin, Ben Chiasson, Carter Easler, Ben Cookson, Sarah Higgins, and Lee-Anne Galloway in the Stage West Production of Red Rock Diner by Dean Regan – John Watson Photography

BEN

Well, to start it’s nice to work with a small cast. There’s only six of us in the show and we became a family within the first week. I mean you kind of go through trials and tribulations together when you’re rehearsing a show but all of us get along so well it’s so much fun to work with Carter and Lee-Anne and Sarah and we do trips to the mountains on our days off. It’s a blast and I went to school with Ben Chiasson. He was in my graduating year. And I’d met Scott the year before and Carter also went to Sheridon. We’re just a happy little family which I just really enjoy and I look forward to spending the rest of the summer with them.

JAMES

What’s your impression of Stage West as a company and Stage West as a performance space?

BEN

I think the large reason our cast has become such a family is because the production team and the family here at Stage West is so strong. Everyone cares so much about the production. Everyone cares so much about each other. It’s hard not to love what you’re doing and who you’re working with.

Stage West as an experience is very cool because you get a great buffet before the show and then you get your dessert at intermission and it’s a comfortable setting where you’re not cramped next to another person. And Red Rock Diner is a show that you can’t come to and not have a good time – you can’t not have fun at the Red Rock Diner.

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Red Rock Diner runs until August 30th at Stage West Calgary. Tickets are available online or by calling the box office at 403-243-6642. Red Rock Diner is a fun show filled with great music presented by a young and talented cast and gets a full five out of five great balls of fire for being a Rockin’ Robin good time.

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Red Rock Diner – Vancouver Canada June 1957 

The Cast – Red Rock Diner: Scott Beaudin as Val, Ben Chiasson as Richard, Ben Cookson as Red Robinson, Carter Easler as Johnny, Lee-Anne Galloway as Connie/Dance Captain, Sarah Higgins as Venus

Creative Team – Red Rock Diner: David Connolly – Director/Choreographer, Dean Regan – Playwright, Konrad Pluta – Musical Director, Executive Producer – Howard Pechet, Production Manager/Artistic Associate – Kira Campbell, Technical Director/Set Designer – Sean D. Ellis, Costumer & Wig Designer – Norman Galenza-MacDonald, Lighting Designer – David Smith, Sound Designer/Head of Audio – Michael Gesy, Scenic Artist – Shane Ellis, Stage Manager – Laurel Oneil, Assistant Stage Manager – Darcy Foggo, Dresser – Brianne Hughes, Replacement Stage Manager – Ashley Rees, Apprentice Stage Manager – Jennifer Yeung, Followspot Operator – Chris Cooper

The Band – Red Rock Diner: Musical Director/Keyboards – Konrad Pluta, Sub Musical Director/Keyboards – Jon Day, Drums – Jeff Fafard, Saxophone – Keith O’Rourke, Guitar – Brad Steckel, Bass – Rob Vause

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Additional Media about Stage West’s Red Rock Diner

  • Stage West’s Red Rock Diner serves up healthy helping of nostalgia with a side of youth, heart and passion   YYSCENE Calgary’s Go-To Guide to Getting Out – Krista Sylvester, July 20, 2018
  • Interview: Legendary radio DJ Red Robinson: The Homestretch CBC He helped shape the radio scene in Canada in the 1950s. He has met everyone from the Beatles to Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley. Red Robinson is an influential force who spent decades spinning tunes. He retired last year at the age of 80. His life inspired a new show now on at Stage West called Red Rock Diner. Red joined host Doug Dirks on the line. July 16, 2018 – Length: 08:27
  • Review: Red Rock Diner a rollicking dance through the ’50s – A musical highlighting the early career of Vancouver DJ Red Robinson  Review: 4 out of 5 stars – Dan St.Yves July 14, 2018
  • Review: Diner whisks audience back to Top 40 Glory Days: Red Rock Diner is a fun, rewarding way to spend a summer evening. Louis B. Hobson Calgary Sun, July 13, 2018

Rock & Roll Links

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Interview with Actor Braden Griffiths: 21st Annual Betty Mitchell Awards

Posted on by James Hutchison

“We’re also a night where everybody in the theatre community comes together to celebrate the work which we’ve done throughout the year. And whether they’re nominated for a Betty or not – whether they win a Betty or not – we are all there to celebrate the outstanding work that has been done throughout the theatre season, because it’s a hard thing to create theatre. It’s a hard thing to create art. They are a celebration that we have a community and that we are a group of four hundred to five hundred people who have come together and decided that this is our life’s work – hence the professional thing – this is our life’s work, this is what I chose to do for a life and the gift of my art is something that has value.” – Braden Griffiths

Actor Braden Griffiths in Vertigo Production
Kathryn Kerbes as Mrs. Hudson, Braden Griffiths as Sherlock Holmes and Curt McKinstry as Dr. Watson in the Vertigo Theatre Production of Sherlock Holmes and the American Problem by R. Hamilton Wright. Photo by Tim Nguyen

On Monday, June 25th the Calgary Theatre community came together to celebrate the Twenty-first annual Betty Mitchell Awards.  I sat down with actor, playwright, and current President of the Betty Mitchell Board Braden Griffiths, who was just finishing his run as Sherlock Holmes in the Vertigo Theatre production of Sherlock Holmes and the American Problem, to talk about the awards and theatre in Calgary.

JAMES HUTCHISON

What is the purpose of the Bettys?

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

The awards were started by Grant Linneberg , Johanne Deleeuw, Mark Bellamy, Donna Belleville and Doug McKeag those five, and Diane Goodman might have been there as well. One of them joined in the second year. They started it as a way to recognize the excellence that they saw happening in this community and as a way to earmark that excellence in a more official way so that the Calgary theatre community could be a bigger player in Canadian Theatre either by exporting that excellence or by becoming a destination for excellence to be imported into Calgary.

Kate Dion-Richard as Helen Schmuck, Gili Roskies as Marm (Margaret) Schmuck, Katie Ryerson as Hilda Ranscombe, and Morgan Yamada as Nellie Ranscombe in the Alberta Theatre Projects in Association with Western Canada Theatre production of GLORY by Tracey Power. Photo by Barbara Zimonick

JAMES

There’s a lot of recognition across the various companies in this year’s nominations.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

We’ve considered splitting the second-tier and the first-tier theatres into separate categories, but there is something beautiful about having smaller theatre companies like Handsome Alice nominated or Verb Theatre recognized in the best production category this year alongside the artistic output from larger theatre companies like Theatre Calgary and ATP because I think when we boil all this down, all we’re trying to do in theatre is illuminate something about this messy existence we lead as human beings. We’re trying to illuminate something about what it means to be human and that can happen anywhere and you can be affected just as profoundly in the Motel Theatre as you can in any of the big theatres in Calgary. And so, I love how the Bettys safeguard this idea that we are a community of artists, and we all have the same goals regardless of whether we are working at TC or whether we are working at Handsome Alice or Sage or one of the smaller companies in town. We all have this same goal to tell a story and hopefully illuminate something about what it means to be human.

Camille Pavlenko as Una and Curt McKinstry as Ray in Verb Theatre’s production of Blackbird by David Harrower. Photo by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media.

JAMES

What do you think the awards mean to the local theatre community?

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

The value of a Betty, at this point I think, is a thumbs up that you’re creating something that did affect somebody in some way. And then beyond that we hope that a Betty Mitchell award matters on a grant proposal let’s say, or we hope that a Betty Mitchell award nomination might help somebody get into an audition room that maybe they weren’t able to get into before, or maybe it helps a playwright to get a commission. It gives that one little extra push to get that commission that maybe they wouldn’t have been considered for before.

And I don’t think the Bettys are the only benchmark we have for excellence in theatre in this community, because there are a lot of people who aren’t on that list who did outstanding work this year, but I think every artist wants to be recognized in some way for what they do as an artist, and this is a nice official way that you can do that and put it down on a ledger and say, I was nominated for a Betty.

Joel Cochrane as Don Pedro in The Shakespeare Company with Hit & Myth Productions Production of Much Ado About Nothing – Photo by Tim Nguyen

JAMES

And it means something now because we’re twenty-one years in. So, there is a history and a legacy to the Bettys that didn’t exist that first year. And the nice thing is, it does offer a certain record to the performance history of Calgary.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

Without a doubt. I was going through all the past nominations and there were productions in 1998 when I would have been in grade ten, I believe, and I can remember going to at least two productions that were nominated for Bettys on that list. And it was a bit of a time capsule for me, so the Bettys end up being a marking of our history. It’s saying, we were here. And there are people who are nominated whose names I don’t recognize, which is shocking to me, because we are a fairly small community, so I do wonder what happened to them, but that person was an important part of our theatre community at some point. And they made a difference

JAMES

They’re remembered, in a way. Their work is acknowledged. And that’s not insignificant.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

It’s not.  There’s a tradition in masonry of masons – when they build a big building or whatever out of stone – they’ll leave a little card with their name on it and the year that the building was built, and that card may never be found but its a little statement of I was here. And if theatre is about building a bridge between the artist and the audience then these artists who were nominated for their work but might not be here anymore are still an important stone in the bridge that the Calgary theatre community has been building to the audience of Calgary.

The cast of Sage Theatre’s production of Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story by Natalie Meisner. Matt McKinney as Everett Klippert, Jenn Forgie as Tonya, Kathy Zaborsky as Maxine, and Mark Bellamy as Handsome. Photo by Jason Mehmel

JAMES

When the awards started in ninety-eight the world population was 5.9 billion. Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister. Bill Clinton was President. The Tony Award for best musical was The Lion King. And on September 4th, 1998 Google was founded. Here are the type of plays that Calgary was producing at the time. A Delicate Balance, Glengarry Glen Ross, Assassins, Fiddler on the Roof, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)…

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

…which I’ve done four times…

JAMES

…and A Christmas Carol.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

There you go.

JAMES

Let’s jump twenty-one years. The world population is now 7.6 billion. Almost two billion more in twenty-one years.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

Holy moly.

JAMES

Justin Trudeau is Prime Minister. Donald Trump is President.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

Oh, man.

JAMES

The Tony Award for best musical – just decided – The Bands Visit. Google’s Brand value is 120.9 billion. They’re behind Apple and Amazon. And so here are the plays we’re seeing this year. We saw The Humans, The Last Wife, Inner Elder, Much Ado About Nothing, Blackbird, The 39 Steps, and A Christmas Carol.

BRADEN (Laughs)

Christmas Carol, our one big constant.

Stephen Hair as Ebenezer Scrooge, Jamie Konchak as Mrs. Cratchit, Tia Rose Woodruff as Tiny Tim, Eleanor Braitenbach as Belinda Cratchit, Graham Percy as the Spirit of Christmas Present, Karl H. Sine as Bob Cratchit and Evan Andersen Sterns as Peter Cratchit in the Theatre Calgary Production of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Adapted for the Stage by Dennis Garnhum. Photo by Trudie Lee

JAMES

So, how do you think the plays we’re producing at a particular time reflect the times we live in?

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

I’m always mystified by how Christmas Carol just sells out every year, but at its core, Christmas Carol, is a simple message about man’s ability to change and so there is still a desire for that simple hope. So, Christmas Carol or shows of that ilk and ilk sounds like a negative word but it’s not, I love Christmas Carol. I adore it. I wouldn’t have done it for seven years if I didn’t. But there is still a desire, and I think there always will be a desire, for that simple human message of hope. And yet theatre is starting to change. We are starting to be a more interactive society because of platforms like YouTube and Twitter where you can send a Tweet to Brad Pitt and he might respond to that Tweet.

Ron Pederson as Man 2, Tyrell Crews as Richard Hannay, Andy Curtis as Man 1, and Anna Cummer as Annabella/Margaret/Pamela in the Veritgo Theatre Production of The 39 Steps adapted by Patrick Barlow from the novel by John Buchan from the movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Photo by Tim Nguyen

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

And so, there’s a desire for more interactivity in the art or the media that we indulge in. I think to a certain degree, the magic of a play like The 39 Steps is that we’re all in on the joke. That this is just two ladders and a bunch of crates on a stage and yet those things will become a plane chasing someone through a field, or the crates will become the boxcars in a train or whatever it is, and so we’re all in on the joke and so there’s a greater sense of interactivity. Which is why I think 39 Steps, even though it’s an old play now, has great relevance because the audience is involved in creating that joke.

And then you have things like Inner Elder by Michelle Thrush which talks about what it means to be a first nations member of the Canadian Zeitgeist. What it means socially to be a first nations member. And to actually hear that story told by the person who should be telling that story. The first nation’s experience is not my lived experience. Their lived experience informs my lived experience, and it may not shine the most desirable light on my lived experience, but I need to know as a person who’s a six-foot-tall white male, and I live with such great privilege that it’s insane, but that is my lived experience, and sometimes I can’t see it. And so, if theatre is holding a mirror up to nature then by watching Inner Elder I learn something about what it means to be Braden by watching and hearing the story of someone who is living with much, much, much, less privilege than I. And then hopefully, if I’m open to that…if my ears are open to that…and if the theatre companies are providing a platform for those stories to be told then I will become a more complete human, and a I will become a better community member, and by community, I mean the community of the world by understanding the stories of those who are around me and understanding something greater about myself.

Inner Elder created and performed by Michelle Thrush and presented by Lunchbox Theatre and One Yellow Rabbit as part of The High Performance Rodeo. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

JAMES

Well that’s what art does, doesn’t it? It makes us look in the mirror. It reflects who we are as a people, culture and society and it looks at both the good and the bad.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

Hopefully. I was doing, Alls Well That Ends Well, with Peter Hinton at The Shakespeare Company two years ago, and this isn’t a name drop, I just want to give credit where credit is due. He said, at some point in that rehearsal process, “There’s not a lot of plays out there where two people sit on a bench both enjoying their own sandwiches, and then they go home. There’s a lot of plays out there where two people are sitting on a bench where one person has a sandwich and the other person is starving. There aren’t a lot of plays out there where we see mankind at peace. We’re always meeting these people in these stories at a time of crisis. At a life-defining moment.”

Elinor Holt as Deirdre Blake, Shekhar Paleja as Richard Saad, Lili Beadoin as Brigid Blake, Ric Reid as Erik Blake, and Ayla Stephen as Aimee Blake in the Theatre Calgary Production of The Humans by Stephen Karam. Photo by Trudie Lee

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

And I feel that’s a really apt quote because, speaking personally, I’ve always much preferred playing the very flawed individual, because we spend so much time in our lives hiding those flaws that we have from the rest of society because that’s the social agreement that we make. We all have our own shit and everybody’s life is complicated, but if you and I are not best friends we’re not going to throw our complications at the other person or that’s the hope of the social agreement we make every day.

And so, the flaws are where the real meat of storytelling and theatre happens. Sherlock Holmes, for example, who is a superhero in terms of his mental acuity is also a morphine addict and a cocaine addict. That I think is where theatre becomes accessible – it’s in the flaws. So, if theatre is holding a mirror up then we can see something of those things we are struggling with in these people on stage. Braden Griffiths as Sherlock Holmes is not dealing with the same things that Sherlock Holmes is, but I become a conduit to talk about those flaws, and I think that’s why theatre is valuable, because it provides a safe space for us to look at the worst and then to ruminate on the worst and know that at the end of the night we’re all going to get in our car and we’ll all safely drive home.

JAMES

What are your ambitions for the Bettys?

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

The board is always trying to safeguard the most unbiased process possible. That’s really what the guidelines are there for. So that we can award these 18 to 20 statues and it is representative of the twelve voices on the jury as opposed to one single voice. It’s a big thing to try and create a list of twelve that has a range of ages, that has a range of sexuality, and has a range of artistic niche. We try to have actors, directors, playwrights, educators, technicians and designers. We want that twelve ideally to be representative of the whole community so that it can be the most unbiased it possibly can be. That’s always going to be, for the board, at the top of the list.

Eric Wigston, Tenaj Williams, Madeleine Suddaby, and Selina Wong in Touch Me: Songs for a (Dis)connected Age by Forte Musical Theatre. Presented by Theatre Calgary. Photo by Trudie Lee

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

There’s also a responsibility for the Bettys to be as inclusive as possible as production models change and as the equity guidelines change to include different types of theatre being created. There are different contracting forms now that weren’t available seven or eight years ago where theatre companies can gather an ensemble of seven and create a show and be protected by equity and be considered a professional show. And so, there is a responsibility for the Bettys to foster a growth in the community by being as inclusive as possible so that those smaller companies that are trying to make their name in the theatre community are included within the professional theatre community. The more inclusive we can be, I think, the greater array of theatre production we’re going to see in this town.

A Chitenge Story created and performed by Makambe K. Simamba. A Handsome Alice Theatre Production. Photo by Tim Nguyen, Citrus Photography.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

We’re also a night where everybody in the theatre community comes together to celebrate the work which we’ve done throughout the year. And to a certain degree that is sacred as well, because as we’ve seen unofficial community meeting places like the Auburn disappear building that sense of community has become more difficult in some ways, and so the Bettys are a night that’s guaranteed to happen every year where two hundred or so of our theatre community will come together. And whether they’re nominated for a Betty or not – whether they win a Betty or not – we are all there to celebrate the outstanding work that has been done throughout the theatre season, because it’s a hard thing to create theatre. It’s a hard thing to create art. They are a celebration that we have a community and that we are a group of four hundred to five hundred people who have come together and decided that this is our life’s work – hence the professional thing – this is our life’s work, this is what I chose to do for a life and the gift of my art is something that has value.

Back Left to Right: Lee-Anne Galloway, Rachel Delduca, Bracken Burns as Elle Woods, Kyla Musselman, Laura Tremblay, Victoria Whistance-Smith Front Left to Right: Amber Bissonnette & Sash Striga in the Stage West Theatre production of Legally Blonde The Musical, Music and Lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe & Nell Benjamin, Book By Heather Hach based on the novel by Amanda Brown and the MGM Motion Picture. Photo by John Watson Photography

JAMES

That’s what the Bettys are doing for the artist but what about the Bettys in terms of their ability to be an ambassador to the city for our arts community.

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

Well, I don’t know that the community at large knows what the Bettys are. And I think the work of the Bettys in the future is, how can we as the awarding body in town support those producing companies in town over the course of the season as opposed to just on that one night? That’s a conversation that needs to happen between us and the producing companies.

Gregory Dahl as Scarpia and Ambur Braid as Tosca in the Calgary Opera production of Tosca by Giacomo Puccini. Photo by Trudie Lee.

JAMES

So, one of the challenges is how do we get new audiences in there. How do we foster that? How do we reach these people?

BRADEN GRIFFITHS

I think people are more liable to go see themselves, and so I think part of the reason we see a lot of white middle-class, upper-middle-class human beings in theatres is partially because it requires a certain amount of disposable income to go to theatre and partially because those are the stories that for a very – very long time were being told. And so, when we talk about Inner Elder I think it’s more likely that someone of first nations decent might go and see Inner Elder because they see something very specifically that is their story being told in a theatre. And once somebody has seen something in a theatre that has affected them profoundly it’s far more likely that they’re going to go to the next show that may not tell a story that specifically speaks to their lived existence, but like I said earlier, me seeing Inner Elder speaks to my existence whether it speaks to it specifically or not. I think we need to do a better job of telling a wider array of stories in the theatre and if we’re producing Shakespeare we need to start casting artists that come from different lived experiences. And I think the fact that we’re seeing Michelle Thrush direct Honor Beat by Tara Beagan as the first show of the season at Theatre Calgary means we’re moving in the right direction, but we need to continue to do the hard work of providing those opportunities so that we can create a theatre community that is representative of the greater community and the Bettys is a part of that, I think.

***

2018 Betty Mitchell Awards Nominees

Winners in Bold.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ENSEMBLE

  • Glory – Alberta Theatre Projects, in association with Western Canada Theatre
  • The Humans – Theatre Calgary
  • inVISIBLE – Handsome Alice Theatre
  • Touch Me: Songs for a (Dis)connected Age – Forte Musical Theatre Guild, presented by Theatre Calgary
  • Undercover – Vertigo Theatre & Tarragon Theatre

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

  • Kathryn Kerbes – Sherlock Holmes & the American Problem – Vertigo Theatre
  • Helen Knight – The Last Wife – Alberta Theatre Projects
  • Chantelle Han – Ai Yah! Sweet & Sour Secrets – Lunchbox Theatre
  • Esther Purves- Smith – Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery – Stage West

OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN (Tie)

  • T. Erin Gruber – Easter Island – Verb Theatre
  • Jessie Paynter – Extremophiles – Downstage
  • Anton de Groot – Nine Dragons – Vertigo Theatre, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre & Gateway Theatre
  • Narda McCarroll – To the Light – Alberta Theatre Projects
  • Bonnie Beecher – The Secret Garden – Theatre Calgary

OUTSTANDING SET DESIGN

  • The Old Trout Puppet Workshop – Twelfth Night – Theatre Calgary
  • David Fraser – Sherlock Holmes & the American Problem – Vertigo Theatre
  • Scott Reid – Nine Dragons – Vertigo Theatre, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre & Gateway Theatre
  • David Fraser – Constellations – Alberta Theatre Projects
  • Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett – Extremophiles – Downstage

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

  • Trevor Rueger – Much Ado About Nothing – The Shakespeare Company with Hit & Myth Productions
  • Mark Bellamy – Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story – Sage Theatre
  • Stafford Perry – The Lonely Diner – Vertigo Theatre
  • Kevin Rothery – Sherlock Holmes & The American Problem – Vertigo Theatre
  • Nathan Schmidt – Sherlock Holmes & The American Problem – Vertigo Theatre

OUTSTANDING PROJECTION OR VIDEO DESIGN

  • Jamie Nesbitt – Nine Dragons – Vertigo Theatre, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre & Gateway Theatre
  • Remy Siu – Empire of the Son – Alberta Theatre Projects, part of the 32nd Annual High Performance Rodeo, a Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre Production
  • T. Erin Gruber – Easter Island – Verb Theatre
  • Corwin Ferguson – Julius Caesar – The Shakespeare Company, Ground Zero Theatre, and Hit & Myth Productions
  • Amelia Scott – To the Light – Alberta Theatre Projects

OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN

  • The Old Trout Puppet Workshop – Twelfth Night – Theatre Calgary
  • Heather Moore – The Last Wife – Alberta Theatre Projects
  • Cory Sincennes – The Secret Garden – Theatre Calgary
  • Cindy Wiebe – Glory – Alberta Theatre Projects, in association with Western Canada Theatre
  • Mérédith Caron – Sisters: The Belles Soeurs Musical – A Copa de Oro Production Ltd. And Segal Centre for Performing Arts production, presented by Theatre Calgary

OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN OR COMPOSITION

  • Steve Charles – Glory – Alberta Theatre Projects, in association with Western Canada Theatre
  • Peter Moller – The 39 Steps – Vertigo Theatre
  • Andrew Blizzard – Nine Dragons – Vertigo Theatre, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre & Gateway Theatre
  • Andrew Blizzard – Sherlock Holmes & The American Problem – Vertigo Theatre
  • Bryce Kulak – To The Light – Alberta Theatre Projects

OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHY OR FIGHT DIRECTION

  • Tracey Power – Glory – Alberta Theatre Projects, in association with Western Canada Theatre
  • Phil Nero – Legally Blonde: The Musical – Stage West
  • John Knight – Julius Caesar – The Shakespeare Company, Ground Zero Theatre, and Hit & Myth Productions
  • Laryssa Yanchuk – Sherlock Holmes & the American Problem – Vertigo Theatre
  • Linda Garneau – Sisters: The Belles Soeurs Musical – A Copa de Oro Production Ltd. And Segal Centre for Performing Arts production, presented by Theatre Calgary

OUTSTANDING MUSICAL DIRECTION

  • David Terriault – Sisters: The Belles Soeurs Musical – A Copa de Oro Production Ltd. And Segal Centre for Performing Arts production, presented by Theatre Calgary
  • Jacques Lacombe – Tosca – Calgary Opera
  • Konrad Pluta – Legally Blonde: The Musical – Stage West
  • Joe Slabe – Touch Me: songs for a (Dis)Connected Age – Forte Musical Theatre Guild, presented by Theatre Calgary
  • Don Horsburgh – The Secret Garden – Theatre Calgary

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A COMEDY OR MUSICAL

  • Jamie Konchak – Miss Caledonia – Lunchbox Theatre
  • Myla Southward – Much Ado About Nothing – The Shakespeare Company with Hit & Myth Productions
  • Anna Cummer – Twelfth Night – Theatre Calgary
  • Anna Cummer – The 39 Steps – Vertigo Theatre
  • Bracken Burns – Legally Blonde: The Musical – Stage West

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A COMEDY OR MUSICAL

  • Tyrell Crews – The 39 Steps – Vertigo Theatre
  • Tyrell Crews – Much Ado About Nothing – The Shakespeare Company with Hit & Myth Productions
  • Devon Dubnyk – The Santaland Diaries – Lunchbox Theatre
  • Christopher Hunt – Twelfth Night – Theatre Calgary
  • Eric Wigston – The Secret Garden – Theatre Calgary

OUTSTANDING NEW PLAY

  • Glory – Tracey Power
  • Nine Dragons – Jovanni Sy
  • Flight Risk – Meg Braem
  • Inner Elder – Michelle Thrush
  • Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story – Natalie Meisner

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A DRAMA

  • Michelle Thrush – Inner Elder – Lunchbox Theatre
  • Myla Southward – The Last Wife – Alberta Theatre Projects
  • Camille Pavlenko – Blackbird – Verb Theatre
  • Makambe K. Simamba – A Chitenge Story – Handsome Alice Theatre
  • Jamie Konchak – Constellations – Alberta Theatre Projects

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A DRAMA

  • Christopher Hunt – Flight Risk – Lunchbox Theatre
  • Stephen Hair – Blow Wind High Water – Theatre Calgary
  • Curt McKinstry – Blackbird – Verb Theatre
  • Braden Griffiths – Julius Caesar – The Shakespeare Company, Ground Zero Theatre, and Hit & Myth Productions
  • Michael Tan – Constellations – Alberta Theatre Projects

OUTSTANDING DIRECTION

  • Jillian Keiley – Twelfth Night – Theatre Calgary
  • Ron Jenkins – The 39 Steps – Vertigo Theatre
  • James MacDonald – Glory – Alberta Theatre Projects, in association with Western Canada Theatre
  • Glynis Leyshon – The Last Wife – Alberta Theatre Projects
  • Vanessa Porteous – The Humans –Theatre Calgary

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A MUSICAL

  • Sisters: The Belles Soeurs Musical – A Copa de Oro Production Ltd. And Segal Centre for Performing Arts production, presented by Theatre Calgary
  • Legally Blonde: The Musical – Stage West
  • Touch Me: Songs for a (Dis)connected Age – Forte Musical Theatre Guild, presented by Theatre Calgary
  • Tosca – Calgary Opera
  • Murder for Two – Stage West

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A PLAY

  • Glory – Alberta Theatre Projects, in association with Western Canada Theatre
  • Inner Elder – Lunchbox Theatre and One Yellow Rabbit
  • Twelfth Night – Theatre Calgary
  • The 39 Steps – Vertigo Theatre
  • Blackbird – Verb Theatre

***

  • Alberta Theatre Projects:  Contemporary, clever & cutting edge live theatre in the heart of Calgary.
  • Birnton Theatricals: Producing theatre that will entertain and show the world from a different view.
  • Calgary Opera: Our BOLD new 2018-19 season starts with Roméo & Juliette, followed by the Canadian premiere of Everest, and ends with Rigoletto.
  • Downstage:  Canadian theatre that creates meaningful conversation around social issues.
  • Forte Musical Theatre Guild: A Canadian not-for-profit company dedicated to the professional development and production of new musical theatre works.
  • Green Fools Theatre: Not-for-profit Theatre specializing in masks, puppets, stilts.
  • Handsome Alice Theatre Company: Devoted to unleashing the female voice through the development, creation, and production of inclusive, curious, and rebellious theatre works.
  • Lunchbox Theatre: One of the most successful noon hour theatre companies in the world.
  • One Yellow Rabbit: Performance artifacts for the seriously curious.
  • Quest Theatre:  An Award-winning Theatre for Young Audiences company based in Calgary.
  • Sage Theatre:  Creates bold, intimate, thoughtful plays exploring the human condition. We showcase talented Albertan artists.
  • The Shakespeare Company: Calgary’s lean and mean classical theatre company
  • Stage West Theatre Restaurants: We bring you the greatest entertainers from the stage, the screen and the music world along with our 120-item gourmet buffet! Play With Your Dinner!
  • Theatre Calgary: Our 2018-19 season includes Honour Beat, Mary and Max – A New Musical, A Christmas Carol, BOOM X, The Scarlet Letter and Billy Elliot The Musical
  • Verb Theatre: Tomorrow’s theatre, today.
  • Vertigo Theatre: The only professional theatre in Canada producing a series of plays based on the mystery genre.

***

BETTY MITCHELL:  After working for ten years in Calgary schools, the University of Alberta graduate moved to Western Canada High School in 1934. Drama was introduced into the curriculum in 1936 and the former biology teacher found herself Director of the Drama Department. Betty had discovered the great love of her life.

She received the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1942, an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1944, followed by a National Research Fellowship from the Cleveland Playhouse. That same year, Betty and her students founded their infamous Workshop 14 which would go on to win nine Dominion Drama Awards and become a training ground for future theatre professionals.

Throughout the fifties and sixties, Betty was a force behind MAC 14 (after a merger of Workshop 14 and the Musicians’ and Actors’ Club), which eventually became Theatre Calgary. As producer, director, and teacher, Betty helped to build a vibrant stage community in Calgary and became sought after as an adjudicator and speaker across Canada.

As achievements mounted, so too did awards, including a City of Calgary citation for her contribution to culture and art. She received an Honourary Doctor of Laws Degree from the University of Alberta in 1958 for her achievements in amateur theatre, the only such doctorate awarded in Canada. Anyone for whom theatre is a passion owes a huge debt of gratitude to Calgary’s first lady of theatre.

Actor Braden Griffiths as Sherlock Holmes
Braden Griffiths as Sherlock Holmes in the Vertigo Theatre Production of Sherlock Holmes and the American Problem by R. Hamilton Wright. Photo by Tim Nguyen

BRADEN GRIFFITHS: Braden Griffiths has been an actor and playwright in Calgary for 14 years. He has performed in over 60 professional productions predominantly in Calgary but also, on various stages in Western Canada and occasionally, when he’s very fortunate, in Asia and Australia. His play My Family and Other Endangered Species, written with Ellen Close, was published by Playwright’s Canada Press. He has multiple Betty Mitchell Award Nominations for both acting and playwriting, taking home the Betty in 2015 for his performance in The Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. This is his 11th year on the Betty Mitchell Awards Board.

THE BETTY MITCHELL AWARDS: The Betty’s were founded by Grant Linneberg, Mark Bellamy, Donna Belleville, Johanne Deleeuw and Dianne Goodman. Named after one of the great arts educators and a pivotal member of the community of artists that founded Theatre Calgary (just over 50 years ago) the Betty Mitchell Awards were started in order to celebrate the excellence of Calgary’s theatre community 21 years ago. Many aspects of the Betty Mitchell Awards have remained constant over the years: the Board (formerly called the Steering Committee) has always been peopled by volunteers from within the community; the Nominating Committee has always been comprised of a group of twelve individuals and that jury changes every year; the guidelines have remained remarkably intact from the first year of the Betty’s (the semantics have evolved but, their spirit remains the same) and (until this year) the Awards have always been disseminated in August. However, as the Calgary Theatre Community continues to change and grow so too have the Betty’s: multiple Awards have been added over the years (most recently Outstanding Projection Design and Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble); the Awards venue has recently moved away from it perennial home at Stage West and they are now presented in the Vertigo Playhouse; since the closing of the Auburn, the after party has officially become a part of the Betty’s Board planning and arrangements for the night. As much as the Bettys (the statues themselves) are a professional theatre Award, the Bettys (the evening of the awards) have become the one night a year where the community comes together to celebrate all that we have been, all that we are and all that we hope to become.

***

This interview with Braden Griffiths has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This article has been updated to include the winners in each category. The opening has been rewritten slightly to reflect that the awards happened. The initial article was written before the awards and linked to tickets for the event.

Interview with Lunchbox Theatre Director of Marketing & Communications Lauren Thompson

Posted on by James Hutchison
Lauren Thompson – Director of Marketing & Communications – Lunchbox Theatre

“Have fun and be creative. If you won’t find it interesting to read why is your audience going to find it interesting to read? If you don’t like the way it looks, chances are your audience won’t like the way it looks. So, trust you and do what you want to do. Marketing is the place where you can be creative and do your own things. Financial people have to follow a budget – have to follow numbers, but marketing is that world where you can have your creative juices flow, if you will.” – Lauren Thompson Director of Marketing & Communications

You know it’s not true. The whole idea that all you have to do is build it and they will come. That idea only works in metaphysical baseball stories. In the real world, if you build it – you have to tell them about it – and then they’ll come.

Maybe.

Marketing is the process of telling people your story and why they should buy your product or service, and in the theatre world that means finding ways of reaching people and telling them why they should come and see your show.

I sat down with Lauren Thompson, shortly before she left her position as the Director of Marketing & Communications for  Lunchbox Theatre, to talk with her about her approach to marketing and some of things she’s done during her time at Lunchbox.

JAMES HUTCHISON

So tell me what you noticed when you first started as the marketing manager for Lunchbox Theatre three years ago.

LAUREN THOMPSON

When I first started I noticed that although Lunchbox had moved into the Calgary Tower location in 2008 a lot of people still didn’t know we were there. The theatre people did. The theatre community people did. But our normal audience, of the downtown working crowd, either thought we’d shut our doors or knew that we’d moved, but they didn’t really know where we were, or they had stopped paying attention.

JAMES

Lunchbox Theatre in the heart of Calgary under the Tower

The move really hurt Lunchbox in terms of people going to it?

LAUREN THOMPSON

It wasn’t convenient for the typical audience that they were seeing. And convenient in the sense that before the move they were in Bow Valley Square. There were five other buildings, or whatever, connected through the plus 15s and it was right in the middle of a food court and there was a lot of foot traffic. There were a lot of positives going on over there. And there are so many positives that have come out of the move here, but the audience, and the traffic, and the regular patrons, and what defined Lunchbox was changing.

JAMES

Okay then, what is Lunchbox? And what does it mean to the community?

LAUREN THOMPSON

Well, I really think Lunchbox has changed. It’s not this convenient stop in for one hour, and you don’t really know what you’re going to get, but it’s here, and you’ll have your lunch. It’s now a destination. We have to program shows to make people want to put in that extra five-minute walk down Stephen Avenue to come see us.

And I think now we’re really focused on Lunchbox as an incubator of sorts. We workshop new plays, but we’re also a company for emerging artists, new designers, and new directors through our RBC emerging directors program and our Stage One Festival, and all these things give a place for these emerging artists to really grow, and then to move onto the Theatre Calgary stages, or the Vertigo stages, or the ATP stages.

JAMES

I was doing a little reading and it was talking about people needing to think about the theatre experience beyond the performance. It’s not just the show. It’s the whole atmosphere. It’s everything.

Ben Wong as Charlie, Jamie Matchullis as Jennifer, Kelsey Verzotti as Jade and Chantelle Han as Lilly in the Lunchbox Theatre production of Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets – Photograph by Benjamin Laird

Lauren Thompson – Having fun with Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets

LAUREN THOMPSON

It is everything. I had a lot of fun with Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets this year. That was Dale Lee Kwong’s play that went up over the Chinese New Year. I specifically remember that one because it was this culture that I didn’t know a lot about. And it was so specific to Chinese New Year and those traditions. Dale was super supportive and taught us everything, and she gave me this forty-page document about all the traditions that they do and what red and gold means and what these symbols mean and why they do these things. I really wanted people to enter the theatre and read these quotes and fun facts along the wall about Chinese New Year and just be immersed in this new culture and this new experience. And on Instagram I did little fortune cookies, so you had a little image of a fortune cookie and you had to slide the image and it would be a different fortune every day. It was just fun posts that aren’t directly promoting the show, but it’s creating awareness and fun and excitement.

JAMES

You have a ten-dollar Thursday night. What was the genesis of that?

LAUREN THOMPSON

The first Thursday night show of every run was our lowest-selling show. So, we were hey, what can we do to entice people to come see the show and see what works? We didn’t know if it was going to work the first year we did it, but it did, and it blew up, and now it’s consistently the first show that sells out.

JAMES

Why do you need a full audience in there?

LAUREN THOMPSON

In Calgary, people are waiting for word of mouth. So, we need full theatres that first week to help get the word out, and by the time the first week’s over and the word of mouth has gotten out our second and third weeks fill up.

JAMES

Of course, nowadays social media is one of the main ways to help spread the word. How do you incorporate social media into your marketing?

LAUREN THOMPSON

Social media is basically doing some of our word of mouth for us, but we can help facilitate that word of mouth a little bit. We can put out a photo, or we can put out a comment and people will share that comment or photo with their own tag and their own comment in it.

JAMES

So, what types of content are you creating? Because I notice, just for an example, The Shakespeare Company will do an interview with one of their actors and post it on their website and then promote it through their social media.

LAUREN THOMPSON

Well, this year I found that the traditional media calls were not always happening. We’ve had a media call planned and the media has had to cancel, last minute, because there was an accident, or something else came up, or whatever, right? So, this year I said to Samantha MacDonald, our Artistic Producer, that we need to do it ourselves. I can’t rely on the media to get the story of our show out there. So, I started the coffee chats that I post on Facebook and Instagram.

I would interview two people from the production. Typically, the playwright or director and then an actor from the show and ask them questions about the process, about the play, and about their characters – what would typically come out in a media call. And then I put it out in the world so we’re not relying on something we have no control over. And it’s worked in our favour. And we’ve had media coverage this year, but I think those coffee chats opened up a different side. A more casual side. A different conversation about the play that a poster or a typical social media post won’t do for you.

JAMES

You know what I’m seeing that I really like? I’m seeing you and Theatre Calgary, and ATP, and The Shakespeare Company, and Vertigo are all using your social media to help each other.

LAUREN THOMPSON

This past season a few of the marketing directors from the different companies Theatre Calgary, ATP, Lunchbox, Vertigo, and I think Stage West just got together to chat and see how things were going and what are the trends and we realized – the same thing is happening across the board – and that we weren’t alone. And then the conversation turned to how do we support each other and get the word out about your show even though our shows on. Our show has the same actor that is in your next show coming up, so how do we do something about that, and let’s talk about that, and it’s become so wonderful to have that community of people who want to see all of us succeed.

JAMES

When you’re making your marketing decisions how much of your decisions are based on instinct and how much on research?

LAUREN THOMPSON

I personally am a much more instinctive person. I go with my gut, a lot. We tagged this season as, “What are you hungry for?” You know, are you hungry for culture? Are you hungry for family stories? Are you hungry for Canadian stories? And along with that – I don’t even know where it came from – I heard about the importance of taking time to take a break and getting away from your desk and taking an hour to take in arts and culture. And I ran with that idea before the season started. Yes, Lunchbox is one hour, it’s not expensive, it’s great theatre, but really like what is it doing for your life? It is giving you one hour of culture. It is giving you a one-hour break from a screen. It is giving you an hour to be with people and to watch live theatre and that has so many positive effects on you as a person. And I did all this research on workplace mental health and taking breaks and the importance of that but then channeling that into easily fun digestible posts or ads. And one of the ads – we did a bunch of ads in surrounding corporate towers and literally my promo was Lunchbox is a five-minute walk and it’s 621 steps. Get your steps for the day. Come to Lunchbox for an hour. And get your steps on your way back to the office.

JAMES

One of the things we talked about before the interview was based on your experience do you have any tips or lessons learned that people could take away in regards to marketing?

LAUREN THOMPSON

I do, but there are a million others. I would say, be open to ideas is number one. Be open to exciting new technology that’s coming out to apps to trends. The trends that are coming out are trends for a reason. Try them and see if they work for your company and your audience. Everything moves quickly. So, react to it all. And take it on your own spin.

Tip number two would be to have fun and be creative. If you won’t find it interesting to read why is your audience going to find it interesting to read? If you don’t like the way it looks, chances are your audience won’t like the way it looks. So, trust yourself and do what you want to do. Marketing is the place where you can be creative and do your own things. Financial people have to follow a budget have to follow numbers, but marketing is that world where you can have your creative juices flow, if you will.

JAMES

It’s a bit of magic.

LAUREN THOMPSON

Totally. My third one is to have a consistent voice. Know your brand. Know your company and your voice regardless. It might have a different tone for your different mediums. Our Instagram has a different tone than our Facebook, but it’s still a consistent voice, and I still know what the brand is and you’re always pushing that. Whatever you do it has to fall under that umbrella.

JAMES

Alright, lets talk about the importance of a healthy box office. How much do you think having a healthy box office impacts the overall company specifically your ability to get donations and other funding?

LAUREN THOMPSON

I don’t think it’s a secret that arts in Calgary are suffering. And we’re very aware. Sam does a preshow chat to the audience before every single show, and in the later half of the year we started to add in – you know obviously we’re struggling like everyone else, and it was just an awareness of it, and if you want to ask more questions and you want to help please come find us after the show. It’s just being transparent about it, and then people come and see the shows and support the shows and leave the shows talking about how much they love it and how much they want it to be around. We had some people come to Girl Crush with Sharron Matthews which was the first Lunchbox show they had ever seen, and the next thing you know we’re getting cheques of money because they loved it so much.

Sharron Matthews in Girl Crush at Lunchbox Theatre Photograph by Benjamin Laird

JAMES

Now, Girl Crush, just because you mentioned it, was a really interesting show.

LAUREN THOMPSON

Yes.

JAMES

Because it turned Lunchbox into a cabaret.

LAUREN THOMPSON

It did.

JAMES

And it did very well.

LAUREN THOMPSON

It was a gamble and it paid off.

JAMES

It was an entertaining and successful show and it showed that you can do a lot in that space. It expands in the consumer’s mind your venue as an entertainment venue rather than just theatre. Are there plans to do more?

LAUREN THOMPSON

Yes, we have a cabaresque show starting the season called Mickey and Judy by Michael Hughes.

JAMES

Traditionally September is a tough sell. Is that one of the reasons you’re going with the cabaret to see how it does?

LAUREN THOMPSON

Yes. September is hard on every theatre. This year we had Book Club II. The sequel to Book Club by Meredith Taylor-Parry. And it did well, but it also struggled just with it being in the September slot – nothing to do with the show. Mickey and Judy is a show that we’re really excited about – it being a musical and having a different style to it – the Cabaret feel you know. It’s a different exciting start to things.

Arielle Rombough, Cheryl Hutton, Kira Bradley, Curt Mckinstry, Anna Cummer – in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club II: The Next Chapter by Meredith Taylor Parry. Photograph by Benjamin Laird

JAMES

Okay then, lets talk about next season. I really like the artwork.

LAUREN THOMPSON

I am obsessed with the artwork.

JAMES

Tell me the story behind this.

LAUREN THOMPSON

So, last season we found a new graphic designer. And she did all of the artwork for the 17/18 season. The two-tone kind of colours and the single image kind of graphic look and it was similar to what Lunchbox had been doing but just a little more mature a little more modern. And this year our programming is taking a new shift, and we’re doing different styles and kinds of shows, and this is Sam’s first programmed season as artistic producer, and so we sort of chatted with her and said we’re open to new ideas.

JAMES

So, you went to the graphic artist?

LAUREN THOMPSON

We went to the graphic artist. Her name is Kimberly Wieting, and she’s young, and she’s so good at what she does.

JAMES

She has her own company?

LAUREN THOMPSON

Yeah, she’s an individual contractor, and she’s incredible. Her company is Gritt Media. We sat down with her, and Sam and I chatted about the season. We gave her a brief synopsis of everything and said, “Tell us what you want to do.” And she pitched this concept of this image on image and black with a pop of colour and it was a lot of work, but it was so worth it. And it’s just a totally different look for Lunchbox.

And it’s like we’ve said, Lunchbox has been around forever. Everyone knows Lunchbox, but now you’re looking at it differently. And we want them to. Our shows are different. Our production quality is different. Our outlook on what we’re doing, the projects we’re taking on, the scripts we’re developing, everything is different, and we’re shifting, and we want the imagery of Lunchbox to shift with us, and we think it’s gone in the perfect direction.

JAMES

Sounds like such an exciting time to be a part of Lunchbox, so what’s going on with you?

LAUREN THOMPSON

And ahhh – I’m going to leave!

JAMES

So, tell me what’s the opportunity for you?

LAUREN THOMPSON

I’m moving to Amsterdam this summer. And I really just needed a change. I don’t know how else to explain it. It was this whim in February. I just sort of was like – I need to go do this. I looked into visas, and most visas in most countries are the working holiday visa, and they’re only valid until you’re thirty. So, I said, I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t have a partner. I don’t really have anything tying me down. I can come back to this wonderful community – that I know will take me back when I come back – and I just need to go. I need to do this.

JAMES

What are you going to do?

LAUREN THOMPSON

I have no idea. (Laughs) Step one is find a place to live. I just want to work when I’m over there. I want to travel. I just want to meet people.

JAMES

Well, good for you for doing this. Do you think this explains part of your success as a marketer? I mean just even in your own life the willingness to take a risk – to try something new – to see how it works?

LAUREN THOMPSON

Maybe. And I’m realizing more and more, I react on my gut a lot. I follow my gut, and looking back on things and the decisions I’ve made – even the gut decision to take the job at Lunchbox – I’ve always followed that, and it’s always led me in the right direction. And my gut is telling me to go to Amsterdam, and so I’m just going to do it. And we’ll see what happens.

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Lunchbox Theatre is located at the base of the Calgary Tower. Regular season shows run Monday to Saturday at 12:00 pm with a 6:00 pm show on Thursday and Friday. Individual tickets are just $25.00. Group discounts, play passes and regular tickets can be purchased online at Lunchbox Theatre or by calling the box office at 403-265-4292 x 0.

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Lunchbox Theatre 2018/19 Season

Mickey & Judy – September 17 to October 6, 2018

Playwright Michael Hughes
Performer Michael Hughes

As a young boy, Michael Hughes was obsessed with musicals and liked to dress in women’s clothing. His parents, confused by his behaviour and determined to cure him, sent him to the Clark Institute in Toronto. Mickey & Judy offers a wildly funny and touching account of Michael’s real-life journey from the psychiatric ward to Off-Broadway. With a score that spans from Broadway classics to the best of the Judy Garland songbook, this inspiring cabaret show will have you laughing, crying, and singing along like no one is listening.

Brave Girl – October 22 to November 10, 2018

Playwright Emily Dallas
Directed by Valmai Goggin
Musical Direction by Joe Slabe

In 2002, Sam and Amy lose their father to the war in Afghanistan. Determined to follow his legacy and do their father proud, the sisters enlist and support each other through the joys and hardships of military training. As the two girls advance, their individual journeys take a very different course. Will their friendship survive? At what cost? Taking its inspiration from the life of Sandra Perron, Canada’s first female infantry officer, this beautiful new Remembrance musical examines the life of women in power and the sacrifices that must be made.

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play – November 26 to December 22, 2018

Playwright Joe Landry
Directed by Craig Hall

Back by popular demand! It’s Christmas Eve and the unimaginable has happened. George Bailey is on the edge of ruin; thousands of dollars are lost and with seemingly no way to save the old Bailey Savings & Loan, George wonders if the world would be better off had he never lived? With the help of a rookie angel and a cast of charming characters, It’s a Wonderful Life reminds us that we are each precious and important. Conceived as a live 1940s radio broadcast, this classic holiday story of love and redemption will be brought to life on stage by our Betty Mitchell Award-winning ensemble.

Sansei: the Storyteller – January 14 to 26, 2019

Playwright Mark Kunji Ikeda
Performer Mark Kunji Ikeda

On December 7, 1941, an attack on Pearl Harbour triggered events in Canada that may easily be described as among the darkest in our history – the internment and dispossession of tens of thousands of Japanese Canadians. Through an engaging blend of dance, spoken word and loads of humour, Mark Ikeda weaves a tale that is illuminating and profoundly personal. Sansei: The Storyteller offers Ikeda’s observations about the internment, his own discovery of where he came from, and how Japanese Canadians found peace.

Assassinating Thomson – February 11 to March 2, 2019

Playwright/Performer Bruce Horak
Directed by Ryan Gladstone

Bruce Horak is a critically acclaimed visual artist, actor and playwright who lives with just 9% of his vision. In this, his one-man tour-de-force, Horak delves into the mysterious death of famous Canadian painter Tom Thomson and the subsequent rise of the Group of 7. Art, politics, ambition, love and murder all take the stage in Horak’s compelling work. As he explores the facts and fictions around Thomson’s death, Horak shares his own story and the unique way in which he sees the world. And if that weren’t enough – while mesmerizing them with his words, Horak paints an original portrait of the audience at every show.

Gutenberg the Musical – April 1 to 20, 2019

Playwright Scott Brown & Anthony King
Directed by Samantha MacDonald

Bud and Deb are aspiring playwrights about to give the performance of their lives. It’s a backer’s audition, and in a desperate, bravely hopeful bid to fulfill their dreams of a Broadway production, Bud and Deb, with an overwhelming supply of enthusiasm will sing all the songs and play all the parts in their “big splashy” musical about Johann Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. Will all their dreams come true? Gutenberg! The Musical! is a raucous spoof of all things musical and is guaranteed to mildly offend everyone equally.

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Lunchbox Theatre was founded in Calgary, Alberta, Canada by Bartley and Margaret Bard and Betty Gibb in 1975. Lunchbox produces one-act plays that deliver a fun and unique theatre experience in an intimate and comfortable black box theatre space. Patrons are encouraged to eat their lunch while they enjoy the show. Lunchbox is one of the most successful and longest-running noon-hour theatre companies in the world.

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Lauren Thompson has a degree in Tourism Management and Marketing from the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. She grew up singing and performing with the Youth Singers of Calgary and is now a teacher for the Youth Singers as well as a choreographer and performer who has worked with numerous local companies including Storybook Theatre, Lunchbox Theatre, Forte Musical Theatre, The Shakespeare Company and Theatre Calgary. Lauren became the Director of Marketing and Communications for Lunchbox Theatre in 2015 which has allowed her to utilize her degree and educational background with her love for the arts.

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Interview with Playwright Neil Fleming: Spare Parts

Posted on by James Hutchison
Neil Fleming – Playwright, Designer, Television Writer/Producer

“There’s an artistic epiphany in my play John Doe Jack Rabbit. There’s a moment where the TV’s broken and they’re stuck in this cabin and they’re on the lam and this one guy Gordy is reading a book – it’s this trashy horrible romance novel called Ravaged at Rush Hour. But then he gets so sucked into this book – as if he’s never read a book before – and he has this moment where he’s like, the person who wrote this book wrote it down so I would know what it feels like to be Jessica in the cab or whatever it was, right? And that was one of those things. That’s what playwriting is about. What art is about. This is what it’s like to feel like I feel, and I put it into this painting for you to grasp that concept, or I put it in this play for you to go – wow that’s what’s going on in your head.” Neil Fleming

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Neil Fleming is a multi-talented, award winning Calgary designer, playwright and television producer. In our hour and a half chat last Friday Neil and I talked about all kinds of things including playwriting, depression, Chuck Wendig, poltergeists and ADHD. The purpose of our getting together was to talk about Neil’s playwriting and specifically his current play, Spare Parts, which is being workshopped at the Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Lunchbox Theatre this week.

JAMES HUTCHISON

As a writer we spend long hours alone at the writing desk and sometimes we find ourselves facing internal or external resistance to a particular writing project or even our own writing career. Who in your life gives you the support and feedback you need that lets you continue on your journey?

NEIL FLEMING

Well my first sounding board has always been Jane, my wife. When I’m done a draft, I’ll be like, can you take a second to read this? And bless her, she’ll drop everything and go in the other room and I’ll sit there and listen to her while I’m trying to distract myself, but really I’m listening to her reading it and asking her what she’s laughing at if she’s laughing just to make sure she’s not laughing at an inside joke between the two of us that I intended for a larger group.

JAMES

Are you more nervous giving her the first draft to read, do you think, than when it’s ready for an audience?

NEIL

No, I don’t think so. I trust her. We have similar taste in story and content, but she likes things that are a bit darker than I do.

JAMES

And you’re pretty dark at times.

NEIL

I can be. But I think humour has always been a defense mechanism for me. It’s my way of not going to the dark place. More recently I’ve been trying to challenge myself to have something to say and not just be silly.

Karen Johnson-Diamond, Nicole Zylstra, Miles Ringsred, Tim Koetting in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Last Christmas by Neil Fleming – Photograph by Benjamin Laird

JAMES

But when you did Last Christmas that was dealing with someone dying of cancer. It was a comedy and a Christmas show.

NEIL

Sure. Pam Halstead at Lunchbox had commissioned me to write that. She wanted it to be a dysfunctional family at Christmas made up of people’s Christmas horror stories. So, there’s some Pam Halstead in it. The inflatable husband. One of her siblings bought her an inflatable husband one Christmas, and she opened it in front of everyone, and it was horrible and awful and fun but real, right?

I tried to come up with a family that didn’t resemble my own and didn’t resemble my wife’s where I could use details from real people but no one was able to accuse me of writing about my brother-in-law or whatever. They were fictional characters, but then so many people came up to me after the show because those characters resonated so strongly, and they’d say, “Oh that’s like my sister-in-law, and I can’t believe she’s in your play.”

JAMES

So, it touched on some universal characteristics.

NEIL

For sure. What I like to do is find little bits of truth and craft around those. Last Christmas started because one of my wife’s best friends worked at a dispensary in Vancouver, and her job was to teach old people how to roll a joint because they’d been given medicinal marijuana with a prescription, and they’d never smoked a joint before. And that’s just such an awesome image. So, I wanted the pot smoking grandpa. I just thought what a great start.

JAMES

And then there’s a lovely part of that play where the grandson and the grandfather have a bonding experience. Where they’re sharing the marijuana.

Tim Koetting and Miles Ringsred in the Lunchbox Theatre Production of Last Christmas by Neil Fleming – Photography by Benjamin Laird

NEIL

I think that’s a favourite moment for the audience. It’s Christmas Eve, and the grandfather and the grandson are listening to Nat King Cole, and grandpa is experiencing being high for the first time. But they’re just having one of those philosophical conversations.

I love the absurdity of real things. One of my favourite things to do when I was looking for something fresh or new is I’d go to the news of the weird, and I have a play called Gnomes about garden gnomes and literally there was a news article about the Garden Gnome Liberation Front, I think, in Paris and they had broken into a garden show, and they stole all these antique gnomes, and then in the town square spelled out, Free the Gnomes with the gnomes.

And so, my concept for that play was there were three characters. Character one was a collector, and his parents had this massive collection of gnomes, and there was an incident where somebody came and smashed a bunch of them. And then here’s a woman from The Garden Gnome Liberation Society. I changed that. And then the last guy was from a group called DAMAGE which was defending all mankind against gnome evil, because he believed that gnomes were secretly evil, and that they come to life. And so, it became this argument between the three characters – were gnomes good, or evil, or ceramic?

JAMES

The new play you’re working on with Lunchbox Theatre is called Spare Parts and has three characters. There’s Martin a widower living alone in the haunted apartment his wife Sarah convinced him to buy, and on the anniversary of the accidental death of his wife and daughter Emily, Martin decides to take an overdose of anti-depressants.

Then there’s Eric, Martin’s upstairs neighbour, and a former human guinea pig for pharmaceutical companies, who is now developing and promoting a new Life Style System that focuses on exercise, recreation, and meditation through colouring as a pathway to an enjoyable life.

And finally, there’s Sarah, Martin’s dead wife. As Martin trips through his various symptoms, side-effects, and visions, we meet Sarah as a memory. In life, Sarah had a business taking people on tours of haunted buildings. She knew the story of Lester – who had been found dead in a heritage building – presumably payback for a romantic tryst. When she heard the apartment was coming on the market, she knew she had to convince Martin to buy it and move in. These three characters…

NEIL

Well, four if you count Lester.

JAMES

Four characters are caught up in a story about suicide, depression, guilt, religion, and the supernatural. First question, how much of that is based on personal experience?

NEIL

Well I didn’t know this at the time, but I did struggle with anxiety and depression. It was more anxiety, I think. Depression I didn’t know how to define. I didn’t know anything about mental health really. Depression to me was sadness, as a writer. As a clinical term it’s something else. What I was struggling with was my inability to focus and accomplish things and constantly feeling like I was getting lapped by younger writers or whatever. I was like why can’t I get anything done?

Recently I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and it was such a relief to finally know what I’ve been struggling with my entire life really. But, before I was diagnosed I was buying a book by Peter Shankman called Crazy Publicity Stunts and Why Your Company Should Do Them because I was thinking of doing a street theatre project that was sort of a social media experiment. And beside that book, in the people who bought this book also bought section, was another book by Peter Shankman called, Faster Than Normal. How to hack your ADHD brain and unleash your super power. And I was like, I want to read that. I ordered both of them. And that book  explained my entire life, my entire history, and I was like Oh, my God. That’s my childhood. This is high school. University. All of those things, and I could see how things went sideways

And when you’re a writer and you sit down to write something it’s work. The first draft is always fun, but fixing it and fine tuning it that’s work, and if nobody’s breathing down your neck waiting for a draft then it’s easy to just let that one sit there and start something new. So, I have a lot of different projects that haven’t seen the light of day because I haven’t been able to focus. I started Spare Parts years ago, and it was part of my mental health journey.

The other thing with ADHD is that when I need to focus I can hyper focus. That’s the H part. As an adult it’s not hyper activity it’s impulse control. And so, yesterday I was writing solid for five to six hours on the play because I have to give them something to read by Monday so we can start to work on it.

JAMES

Who are you working with.

NEIL

Col Cseke is the director. Graham Percy is playing Martin. Matt McKinny is Eric, and Julie Orton is Sarah. And some things have changed already from your introduction. I’ve cut the daughter. They rent the place they don’t buy it. I know I’ve made that note before about Eric being a Guinee pig so he knows what the prescription is and what it does, because I need somebody in there to help detail what’s going on for the audience because your brain is a complex machine. That’s what fascinated me about this idea in the first place, because when I was struggling with those anxiety issues I talked to my doctor about it – this was years ago – and she gave me a trial prescription of Escitalopram which is a serotonin inhibitor in a way. And when I got the pills they came with warnings.

JAMES

The side effects?

NEIL

It was a crazy.

JAMES

Scary list?

NEIL

It’s supposed to help you, but like how could it maybe do that to you.

JAMES

Do the exact opposite.

NEIL

Well if you have suicidal tendencies it could amplify that.

JAMES

That’s frightening.

NEIL

Yeah, and I’m like, do I want to take this, and so you know I decided at the time I don’t think this is for me. But I kept the information and that’s what started it.

JAMES

That’s what started this play six or seven years ago?

NEIL

More than that – I think, 2007 is what my hard drive tells me was a first draft. So, I’ve learned a lot in the last eight or nine years. Mostly in the last year. What’s always interested me as a writer are the odd outlying people. Spare Parts is kind of about that. It’s about people just on the outskirts of regular society. Like the neighbor, Eric’s character. He’s trying to rediscover his purpose by starting this sort of life style system.

JAMES

It’s kind of a religion he’s working on?

NEIL

It’s open to all religions, because in his theory religion is part of the problem because of people bickering over the differences between theirs, and yours, and whatever.

JAMES

So, his philosophy could be placed over any faith?

NEIL

Yeah, his philosophy of life is to find the things that make you feel good because you’re only here for a finite amount of time.

JAMES

What are you hoping to accomplish in next week’s workshop?

NEIL

What I love about playwriting is it’s all about questions. Dramaturgy is all about questions, hopefully. And I don’t mind suggestions, but questions are great because I will write them all down, because a question from anyone – whether it’s from an actor, or a stage manager, or an audience member, represents a certain percentage of that population. There’s a lot more people who will have that same question. I lost you for two or three lines because you were hung up on something, so I always feel like you have to address those with what’s the simplest way for me to make that question go away. If it’s that kind of question.

I was just reading this book, Damn Fine Story, by Chuck Wendig who’s a novelist and a writing blogger. Terrible Minds is his blog. In his book, which is about story telling more than anything else, he uses Die Hard as an example. And at the root of it he says stories are about characters. Stories are rooted in character, and so a character has a problem, and then how they try to solve that problem is the story.

JAMES

And they either solve it, or they don’t.

NEIL

But what he pointed out – Bruce Willis’s character’s problem, John McClain – I only know that because he keeps referring to him in this book, but his problem is that his wife left him for this job in LA, and he’s a New York City cop, so he’s flown out at Christmas time to convince her to come home to get his family back together. And coincidentally all of this stuff goes down with Alan Rickman, and terrorists, and the tower, and him not having his shoes on – those are all coincidental pieces of the puzzle of I’m just trying to get back together here with my wife.

JAMES

And that’s what makes it work – the human element. You mentioned something in a previous interview when you were asked, “What do you think art is?”  You said, “I suppose art is an expression of human emotion.”  Why do you think we have this need to examine our emotional connection and reaction to other people, the world, and ourselves?  

NEIL

I think that there are so many unanswered questions that we have. You know I took first year philosophy when I was at University and it was all Plato’s Republic and you couldn’t make me read that book – it was like painful. If it had been a survey course of all the philosophers I think I would have really gotten into it with different perspectives and stuff.

JAMES

Maybe theatre is philosophy on stage?

NEIL

Yeah, kind of. It’s trying to explain what it means to be a person, because we don’t know what happens after we die. As artists I think we’re always trying to reflect back, and sometimes it’s a fun house mirror reflection, but you know it’s also a compulsion. And I think the ADD is part of it too. I just started doing collage work with my photography. A few years ago we were in Paris for my wife’s 50th birthday and I saw all these numbers every where, and I just started taking pictures of numbers – like address numbers and here and there, and I bought one of those big cheap print things for ten bucks form Homesense or whatever, and I pasted all of these photographs over top of it as a present for my wife, and here’s our entire Paris trip on one canvas, and you could see us in some of them, and some of the pictures were tiny, and I have no idea the compulsion that drove me to do that, but it felt like something I needed to do.

JAMES

It tells a story.

NEIL

Yeah, for sure and it’s something you can spend some time with it’s not just like, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that.” You can really sort of dive in and look at all those little details

JAMES

Do you think that’s what your plays are like? Like in terms of your process it reflects what you’re doing with your photography, because you’ve got all these different ideas, all these little bits, and now you’re putting them together, and the play itself when the audience comes to it is the experience of all these little pieces.

NEIL

Yes, and the takeaway will be different for everyone, you know, I think. Especially with this. There’s so much crazy content in this play. There’s an artistic epiphany in my play John Doe Jack Rabbit. There’s a moment where the TV’s broken and they’re stuck in this cabin they’re on the lam and this one guy Gordy is reading a book – it’s this trashy horrible romance novel called Ravaged at Rush Hour. But then he gets so sucked into this book – as if he’s never read a book before – and he has this moment where he’s like, the person who wrote this book wrote it down so I would know what it feels like to be Jessica in the cab or whatever it was, right? And that was one of those things. That’s what playwriting is about. What art is about. This is what it’s like to feel like I feel, and I put it into this painting for you to grasp that concept, or I put it in this play for you to go – wow that’s what’s going on in your head.

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Spare Parts is one of eight new plays being developed through The Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Lunchbox Theatre from May 25th to June 9th.

2018 Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work Free Reading Schedule

Spare Parts by Neil Fleming – Friday, May 25, 12:00PM
The Happiness Equation by Peter Fenton & Scott White  – Friday, May 25, 6:00 PM
The Art of Kneading by Helen Knight – Saturday, May 26, 12:00 PM
Paul’s Grace by Anna Cummer – Friday, June 1, 12:00 PM
Candemic by Arun Lakra – Friday, June 1, 6:00 PM
Wo De Ming Shi Zhang Xin En by Kris Vanessa Teo – Saturday, June 2, 12:00 PM
Go for Gold, Audrey Pham by Camille Pavlenko – Friday, June 8, 12:00 PM
Reprise by Mike Czuba – Saturday, June 9, 12:00 PM

This interview has been edited for length and condensed for clarity.

Playwright Wendy Froberg: A Woman of a Certain Age

Posted on by James Hutchison
Wendy Froberg – Actor, Playwright, & Psychologist

Wendy Froberg, Playwright & Actor: “Is life a search for truth? I think ideally it is. I think people that go off into the light happily – however you want to say it – those are the people that have somehow discovered the more profound fundamental truths about life. I always tease people and say, “No one is lying on their deathbed saying they wished they’d worked at the office more or wished they’d partied more.” You know generally what gives people a sense of peace and meaning – again because we’re talking about aging meaningfully – is that they made those profound human connections. They struggled, but they overcame. They had loss, but they healed from that. They were transformed. And I think the happiest people are the ones who live most truthfully.”

Wendy Froberg is an actor, playwright and psychologist and this month Calgary audiences will have a chance to catch her award-winning play, A Woman of a Certain Age, from May 13th to 19th at Knox United Church. The play won “Best of Fest” at the 2015 Calgary International Fringe Festival and since then has received strong reviews and successful runs at the Edmonton, Lethbridge, Regina and Winnipeg Fringe Festivals.

“… a stellar performance… hits a nerve…what a show!”
Louis B. Hobson – Calgary Sun

“…honest, entertaining…a convincing portrayal…emotionally poignant”
Clare Clancy – Edmonton Journal

“…expertly done…astute…warm, funny…you will enjoy the hour”
Lisa Campbell – Winnipeg Jenny Revue

The play is an entertaining and insightful story about six women who are trying to cope with the demands of family and career as they struggle with the physical and emotional challenges of growing older in a culture obsessed with youth and beauty. I sat down with Wendy to talk with her about her play and how she got into playwriting.

Poster for A Woman of a Certain Age by Playwright Wendy Froberg

JAMES HUTCHISON

Tell me a little bit about how you got involved in playwriting?

WENDY FROBERG

I was an actor in high school, and I did a little bit of directing, but my parents weren’t thrilled about me becoming someone in the arts, so I put theatre away for many years and pursued a career in psychology. But as an adult, I got back into acting, and I started auditioning, and I realizing there were limited opportunities for women. And since I had lots of stories I wanted to tell, and I’d always liked writing, I decided to try writing plays

JAMES

Well psychology isn’t totally different than writing and acting, because you’re looking at motivation and characteristics. Where do you see the connections between psychology and playwriting and acting?

WENDY

Well that’s absolutely right, as a psychologist, or as an actor, or as a writer you’re looking at human beings and their motivations. And when we talk about a character’s dramatic arc, for example, the idea that a character changes from the beginning of a play or movie to the end of it that’s certainly similar to what we do in psychotherapy. We want somebody to change from the beginning of the process to the end of the process. I was actually out of psychology for a number of years while I was pursuing playwriting, acting, and directing, but I’ve always felt like I was doing psychology because I was doing it through my art. I was digging into a character or creating a character in my writing.

JAMES

Can you tell me about the genesis of your play, A Woman of a Certain Age?

WENDY

As you know, as a playwright, often whether we intend to or not, parts of ourselves end up being in the play. Whether they’re done literally or whether they’re done from our emotional experience. As I became older and passed out of the ability to play the ingénue roles and got married and had children I began to realize that I was beginning to have a different currency in the world. I wasn’t looked upon the way that I was when I was younger. There are a lot of issues about growing older that have to do with the physical aspects of aging. It’s when you go from being someone who can turn a head when you walk into a room, to being someone that becomes somewhat invisible. And that’s actually a tagline I use when I’m promoting my play and talking about it. The women that I’m portraying are struggling to age with meaning and grace in a culture that’s obsessed with youth and beauty and wants to make them invisible.

JAMES

You’ve done some talkbacks with the play. What sort of conversations have you had with people after they’ve seen the play? When it’s the actor playwright sitting there – what are some of the themes that get discussed?

WENDY

It’s different things for different people. There’s a character in the show who’s a widow as well as an aging mother and she’s suffering from dementia and living in a care home and I get a lot of women who say, “I’m going through exactly that with my mother.” And often, they’re tearful and they say, “That’s exactly how she behaves.” And they’re grateful for the fact that somebody recognizes how difficult it is to watch your parent go through that.

I also have a theme that runs through the show about physical appearance and women often say, “Yeah I’m struggling with the concept of whether or not I should get Botox or should I get a facelift or should I have the courage to let my hair go gray and be natural and embrace the concept of aging because that’s a difficult thing to do, because if you acknowledge that you’re older then people will make assumptions about you and think you’re ready to go out to pasture.” And in the play I’m never judgmental about whether someone wants to do that or not. I think a good play poses questions. You never want your play to be preachy. You never want your play to simply be about your point of view that you’re forcing on your audience.

JAMES

Do you find people take away hope from the play after seeing it?

WENDY

I think they do. I always say that it’s sometimes humorous, that it’s sometimes poignant, but it’s always truthful because that’s what I want to go see. A show that’s truthful and genuine.

JAMES

You mentioned truthful. That’s an interesting idea – because when we see acting that is truthful and sincere it has impact. But what about life itself and theatre’s reflection of life – do you think that life is a search for truth?

WENDY

Is life a search for truth? I think ideally it is. I think people that go off into the light happily – however you want to say it – those are the people that have somehow discovered the more profound fundamental truths about life. I always tease people and say, “No one is lying on their death bed saying they wished they’d worked at the office more or wished they’d partied more.” You know generally what gives people a sense of peace and meaning – again because we’re talking about aging meaningfully – is that they made those profound human connections. They struggled, but they overcame. They had loss, but they healed from that. They were transformed. And I think the happiest people are the ones who live most truthfully.

JAMES

You’ve done the play at a number of fringe festivals. Tell me a little bit about that fringe experience and travelling across Canada. What was that like?

WENDY

Well in 2012 I had been touring as an actor with a fringe show that had gone to Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, and Edmonton. When I go to fringe festivals I work the lineups really hard. That’s how we get our shows promoted to a large extent. You work the lineups for other shows. And you hand out flyers and you tell people about your show and you get them to know a little bit about you as a performer and or as a writer. And I kept noticing the demographic. The demographic was me. They were middle-aged women. And there were a lot of the husbands and boyfriends with them but the women were the ones that typically decided which shows to see. And I had this play in my head because I recognized there’s an audience here so I think I’m going to write it. You know it’s like Field of Dreams. If you write it they will come – because we love to see ourselves portrayed truthfully and with a certain amount of dignity on stage.

JAMES

How much has the show changed from when it started?

WENDY

When I first presented the play it was at the Calgary One-Act Play Festival in 2013 where it won best script and I had a different director the first time around. My director wanted to try a lot of different things so we had projections and a lot of technical stuff and it ended up being quite cumbersome and crisis ensued with things not working the way they were supposed to.

JAMES

Projections didn’t go, the lighting cue was missed, the music lost.

WENDY

Yeah, things like that. When I ended up working with my next director Valerie Ann Pearson, who is a gem, I can’t speak highly enough about her…

JAMES

She was my junior high drama teacher.

WENDY

She is the loveliest person ever.

JAMES

And her husband, Pat, was my radio instructor at SAIT.

WENDY

I love Pat. He’s just a doll. I love them both. Anyway, I just approached her, out of the blue, because I didn’t really know her, but I’d seen her on stage – you always know those people on stage more than they know you. And she liked the story and I talked to her about what I felt – which was that the story got lost in all the bells and whistles – and she said absolutely. She said, “I think this needs to be told really really simply because it’s the story. If you have a strong story you don’t need all that other stuff.”

And since I was thinking of doing it for a fringe I was like absolutely, because another thing about the fringe is you get ten minutes to set up your show and five minutes to strike your show, because the next theatre group is coming in to perform. And so you better have a pretty lean mean machine working there, especially for a one-woman show where it’s just me or me and my son. So now when I write things, I always write things with that in mind. Would this work at a fringe festival? Could it be transportable and quick to set up?

And because the play is easy to set up I’ve also gone on to perform it privately. I’ve done it in people’s living rooms – I’ve done it in people’s guest houses – I’ve even done it in hotel ballrooms.

JAMES

Have play. Will travel.

WENDY

Have play. Will travel. That’s my name. I’m thinking next year, because I took this year off of fringing, I’d like to go beyond Winnipeg. This means I don’t think I’m going to drive, which means I’m probably going to have to rejig my show so it doesn’t even have a set – which happens a lot in fringe shows. Or, have something simple I can pick up locally.

JAMES

I like that for the title of something – Beyond Winnipeg.

WENDY

Beyond Winnipeg, I like that.

JAMES

Beyond Winnipeg, the life story of Wendy Froberg.

WENDY

Yeah, yeah I like that. Have Play. Will Travel. I like that one too.

This interview has been edited for length and condensed for clarity. Last updated August 29, 2019.

An Interview with Playwright Dale Lee Kwong: Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets

Posted on by James Hutchison

“It’s been my goal to have a play at Lunchbox Theatre since 1978. I was in grade twelve when the Stage One program first started, and I don’t even know how I ended up going to all the Stage One readings but I did, and I made a mental note to myself that someday I would like to have a play at Lunchbox.” – Dale Lee Kwong

Calgary Playwright Dale Lee Kwong
Calgary Playwright Dale Lee Kwong – Photo by: Tung Bui – illusionistproductions.com

One of the things I love about Lunchbox Theatre is that many of the productions you see on their stage feature local playwrights whose work was developed through the Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work. This season alone features several plays that were developed through the festival including Book Club II: The Next Chapter by Meredith Taylor-Parry, Flight Risk by Meg Braem, and the upcoming and very funny Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets written by Dale Lee Kwong.  

Dale not only writes plays but also writes poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction. Her essays have been published in Somebody’s Child: Stories of Adoption, A Family By Any Other Name: Exploring Queer Relationships, and the Malahat Review. Her poetry has appeared in Canadian Literature, Modern Morsels, and The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual. Dale often performs at local literary events and sometimes speaks at inclusive churches and organizations like PechaKucha, TALES and The Coming Out Monologues.

I spoke to Dale about her dream of having a play performed at Lunchbox and the journey her play, Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets, took to go from page to stage.

Jamie Matchullis as Jennifer, Chantelle Han as Lilly, Ben Wong as Charlie, and Kelsey Verzotti as Jade in the Lunchbox Theatre production of Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets – Photograph by Benjamin Laird

JAMES HUTCHISON

When did you get into writing?

DALE LEE KWONG

I’ve always been a writer. I have poems framed in cardboard and typed on Manila paper from 1971 that I gave to my family at Christmas. I wrote a community column for about ten years when I lived in Crescent Heights that was told from the point of view of my dog, Magoo. And in my family I’m always the one that gets called upon to do the toast to the bride or the speech. But my real writing career started about fourteen years ago at the end of a relationship. I went to a writing workshop in Edmonton called Women Who Write and took some introductory writing classes. Classes which didn’t actually critique your material so much as just read it back to you and say what struck them.

JAMES

So, it’s a workshop to encourage the writing process?

DALE

Yes, it’s very much for emerging writers. And I realized I had things I wanted to say and so, the first year after my break up I started enrolling in creative writing courses at the University of Calgary. I took three poetry classes with Tom Wayman, and he’s an awesome professor. During that time I won the CBC Poetry Face Off in Calgary, and that got recorded and aired nationwide, and that got voted on by listeners, where it placed third.

JAMES

What a fabulous boost for the ego.

DALE

It was. At the same time Alberta Theatre Projects and the Alberta Playwrights’ Network ran a 24-hour playwriting competition. I entered, and my first play, which was really just a scene, was called – Is Normie Kwong Your Uncle? And it won a special merit award which gave me a free dramaturgical session with Ken Cameron at the Alberta Playwrights’ Network.

I wasn’t even sure what APN was, but after I met with Ken I sent a proposal for an as-of-yet unwritten play to Rona Waddington at Lunchbox Theatre and she commissioned the play in the fall of 2005. I wrote notes and outlines, but I didn’t actually write the play until February 2006 in another 24-hour playwriting competition, which is so well suited to me because I worked in television as a news editor. In television we don’t start cutting the news for the six o’clock show until around three in the afternoon. And then from three to six you hit the ground running, and it’s intense, and that’s the kind of scenario I love. So my writing is always last minute and rushed. I’ve tried to change that, but it’s just part of my process.

JAMES

So, was that the play that became the play being produced at Lunchbox this season?

Dale Lee Kwong Playwright, Steve Gin, Brenda Finley, Michelle Wong, Francine Wong, Pat Mac, Nicola Zylstra
Dale Lee Kwong, Steve Gin, Brenda Finley, Michelle Wong, Francine Wong, Pat Mac, Nicola Zylstra – at the Glenbow Museum for the Alberta Playwrights’ Network Discovery Prize workshop and reading, November 2006

DALE

Yes, this play has been in development since it was first commissioned in the fall of 2005 and written in February 2006. It’s taken twelve years to get to the stage. And some people think it’s autobiographical, but it’s actually not. There are elements of truth in it, and there are true stories in it.

JAMES

So, what you’ve done is taken personal experience as an inspiration and then created the play out of that. What are some of your thoughts about this twelve-year journey?

DALE

Well, when I started I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I’d never written a play before. But one thing that worked to my benefit as a playwright was my day job as a news editor. A news editor takes the raw material that a reporter shoots with her photog (cameraman) and helps it become a better product. And one of the things that entails is taking interviews that are five to twenty minutes long and pulling out 20-second sound bites. So in a sense – I’ve been working with dialogue for twenty-six years.

I’d also taken a writing workshop at the Banff Centre from Fred Wah about a form of Japanese poetry called Utanikki. In Utanikki you take two pieces of text and chop them up and then you put them back together in some form, and just by taking two completely different subjects – for example, a recipe for making scrambled eggs and a piece about coming out to your family and mashing them together a relationship is created between these two topics that didn’t previously exist. Many of my writings employ this method. Two types of writing blended together. I have poems where there’s haiku blended with free form.

Jamie Matchullis as Jennifer and Kelsey Verzotti as Jade in the Lunchbox Theatre production of Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets By Dale Lee Kwong – Photograph by Benjamin Laird

In the play I had this story about a lesbian and her girlfriend, and eventually they decide to move to Vancouver to get away from her family. But in between those scenes I had another entire play. It was a reality game show like Survivor where the lesbian girlfriend was being forced to come out to her family through a competition. There was a character like Jeff Probst, and there was this ancient Chinese sage character named Connie-fucius who would spout out fortune cookie lines.

Over the years I worked with a lot of different directors and dramaturges who encouraged me to remove the Survivor scenes from the play, but it was honestly my favourite part. I loved it! And I loved the character of Connie-fucius.

Lunchbox Theatre – The Early Days – Bow Valley Square

Rona Waddington never scheduled it for a production, and after she left Lunchbox I resubmitted it to Pamela Halstead when she was artistic director, and she was really interested in it, but by then she had already submitted her own resignation. So she set up a meeting between me and Glenda Stirling who was the incoming artistic director. Glenda had already programmed her first season,  but she was interested in it for the following year, but then Glenda left. So I’d submitted the play to three different artistic directors and it had fallen through the cracks each time.

The other thing you need to know is that it’s been my goal to have a play at Lunchbox Theatre since 1978. I was in grade twelve when the Stage One program first started, and I don’t even know how I ended up going to all the Stage One readings but I did, and I made a mental note to myself that someday I would like to have a play at Lunchbox.

JAMES

But isn’t that fascinating – that there’s that connection from thirty years ago – no forty years ago.

DALE

78, 88, 98, 2008 – oh my God, forty years!

JAMES

Four decades.

DALE

That makes me tear up thinking about that. That’s why this play is so special to me. Lunchbox is my favourite theatre company, and I make no bones about saying that. I’ve been donating to them for years, and I’ve been volunteering there, and I think they’re one of the best treasures in Calgary.

Chantelle Han as Lilly and Ben Wong as Charlie in the Lunchbox Theatre production of Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets by Dale Lee Kwong – Photograph by Benjamin Laird

JAMES

So what happened next?

DALE

After Glenda left, in comes Mark Bellamy. I knew Mark vaguely from Vertigo Theatre – and you’d think I’d show him my script right away, but I was gun shy having experienced several disappointments. So, I got to know Mark better, and he got to know me better, and I finally said to Mark, “You know, I’ve got this script that was workshopped here, and it kind of fell through the cracks.” He asked me what it was about and after I told him he said, “Send it to me.” So then I had this opportunity to send it to him, and do you think I sent it to him? No, because by that time it had been workshopped so much I didn’t know where I was at, and I thought I should get him a clean version. So, it took me a year to revise it and send it to him and he got back to me within a month, and gave me a workshop.

At the workshop Mark gave me the choice of a couple of directors and I chose Trevor Reuger from APN whom I had prior dealings with. He had helped me with another script I had started. I told Trevor my creative process and how I’m late with everything and not to worry because I was a news editor, and I’m used to tight deadlines, but before we started the workshop, Trevor suggested, that for the sake of time, we leave the Survivor bits out for now and he said, “If you can show me how they advance the storyline then we’ll start putting them back in.” I was sort of reluctant to do that.

JAMES

Sounds like a clever strategy from your dramaturge.

DALE

Yeah, so the first day we missed two Survivor scenes, and they were funny, and I was like – how can I justify getting them in?

JAMES

So, for the whole workshop you were trying to push them back in?

DALE

Well by Thursday I knew Survivor wasn’t coming back. The play had changed. Everything was fluid. I was doing rewrites every day. But there was this fight scene between Jade and her mother which I’d always struggled with because I didn’t have that fight with my mother in real life when I came out.

Ben Wong as Charlie, Jamie Matchullis as Jennifer, Kelsey Verzotti as Jade and Chantelle Han as Lilly in the Lunchbox Theatre production of Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets – Photograph by Benjamin Laird

DALE

When I first came out it was in ’93, and I wrote the play twelve years later. I came out before Ellen Degeneres came out, and that was big news. She came out on the cover of TIME magazine. I came out to my family – all in one day – at my mom’s house. I told my cousins first, and at dinner I told everybody’s parents. The ones who had the most trouble with it were the cousins in the 50 to 70 year range, but everyone over 70 was fine with it. In my experience of coming out – senior citizens don’t care that much – you know – life’s too short – do what you want. I had one relative who was ecstatic to finally have a lesbian in the family – that was surprising too.

So, anyway, I had written the play forward to the fight scene and written the play backwards from the fight, but I couldn’t actually write the fight scene. There was just a blank page.

And we got to Friday, before the public reading, and we were reading the script, like we did every morning, and the actor basically went from the last line before the blank page to the first line after the blank page and I went, “No wait. There’s a fight scene there.” And they all went, “What?” And I said, “Well that’s what the blank space is.” And Trevor said, “Where are the words?”

And I said, “I was hoping we could workshop this and get something out.” And Trevor said, “Dale, there’s an audience coming in an hour and a half to see your play. You have to have some words there.” And I said, “Well yeah, but I’ve struggled all the way forward and all the way back – I just need some help.”

Finally Chantelle Han who was playing the mother said, “I think I would ask them to leave, but I need to say something first.” Then the actor playing Jennifer or Jade said, “Well maybe such and such could happen.” And that gave me a little bit. And I think we all worked it out together. I was scratching out lines and adding lines and telling them things. I have no idea what that page looked like on their scripts, and when they actually read it at the reading it wasn’t typed. It was just hand written notes. That script literally got written an hour before it was read.

JAMES

But the audience didn’t know that, and I saw that reading, and it was a lot of fun. There were a lot of laughs. People loved the play, and I remember mentioning to you how much clarity had come into the play from when I had read it probably a year and a half to two years before that if not more. So now that the play is being produced are you excited about going into the rehearsal process?

DALE

Even though I’m not as much of a green horn as I was twelve years ago I’m still a newbie. This is my first big production. So, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but I’m really lucky because one of my mentors in the theatre community is Sharon Pollock whom I’ve known since 2006, and over the last few years we’ve become really good friends because we walk our dogs together.

Rehearsal for Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets
Jamie Matchullis, Kelsey Verzotti, Ben Wong, and Chantelle Han rehearse a scene from Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets

Sharon is wonderful. Last year she had her own new play Blow Wind High Water at Theatre Calgary and she had a revision happening on another play at Stratford and I was going through stuff on my end and so I could ask her questions like, “Should I go to the rehearsals?” And Sharon was the first to say, “It’s your right to go to the rehearsal. Not all playwrights do. In fact, most directors would probably discourage it, but you’re emerging – you’re a rookie – you should go to them all.” She said, “Just take a book, and be there if they need you, and listen once in a while, and see what things they struggle with, and you’ll learn.”

You know I always say to emerging artists, particularly artists in their 20s, I say, “You have age on your side. You can plead complete ignorance. You can say, I don’t know. I’ve never been to a dress rehearsal? Can I come to your dress rehearsal? I’ve never been to a first read. Can I come to your first read?”

Ben Wong as Charlie, Jamie Matchullis as Jennifer, Kelsey Verzotti as Jade, and Chantelle Han as Lilly in the Lunchbox Theatre production of Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets – Photograph by Benjamin Laird

DALE

The other thing you can do if you’re an emerging writer or artist is volunteer. I have been ushering at Calgary theatres for more than ten years. Almost every theatre company in the city uses ushers, and if you usher you get to see the play for free, and you meet the people behind the scenes. So there are all these people that I’ve met along the way, and I’ve been supporting them for ten years, and I finally have something they can come to.

JAMES

Playwright Dale Lee Kwong at Lunchbox Theatre 2017/18 Season Launch
Dale Lee Kwong at the Lunchbox Theatre 2017/18 Season Announcement with former Lunchbox Artistic Producer Mark Bellamy Photograph by Carol F. Poon

And genuine friends are happy for you.

DALE

Yes, I get that. I feel the love. At the official season announcement last February I just burst into tears. My best friend got a picture of it, and it’s one of my favourite pictures. Like you say it was a forty year journey. I didn’t even do the math. I’m bad at math. I’m not a good Asian.

JAMES

You can say that joke, I can’t.

DALE

You can credit it to me.

***

Dale also wanted to take this opportunity to thank the many people who have contributed to the development of her play over the years. Here is a list of the actors, directors, and dramaturges who have offered their time, talent and support in the creation of Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets.

Lunchbox Theatre – Stage One workshop, May 2006

  • TV Host/Charlie Wong – Steve Gin
  • Lillian Wong/Connie-fucius – Jacey Ma
  • Jade Wong – Elyn Quan
  • Jennifer Smith – Karen Johnson Diamond
  • Dramaturg/Director – Ken Cameron

Alberta Playwrights’ Network – Writing in the Works excerpt, Oct 2006

  • TV Host – Grant Lunnenburg
  • Lillian Wong/Connie-fucius – Sharon Pollock
  • Jade Wong – Laura Parken
  • Jennifer Smith – Francine Wong
  • Director – Sharon Pollock

Alberta Playwrights’ Network – Discovery Prize workshop and reading, Nov 2006

  • TV Host/Charlie Wong – Steve Gin
  • Lillian Wong/Connie-fucius – Michelle Wong
  • Jade Wong – Francine Wong
  • Jennifer Smith – Nicole Zylstra
  • TV Host/Stage Manager – Patrick MacEachern
  • Dramaturg/Director – Brenda Finley

filling Station Magazine – flywheel reading for Chinese New Year, Feb 2008

  • Charlie Wong– Ben Tsui
  • Lillian Wong– Jasmin Poon
  • Jade Wong – Francine Wong
  • Jennifer Smith – Elan Pratt
  • Connie-fucius – Jade Cooper
  • TV Host – Emiko Muraki
  • Director – Dale Lee Kwong

Lunchbox Theatre – Stage One workshop, June 2016

  • Charlie Wong – Mike Tan
  • Lillian Wong – Chantelle Han
  • Jade Wong – Ali DeRegt
  • Jennifer Smith – Julie Orton
  • Dramaturg/Director – Trevor Rueger
Poster for Ai Yay! Sweet and Sour Secrets at Lunchbox Theatre

Dale Lee Kwong writes poetry, plays, and creative non-fiction. Third-generation Chinese-Canadian, her work explores Chinese-Canadian history, diversity & inclusion, adoption, and LGBTQ issues. Dale is passionate about the importance of Chinatowns across North America, and the fight to save them from gentrification. Dale plans to keep writing about the past and present, in hopes of shaping the future! 

Lunchbox Theatre is one of the most successful noon-hour theatre companies in the world and produces one-act plays that provide patrons with an engaging and entertaining theatre experience. Lunchbox produces seven plays per season, as well as the Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work where many of the plays produced by the company are developed. Lunchbox is one of Calgary’s longest-running professional theatre companies and is located in downtown Calgary at the base of the Calgary Tower.

Tung Bui is a Calgary photographer and videographer that is passionate about visual storytelling. He loves the challenge of trying to shoot outside the lines of the viewfinder. So if you’re looking to capture your memories in a unique way…let his imagination work for your vision.

This interview has been edited for length and condensed for clarity.

DOWNLOAD: James Hutchison Interviews Playwright Dale Lee Kwong – Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets

An Interview With Playwright Maria Crooks: The Mary Mink Story

Posted on by James Hutchison
Photograph of Playwright Maria Crooks
Playwright Maria Crooks – Photograph by James Hutchison

“Frankly as human beings we all have a tendency to be more wary and distrustful of anyone who is not like ourselves. Also there has recently been a lot of discussion about who has the right to tell other cultures’ stories and my play touches on that topic. As our society becomes more diverse it is important to talk about this and to understand how to respectfully approach the telling of stories about other cultures. I don’t think it is wrong to write stories or make movies about others but one should always think about how to do so in a respectful and mindful manner.” – Playwright Maria Crooks

Maria Crooks is an emerging Calgary playwright who began writing plays after retiring from a corporate job in the oil industry in 2011. She describes her most recent play, The Mary Mink Story, as a play about untrammeled ambition, ruthlessness and deceit and one man’s relentless efforts for the truth to be told.

JAMES HUTCHISON

Maria, what attracted you to playwriting as opposed to novels, short stories, poems or other forms of writing?

MARIA CROOKS

I’ve always had a passion for writing and in the past I’ve taken a number of writing courses including poetry and short story writing. I decided to try playwriting because it was a new kind of writing for me and because I don’t like doing research and I mistakenly thought that writing plays wouldn’t require doing much research. Despite discovering that I was wrong about the amount of work it takes to write a play, I was hooked when at the end of the first course, the instructor brought in two professional actors to read scenes from the plays we had written in class. It was so thrilling to have the characters I had created, in my head, come to life before me that I’ve been writing plays ever since.

JAMES

You know I find it inspiring that you’ve come to playwriting later in life and I think that’s a great thing. I think people should go after their dreams no matter what their age. What motivated you to go after this dream?

MARIA

I love the theatre and I love acting and in fact after retiring I started taking acting courses and I’ve acted in a couple of plays since then. I also love words and writing and so the acting led to the writing of plays and somehow the writing has taken centre stage as it were, at least for the time being.

JAMES

A few years ago, I went to When Words Collide, an annual writers and readers conference here in Calgary, and heard American fantasy and science fiction author Brandon Sanderson talk about writers being either gardeners or architects. Gardeners are writers who plant seeds and see what grows. In other words, they just sit down and start writing. Architects are writers that like to make a blueprint before they start writing. Which are you?

MARIA

I believe I’m naturally a gardener. Even at university when I had to write papers I had difficulty following structure and pattern. I find following a blueprint a bit confining. However, over the years, I’ve discovered the usefulness of having a blueprint. It’s particularly important when writing a play where you have to know everything about the background of the characters you’re writing about before you start writing because it grounds them and informs their choices and will make your play and the characters more realistic and believable.

JAMES

Okay I have to ask, one of your earlier plays is a play called Age of Love – and it’s about a romantic relationship between a younger man and a much older woman – where did that story come from?

MARIA

I was listening to the program As It Happens on CBC radio about two years ago when they were rebroadcasting episodes from their archives. I heard an interview with a young man who in 1976 was 21 years old, and had fallen in love with his 76 year-old step-grandmother who had recently been widowed and he was determined to marry her despite his parents’ protests. At the time I was looking to write a play examining sexuality and I thought the story of love between two people with such a huge age difference would be intriguing to explore and write about.

JAMES

As you were writing that play what did you discover about your own thoughts and society’s thoughts concerning love, sex and age.

MARIA

I wrote the play as a comedy: I thought it was very funny and odd for a young man to fall in love with wrinkles and false teeth, but as I wrote it, I fell in love with my characters and I realized that romantic love comes in different forms and the usual pattern of boy meets girl who is young and beautiful is only just one of many ways for people to fall in love.

Ryan Gray as Ash and Diana-Marie Stolz as Olivia in the Urban Stories 2015 Production of The Age of Love

JAMES

It was produced so I’m curious what the audience’s reaction to the play was.

MARIA

I was very pleased with the reaction of the public, in fact it got good reviews* and elicited a lot of laughs. To this day, I will be at a dinner party or be at some other social function and friends or other people who have seen the play will approach me and want to talk about it. This happens way more often than with any other play I’ve written. Many wonder if perhaps I had been in a relationship with a younger man and that is the reason I wrote the play.

I also did research on gerontophilia, which is a little-known sexual preference for the elderly, and I printed an article to post at the theatre for the audience to read so they would know that this sort of love is possible and that I didn’t just write it out of wishful thinking.

JAMES

You mentioned that people thought the story for Age of Love came from personal experience but even though the specifics of that story aren’t about your life how much of your own life experience do you find you put into your writing?

MARIA

I think it’s inevitable that my own experiences will seep into my writing consciously or unconsciously.

When I was a child we moved from Cuba to Jamaica and after the move my parents couldn’t find an item, it’s been so long now I can’t remember what it was, but they immediately assumed it had been stolen by the woman who had been helping with the packing. This woman had been a family friend and my parents never responded to her letters because of the assumption that she had stolen from them. Many years later they found the missing item but by then it was too late, the friendship had been broken.

That story became the basis of my first play, The Servant, which is a story about a servant who is accused of having stolen a valuable ring which was subsequently found. I wanted to examine the nature of trust and how quickly it can be eroded when we jump to conclusions. In that same play I included a scene from a revival church meeting I witnessed as a child with a woman getting into the spirit and whirling around while speaking in tongues.

So yes, my experiences do enter my plays from time to time.

JAMES

Your current play is The Mary Mink Story. What is that play about?

MARIA

The Mary Mink Story is about a black woman who lived in Toronto in the mid-19th century. Her father, James Mink, was a prosperous businessman who owned a hotel and livery stables and had several lucrative government contracts delivering mail and so forth. According to several historical accounts, which I found online and in books, James Mink placed an ad in the Toronto papers offering $10,000 for a white man to marry his daughter. A white man married her and promptly took her across the border to the US where she was sold into slavery. The story was so intriguing that I felt compelled to write a play about it, however my research led me to a researcher from York University in Toronto who has done extensive work on James Mink and his family and she provided me with information which disproved the story.

JAMES

After doing your research and finding out the real story – how did that impact your play?

MARIA

I found myself in a dilemma. I felt the story was so dramatic that I wanted to tell it, but at the same time I didn’t wish to perpetuate the myth which is based on racism and bigotry and I didn’t want to be a part of that. I, therefore, decided to tell the myth while at the same time debunking it. This has been my most difficult play to write and my hope is that I have succeeded in exposing the myth while at the same time telling an interesting Canadian story.

JAMES

Why do you think this story needs to be told?

MARIA

I felt this was a story about a black family that needed to be told and I had a responsibility to set the record straight. A TV movie about the Minks was made in the 1990s and it too recounted the myth as if it were true. Wikipedia has an account of James Mink and that account does not say that it is a myth either so anyone coming across the movie or reading the Wikipedia account will come away believing it to be true.

JAMES

Why do you want to set the record straight? To tell the truth about what really happened?

MARIA

I feel a responsibility to James Mink and to his daughter to set the record straight because both were real people who were respectable and hard-working intelligent folk who do not deserve this continued insult to their memory. James despite his humble beginnings rose to become a prominent citizen of his community both he and Mary were proud of their African heritage and it is inconceivable that he would have made the offer he was purported to have made in order to get his daughter married.

JAMES

You’ve been able to work with Urban Stories a local theatre company here in Calgary on the development and production of your plays. What’s that been like?

MARIA

As an emerging playwright, collaborating with Urban Stories Theatre has been really advantageous. I met the founder and Artistic Director, Helen Young at an actors studio a few years ago and she encouraged me to expand a short play I had written into a full-length play which she then produced and presented as a main stage play. Urban Stories has a mandate to promote and support local playwrights and to that end they put on playwriting workshops, help budding writers through the dramaturgical and workshop process and will produce works which they feel fulfill their mandate of examining social justice issues.

Urban Stories has produced two of my full-length and two of my short one-act plays and we’re planning to produce the The Mary Mink Story at some point in the future. I originally had no intentions of offering this play to Urban Stories or anyone else for that matter because I had reached an impasse with the play and didn’t know how to move forward with it. I knew I wanted to expose the myth but I didn’t know how to do it, so I had put it away. Then I happened to mention to Helen that I had this play that I had more or less discarded and she asked to read it. She did and next thing I knew she said she wanted to produce it. So now I’m working with Urban Stories as well as dramaturge Caroline Russell-King, so that the play can be produced.

JAMES

Speaking of Urban Stories’ mandate to examine social justice issues what are you hoping audiences will get out of your telling of The Mary Mink Story?

MARIA

First of all, I hope they will find it entertaining and enjoyable but I also want people to see how easily lies can be created and perpetuated. This myth was born out of jealousy and dislike of the “other” and it persists even today.

JAMES

I assume you’re referring to the “other” as in immigrants or people of different race or nationality.

MARIA

Yes, I’m referring to immigrants and minorities but frankly as human beings we all have a tendency to be more wary and distrustful of anyone who is not like ourselves. Also there has recently been a lot of discussion about who has the right to tell other cultures’ stories and my play touches on that topic. As our society becomes more diverse it is important to talk about this and to understand how to respectfully approach the telling of stories about other cultures. I don’t think it is wrong to write stories or make movies about others but one should always think about how to do so in a respectful and mindful manner.

JAMES

Anything else you’d like to add about the play or writing or art or who you think is going to win the Grey Cup this year?

MARIA

I think theatre is important and it’s very pleasing how much good theatre there is to see in Calgary. We live so close to the US and their plays and playwrights tend to dominate so I think it’s very, very important to foster our own Canadian playwrights and their work. As for who will win the Grey Cup, I’m afraid I know nothing about football so, I won’t even hazard a guess.

***

Maria Crooks is a Calgary playwright whose plays are often inspired by real events which she uses as a starting point for her fictional work. You can contact Maria by at catalinaver13@gmail.com if you’d like more information or if you’d like to obtain copies of her plays.

FULL-LENGTH PLAYS

  • The Servant is a play set in early 1960s Jamaica and Canada. It’s about a poor servant woman and her desperate efforts to achieve a better life for herself and her children despite the many forces arranged against her.
  • The Age of Love is a wacky comedy about an inheritance, a free-spirited step-grandma, a libidinous young man, his jealous mama, a weirdly eccentric German doctor and a ruthlessly ambitious talk show host. Non-stop hilarity ensues when these unlikely characters come together on a tabloid TV show.
  • The Mary Mink Story is a play about untrammelled ambition, ruthlessness and deceit and one man’s relentless efforts for the truth to be told.

SHORT PLAYS

  • Dreamboat is a 15 minute play about a plain young woman’s dreams of finding true love
  • La Mère, La Mer is a short play about a young mother’s descent into insanity and the unfathomable act she commits after the birth of her child.

* Review: The Age of Love Turns the Taboo Into Something Sweet by Rodrigo Flores

***

Urban Stories Theatre is focused on supporting local playwrights writing about social justice issues by nurturing their ideas from first draft to finished production. The company is made up of a core group of local artists who oversee all productions and workshops. Budding actors, directors, stage managers and designers are encouraged to share their ideas by becoming part of the team on a show by show basis.

Vision: To give local artists a voice in creating theatre that tells real stories about real life.

***

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

An Interview with Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry: Book Club II

Posted on by James Hutchison
Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry – Photograph James Hutchison

“I enjoy writing humour and I like the challenge. At the same time, if the story doesn’t have heart, if nothing serious is going on underneath the humour….what’s the point really? I want my plays to address some aspect of the human struggle that hopefully people can relate to. That’s what I want to see when I go to a play so naturally I aspire to that in my writing.” Meredith Taylor Parry interview Book Club II

***

Meredith Taylor-Parry is a Calgary-based actor and playwright whose fun and insightful comedy Book Club was a runaway hit for Lunchbox Theatre back in 2016. At that time I did a two-part interview with Meredith. In Part One we talked about Meredith’s play Survival Skills which won the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2013 and was produced Off Off Broadway by the 13 Street Repertory Company. In Part Two we talked about Meredith’s play Book Club which was a funny and insightful look at motherhood and the joys and disappointments of life. Now in this third interview, Meredith and I talk about her very funny and moving sequel to Book Club – Book Club II: The Next Chapter, which premieres at Lunchbox Theatre and runs from September 18th to October 7th.

***

JAMES HUTCHISON

The first Book Club was a big hit for Lunchbox Theatre and ended up having an extended and sold-out run. Audiences loved it! Why do you think the play resonated so well with audiences? And did you notice any difference in how men and women reacted to the play?

MEREDITH TAYLOR-PARRY

I knew I had a dream team as far as our director, actors, production and design team, but I never once imagined it would do so well! I can’t even tell you how much fun it was sitting in the audience listening to the laughs and waiting for the responses to my favourite moments. That was so exciting for me and unexpected.

I really think the reason the play resonated so well with people was because of the chemistry we had together as a group of artists. Everyone contributed so much to that script in the Stage One workshop process. There wasn’t one person in that room who didn’t add value to the script because everyone was brave enough to share themselves with me. I think that process and the generosity of the artists I was working with allowed me to find authenticity in the script along with the humour.

And, I think, the audiences liked it because they could relate to human beings, regardless of gender.  One of the best comments I got was from a man who said, “good comedy is good comedy.”

Anna Cummer, Cheryl Hutton, Kira Bradley, Arielle Rombough and Kathryn Kerbes in the 2016 Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club

JAMES

How soon after Book Club did you start thinking about a sequel?

MEREDITH

I was watching performances of Book Club sell out and I was thinking, better strike while the iron is hot Meredith! I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to approach Mark Bellamy, Lunchbox Theatre’s Artistic Producer, when things were going well, and I had already been working on an idea for a sequel based on a weekend I had spent in Banff with my girlfriends.

I have the BEST group of girlfriends. We’re all moms and we have a lot of laughs together, and I’m constantly writing down ideas when I’m with them. They don’t mind either, they’re very supportive of my writing.

So, I took my idea and managed to scrape together 20 pages of Book Club II and a rough outline and I submitted it to Mark pretty much as soon as Book Club closed.

He was thrilled and considered it for the 2016 Stage One workshop but, due to scheduling issues, we couldn’t get the same team together to work on it. So, he scheduled me in for the 2017 Stage One series AND programmed it for the beginning of this season. He let me know at the beginning of this year and it was very exciting and of course a bit terrifying because I didn’t have a full script yet.

JAMES

What is Book Club II about?

MEREDITH

I wanted to further explore the nature of really good female friendships and examine how that works within one’s marriage.

There’s a special kind of intimacy I share with my girlfriend’s and I’ve questioned how that affects my relationship with my husband. Does he feel left out because I rely on them so much? What about my girlfriend’s spouses? How do they feel?

The first play was all about good girlfriends supporting each other through the messy business that is motherhood. I wanted Book Club II to explore the toll parenthood takes on a marriage and examine where the character’s husbands fit into the complicated lives of these women.

Anna Cummer, Cheryl Hutton, Kira Bradley and Arielle Rombough in a scene from the Lunchbox Theatre production of Book Club II: The Next Chapter – Playwright Meredith Taylor Parry Book Club II

JAMES

Even a good marriage has rough patches and, I think, unfortunately, our society places a lot of unrealistic expectations on our relationships. For example, there’s the idea that our romantic partners should know what we want and feel and think without us actually having to tell them. That’s a romantic notion that doesn’t reflect the reality of marriage or relationships. To make any relationship work, romantic or otherwise, you have to communicate. You have to tell your partner – when you’re hurting – what you need – what’s going on in your life – otherwise they won’t know. So, I guess what I’m asking is whether or not you think that some of the problems people face in their marriages are because the reality of marriage doesn’t live up to the romantic fantasy of marriage? And maybe – now that I think of it – men and women have different expectations of what marriage is?

MEREDITH

Yes, and yes! We are raised on a certain brand of romance. Cinderella has been around for a long, long time! I think we are both unrealistic in our expectations and I think men and women have different expectations for their romantic relationships. I also agree that communication is key. Humans are terrible mind readers yet we easily make assumptions about our partner’s thoughts and behaviours and communicate our needs in cryptic ways.

In the workshop, we did discuss the typical “husband on the couch while wife slams dishes into the dishwasher” scenario. Why doesn’t she just ask for help? Why doesn’t he pitch in without being asked? We also talked about the different expectations for men and women when it comes to emotional vulnerability in communication. I think we’re improving but there’s still a culture of emotional toughness when it comes to boys.

JAMES

Where did the actual story for Book Club II come from?

MEREDITH

It started with the original idea of the characters getting away for the weekend and talking about their marital woes. I talked with lots of girlfriends and a few male friends about their marriages and I also did a lot of reading. There’s a lot of material out there about marriage and relationships! I went back as far as Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus, remember that one?

One of my favourites was “How Not to Hate Your Husband After You Have Kids” by Jancee Dunn. So, the story of Book Club II contains bits and pieces of all the research I did and of course it evolved greatly in the Stage One workshop this past June. Curt Mckinstry was extremely helpful with developing the husband character. Once again, I was blessed with a generous artist who was willing to share himself. And, of course, I got the rest of my dream team back as well.

Cast of Book Club II – Anna Cummer, Cheryl Hutton, Kira Bradley, Arielle Rombough and Curt Mckinstry Playwright – Meredith Taylor Parry Book Club II

JAMES

Did you feel any pressure writing the sequel? Were you able to focus on the writing without worrying about it being as big a success?

MEREDITH

The pressure made me sick to my stomach to tell you the truth.  What if number two sucks? But the great thing about a deadline is, you have no choice. I wasn’t going to walk into the workshop empty handed. It was a very intense week, the script was rough and I spent a lot of late nights writing so that I could address the issues that had come up during the day. That kind of intense writing leaves no room for your inner critic to get in the way. I did breathe a sigh of relief at the reading however when the audience seemed to like it. I also completely trust Shari Wattling, my dramaturg/director. She keeps me truthful and she keeps me focused and tells me when I’m drifting off course.

JAMES

I think one of the things that worked so well in the first play was the mix of humour and drama all brought to life by a wonderful cast and a terrific production. And I’d say based on the reading for Book Club II, which I saw back in June, I think you’ve managed to capture that same mix of humour and drama. So, I’m curious when you’re writing is the mix between humour and drama something you do intentionally or is it more of an intuitive process?

MEREDITH

I guess when I’m working I’m always looking for ways to work in funny or quirky bits. I enjoy writing humour and I like the challenge. At the same time, if the story doesn’t have heart, if nothing serious is going on underneath the humour….what’s the point really? I want my plays to address some aspect of the human struggle that hopefully people can relate to. That’s what I want to see when I go to a play so naturally I aspire to that in my writing.

Arielle Rombough, Cheryl Hutton, Kira Bradley, Curt Mckinstry and Anna Cummer in a scene from the Lunchbox Theatre production of Book Club II: The Next Chapter – Meredith Taylor Parry Book Club II

JAMES

It’s been a couple of years since you wrote the original Book Club. In what ways do you think you’ve evolved as a playwright?

MEREDITH

I’m learning more about structure and I’m learning more about the practice of writing. I was an on again off again kind of writer, creating in fits and starts and then buckling down when I had a deadline. But now, I write every day. A play is kind of like a lover, you need to give it attention so that it will give something back. If I give a play attention every day it seeps into my unconscious mind and feeds me new ideas constantly, even when I am not sitting at the computer. And hopefully on opening night, your lover doesn’t screw you over. Ha ha!

JAMES

If you loved Book Club you’re definitely going to love the sequel, but the great thing is you don’t need to have seen the first play in order to enjoy the second play. Both plays stand as full stories on their own. What do you want audiences to take away after they see the new story.

MEREDITH

My hope is that the audience will see a story they can relate to and enjoy a great night of theatre. I hope they will leave with a desire to see more theatre! There are so many spectacular offerings this season in Calgary!

JAMES

Are the girl’s stories going to continue? Is there a full-length play in the works?  A book maybe? A possible television series?

MEREDITH

Good lord, you’re getting way ahead of me. Let’s see how this one goes first, shall we?

***

Book Club II: The Next Chapter runs from September 18th until October 7th at Lunchbox Theatre. Performance times are Monday to Saturday at 12:00 noon plus a 6:00 pm show on Thursdays and Fridays. Tickets are $26.00 for adults and $21.00 for students and seniors. Tickets can be purchased on-line at Lunchbox Theatre or by calling the box office at 403-265-4292 x 0.

Lunchbox Theatre 2017/2018 Season

Book Club II: The Next Chapter by Meredith Taylor-Parry
Book Club is back. Get ready for another page turner.
September 18 – October 7, 2017

During a weekend getaway where the girls talk about creating a Mommy Commune and Lisa runs into an old boyfriend, the girls of Book Club have to examine what marriage and sisterhood truly means to them.

CAST

Kira Bradley – Kathy
Anna Cummer – Ellen
Cheryl Hutton – Lisa
Arielle Rombough – Jenny
Curt Mckinstry – Barry / Bartender / Colin

CREATIVE TEAM

Meredith Taylor-Parry – Playwright Book Club II
Shari Wattling – Director
Chris Stockton – RBC Emerging Director
Terry Gunvordahl – Scenic & Lighting Design
Rebecca Toon – Costume Design
Allison Lynch – Sound Design
Ailsa Birnie – Stage Manager
Ava Bishop – Production Assistant

Flight Risk by Meg Braem
One man’s heroic journey to find peace.
October 23 – November 11, 2017

World War II veteran Hank Dunfield is about to celebrate his 100th birthday, but painful memories of his time as a tail gunner during the war don’t make him feel much like celebrating. Only his new nurse Sarah is finally able to get to the heart of Hank’s pain and sorrow and help Hank find peace with the past.

The Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris, adapted by Joe Mantello
The is one elf that won’t make the nice list.
November 27 – December 23, 2017

An out-of-work actor in New York city takes a job as an elf in Macy’s Santaland Village and reveals all the crazy and hilarious behind-the-scenes shenanigans of the holiday season. A Christmas comedy for the little bit of humbug in all of us.

Inner Elder created and performed by Michelle Thrush
One woman show for all people.
Co-Presented with the High Performance Rodeo
January 15 – 27, 2018

Using real memories about her Grandmother’s impact on her life, award winning Calgary actress, Michelle Thrush takes audiences on a journey of discovery. A journey where we see the transformation from child to elder and learn that for everyone laughter is the best medicine.

Ai Yah! Sweet & Sour Secrets by Dale Lee Kwong
Dinner is served. So are juicy family secrets.
February 19 – March 10, 2018

When her father invites a surprise guest to celebrate Chinese New Years more than one family secret comes out of the closet and Chinese-Canadian Jade Wong is caught between being true to herself and living up to her family’s cultural expectations. A funny heart-warming story for anyone who has ever faced an awkward family dinner.

Miss Caledonia by Melody Johnson
This story will be over in an hour. Her Hollywood dreams may be too.
April 2 – 21, 2018

Peggy Ann Douglas dreams of becoming a Hollywood movie star and leaving behind all the stall cleaning, hay-baling drudgery of her 1950’s life on Rural Route 2. Step one is to sing, twirl and pivot her way to being crowned Miss Caledonia in the local pageant!

***

Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry

Meredith Taylor-Parry is a playwright based in Calgary, Alberta. Her plays include So Long, a TYA play which toured Calgary and area schools in 2012 with Sandbox Children’s Theatre, Survival Skills (Winner New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest 2013) which was produced Off Off Broadway in 2014 by the 13 Street Repertory Company NYC and Devices which was produced as part of the 27th annual New Ideas Festival presented by Alumnae Theatre in Toronto. Her one act comedy, Book Club, received its world premiere at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary in 2016, performing for a majority of sold-out audiences and held over due to the play’s popularity. She is looking forward to returning to Lunchbox with the sequel this September: Book Club II: The Next Chapter. Meredith is a co-founder of Bigs and Littles Theatre Society and a stay-at-home mom to 11 and 12-year-old girls. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Playwriting at the University of Calgary.

Lunchbox Theatre

Bartley and Margaret Bard and Betty Gibb founded Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary in 1975. Lunchbox delivers a fun and unique experience to its audience – upbeat performances in an intimate and comfortable atmosphere. Patrons are encouraged to eat their lunch while they enjoy the show. Lunchbox Theatre focuses on the development and production of original one-act plays; many of which are written by local Calgarians.

Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry – Part Two: Book Club

Posted on by James Hutchison
Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry
Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry – Photograph by James Hutchison

***

“The pattern is clear, women are drinking more. And not just in my circles. I think it’s a phenomenon in stay at home moms. It’s a way to get through the witching hour. It’s a way to relieve the anxiety and the pressure of information overload that moms now have because we’re trying to make the right choices. But there are so many choices laid out for us, with so many different arguments for which one is the right one, that we’re walking around with this mind boggling anxiety all the time that we’re making the wrong ones.” Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry

Anna Cummer, Kira Bradley, Cheryl Hutton, Kathryn Kerbes, and Arielle Rombough in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club by Playwright Meredith Taylor Parry. Photo Benjamin Laird.
Anna Cummer, Kira Bradley, Cheryl Hutton, Kathryn Kerbes, and Arielle Rombough in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.

 ***

There’s a new play premiering at Lunchbox Theatre next week by Calgary Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry called Book Club. It’s a funny and insightful look at being human, motherhood, and coping with life’s disappointments and joys.

And it’s funny – did I mention that?

Very funny. And beautifully written. I highly recommend it. So, take your daughter and your mother and your grandmother. Get your son and your father and your grandfather. Gather up the whole family, members of the Book Club, the Wine Club and the Social Club and make sure you head to Lunchbox Theatre and catch this gem of a play.

Last week, I published the first part of my interview with Meredith where we talked about her play Survival Skills. This week, in part two, we talk about her play Book Club.

 ***

Kira Bradley, Anna Cummer, Kathryn Kerbes and Cheryl Hutton in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.
Kira Bradley, Anna Cummer, Kathryn Kerbes and Cheryl Hutton in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.

JAMES HUTCHISON

You came to the acting late, and now you’ve come to the writing later. And even though you haven’t been writing a long time you’ve had good feedback and some success including a production Off Off Broadway for your play Survival Skills. And now you have a new production coming up, here in Calgary, at Lunchbox Theatre for your play Book Club. How much do you feel maturity has played a role in you becoming a writer?

MEREDITH TAYLOR-PARRY

For me maturity was very important. I don’t think I would have had the confidence or the stories to become a writer if I’d tried this when I was nineteen.

For someone else, who’s got that confidence and talent right from the womb, they can sit down in their twenties and tell these great stories. But I wouldn’t have had the confidence to be able to tell them on paper and be brave enough to share them and get the feedback. I feel like I needed to gather confidence over the years, and then just gather a wealth of stories because life happens to you, and to other people, and you can write them down and turn them into drama.

And I struggle with that, from time to time, as a writer – when someone tells you something personal and you go, “Jesus, that’s a good line.”  But if you’re a writer that’s what you do. I don’t make this stuff up. It’s hand delivered right to you – and you sit there and you take things in and you remember details.

Arielle Rombough, Kira Bradley, Cheryl Hutton, and Anna Cummer in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club by Playwright Meredith Taylor Parry. Photo Benjamin Laird.
Arielle Rombough, Kira Bradley, Cheryl Hutton, and Anna Cummer in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.

JAMES

What is Book Club about?

MEREDITH

It’s about a bunch of mommies who are meeting for Book Club and I wanted to examine different kinds of mommies that I’ve met or mommy types. You know there’s the type of mommy, like me, that would give her kid a hot dog, and then there’s the type of mommy that would see that as child abuse. But we’re all mommies, right.

And then there’s that competitive nature we seem to have as human beings. That seems to happen with mommies. If you show up with bought cookies, from Safeway on bake sale day, you feel less than the person who shows up with homemade cookies that she must have spent all night slaving over.

And I also wanted to explore a darker idea. The phenomenon of wine being a civilized version of Valium in our generation. You know people get together for play dates and they have wine. They meet for book club and they have wine. The pattern is clear, women are drinking more. And not just in my circles.

I think it’s a phenomenon in stay at home moms. It’s a way to get through the witching hour. It’s a way to relieve the anxiety and the pressure of information overload that moms now have because we’re trying to make the right choices. But there are so many choices laid out for us, with so many different arguments for which one is the right one, that we’re walking around with this mind boggling anxiety all the time that we’re making the wrong ones.

Kathryn Kerbes, Cheryl Hutton, and Anna Cummer in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.
Kathryn Kerbes, Cheryl Hutton, and Anna Cummer in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.

JAMES

Tell me about workshopping the play at Lunchbox.

MEREDITH

Once I did the workshop process it became pretty clear right away – any wine drinking that happened had to be pretty tame because we wanted it to be a comedy and we didn’t want to explore the idea of addiction in stay at home mother’s at this time.

JAMES

You touch on it very lightly.

MEREDITH

Very lightly.

JAMES

There’s a resolution at the end of maybe we should stop drinking wine and actually read some books. So it is dealt with. But it’s a very funny play. And I think it’s all about trying to figure out life – it’s about hopes and dreams and figuring out how you can do the role you’ve been put into and whether or not that role fits you. And even though it’s about motherhood I think it’s about anybody because male or female we can relate to that because that’s a universal thing. How many dads are dads going – “Did I want to be a dad? I did want to be a dad. But now that I’m a dad –

MEREDITH

– boy does this ever suck –

JAMES

– this isn’t exactly where I want to be –

MEREDITH

– I wouldn’t trade them for anything but wow this sure sucks in some ways.”

JAMES

I love that you explore that because that’s not an unusual feeling. To think what life could be without the children but we’re made to feel guilty about that.

MEREDITH

Or to want other things, right? Because being a parent is supposed to be our most important role. Yeah, I want to be a great mom but I also want to be a great writer too. But, no, no, no, I have to want to be a great mom more – right? That’s more important.

Thanks for all the positive feedback by the way. I was shocked that everybody found it so funny and liked it so much because it was such a pleasure to write and it was easy to put down on paper. It just fell out of me.

When I did the workshop I’d get up early in the morning and I’d write a new scene and I’d go in and I’d be sick to my stomach when they sat down to read it because I’d just wrote it that day. And then when I got good feedback I just remember being continuously shocked – “Really? You really like it? Does that work?” And then when Mark Bellamy from Lunchbox read it and said, “I really like your play.” Once again I’m still kind of astonished that the feedback has been so good.

Kira Bradley, and Arielle Rombough in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club by Playwright Meredith Taylor Parry. Photo Benjamin Laird.
Kira Bradley, and Arielle Rombough in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.

JAMES

Are you astonished in one sense because it was such an easy journey to reach a professional stage?

MEREDITH

Yes, absolutely – to reach a point where it’s going to be produced by a professional theatre. Yeah. That’s astonishing to me. So what does that tell you? I guess you should write what you know.

JAMES

How much do you credit the workshop? Because it was a wonderful ensemble – right – it just seemed to really work well.

MEREDITH

Yes, I had a bunch of superstars – fantastic actors – almost all of them young moms and then I had Shari Wattling and she’s a great director and a great dramaturge.

I also wanted to write a play with just female roles because the year before I put a play in and Glenda Stirling was at Lunchbox then and she said, “Wow four women up on stage – I love it! It didn’t make the cut this year but I really loved your play and I’d love to see all women up on stage.” And I said, “Yeah.  I want to write good roles for women because I’m a woman and I’m an actor and I know how hard it is to find good roles.” So that was important.

But that process with Shari and the other actors was just gold because they gave me lots of things to think about. Lots of ideas. We discussed and talked about it at the table, and then I went home and thought about things they had said. When someone as talented as Myla Southward or Cheryl Hutton says, “I don’t know about that part – that’s a real harsh line or that falls flat with me…” and that’s the last thing you hear as you head out the door you think about that until bedtime. I trusted their opinions. These are talented artists. I was lucky to get that group.

That’s the dumb luck part. The dumb ass luck part that Vern Theissen talked about when he was talking about a career as a playwright in his workshop that we went to.

JAMES

So, so far, you’ve had a lot of dumb ass luck.

MEREDITH

I’ve had a lot of dumb ass luck man. I don’t know what’s going on? But I also think I got a lot of bad writing out of my system early on which feels good. When I look back on the classes I took with Clem Martini when I was taking my BFA at the U of C fifteen years ago I purged a lot of crappy writing off the top…kind of like the head on a beer, you know. I look back on some of that stuff and it just makes me laugh at how bad and self-involved it is – and how it’s not dramatic and I don’t care about structure. Or when I was trying to be funny – oh man, that’s painful.  So, I feel like I purged a bit of that. And then to come back at it years later I was in a different place.

Cheryl Hutton and Kira Bradley in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.
Cheryl Hutton and Kira Bradley in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.

JAMES

You told me Clem encouraged you to write so he must have recognized something.

MEREDITH

Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I mean I never did exceptionally well in his classes or anything but he’s a good teacher and a lot of the stuff he told me stayed with me. He told us about writing dialogue, about structure, and about the hero’s journey – and that stayed with me over the years and I’d think about it, you know, when I’d read a book, or watch a movie, and maybe that was because I was supposed to become a writer in the end.

JAMES

Are you able to picture what you want the future to be for you as a writer?

MEREDITH

I want to be writing of course. I would like to spend more time collaborating with other artists like we did that week when we did the workshop at Lunchbox. That’s when I’m at my best. Not when I’m on my own but when there’s a group of people around and we’re on the same creative page. You know not just writing in my own little office but being able to collaborate with other artists in order to make something you’ve created even better.

Anna Cummer, Cheryl Hutton, Kira Bradley, Arielle Rombough, and Kathryn Kerbes in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.
Anna Cummer, Cheryl Hutton, Kira Bradley, Arielle Rombough, and Kathryn Kerbes in The Lunchbox Theatre Production of Book Club. Photo Benjamin Laird.

***

Book Club by Meredith Taylor-Parry

Directed by Shari Wattling

What happens at book club, stays at book club.

Jenny is the perfect wife and mother. At least that’s what her book club thinks until one day she disappears and they have to turn detective and follow her trail! This mad cap, adventure-filled romp, shines a light on the pressures of motherhood and the value of true friendship.

World Premiere at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary from February 8th to 27th, 2016 with the following cast and crew.

Cast

  • Lisa – Cheryl Hutton
  • Ellen – Anna Cummer
  • Mary – Kathryn Kerbes
  • Kathy – Kira Bradley
  • Jenny – Arielle Rombough

Creative Team

  • Playwright – Meredith Taylor-Parry
  • Director – Shari Wattling
  • RBC Emerging Director – Jenna Rogers
  • Stage Manager – Ailsa Birnie
  • Apprentice Stage Manager – Melanie Crawford
  • Scenic & Lighting Design – Anton de Groot
  • Costume Design – Dietra Kalyn
  • Sound Design – Allison Lynch

***

Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry

Meredith Taylor-Parry is a playwright based in Calgary, Alberta. Her play Survival Skills won the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2013 and was produced Off Off Broadway by the 13th Street Repertory Company, NYC in April 2014. Her play Devices received a production in Week One of the New Ideas Festival at Alumnae Theatre in Toronto in March of 2015. Her most recent work, Book Club, was developed as part of the Suncor Energy Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary in 2014 and will receive a world premiere at Lunchbox in February 2016. Meredith is Co-Artistic Director of Bigs and Littles Theatre Society and also enjoys writing and performing for young audiences.

You can contact Meredith at LinkedIn by clicking the link above or by email at: mtaylorparry@gmail.com

***

Book Club was part of the Suncor Energy Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Lunchbox Theatre in June of 2014 where it received a workshop and reading.

Cast

  • Lisa – Brieanna Blizzard
  • Ellen – Myla Southward
  • Mary – Kathi Kerbes
  • Kathy – Cheryl Hutton
  • Jenny – Arielle Rombough

Creative Team

  • Playwright – Meredith Taylor-Parry
  • Director/Dramaturge – Shari Wattling
  • Assistant Dramaturg – Jacqueline Russel

Setting

The action takes place over a few hours in Lisa’s home, at a male strip club, outside a tattoo parlour, in a rough part of town, and outside an airport.

Synopsis

When Jenny is a no-show on Book Club night the mommies start to worry. When she sends them a text to tell them she has booked a flight to Italy, they really get frantic. The group heads out on the town to track down their friend and hopefully talk some sense into her. This is a play about motherhood, from the stress of competitive parenting to the beauty of a good girlfriend who will help you get through it.

Lunchbox Theatre

Bartley and Margaret Bard and Betty Gibb founded Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary in 1975. Lunchbox delivers a fun and unique experience to its audience – upbeat performances in an intimate and comfortable atmosphere. Patrons are encouraged to eat their lunch while they enjoy the show. Lunchbox Theatre focuses on the development and production of original one-act plays; many of which are written by local Calgarians.

Interview Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry – Part One: Survival Skills

Posted on by James Hutchison

Survival Skills by Meredith Taylor-Parry won the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2013 and was produced Off Off Broadway by the 13 Street Repertory Company, in New York City in April 2014.

“You want to write the kind of play where people are going to go home and talk about it, and think about it, and talk about themselves a little bit. You know, my God, if it got people to think about their own mortality a little bit, how could that be a bad thing? We all run around scared to talk about it, but we’re fascinated by it at the same time. The idea that we’re mortal. Just to have that discussion opened up wouldn’t hurt.”

Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry Survival Skills
Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry – Photograph by James Hutchison

Her most recent work, Book Club was developed as part of the Suncor Stage One Festival at Lunchbox Theatre and will receive a world premiere at Lunchbox in February.

I sat down with Meredith, while her four-month-old Beagle Tucker, lay happily nearby chewing puppy toys, to talk with her about Survival Skills and Book Club, as well as her writing process.

***

JAMES HUTCHISON

When you go to a play what is it you go for? What is it you hope to get out of it?

MEREDITH TAYLOR-PARRY

I guess I want to be moved emotionally, always. I like Opera. I always write while I listen to Opera. I want to be moved. I like the tragic. I like stories where you watch people getting put through the wringer. Watching characters go through hell and then some. And I like stories and plays with some expression of hope at the end. That’s very important. It doesn’t need to be wrapped up perfectly, but just something.

JAMES

Tell me about the reason you wrote Survival Skills.

MEREDITH

Well, my Dad committed suicide in two thousand and two after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I always knew that I wanted to write about it. I never thought about writing a novel – I always thought it would be a play.

JAMES

How difficult was it to put that out into the world? Because that’s a very personal thing.

MEREDITH

It was difficult, but when an experience like that happens to you – or at least my experience is – you’re compelled to tell that story over and over and over again.

And I’ve heard some people say, yeah but some people never want to talk about it again – but that wasn’t me. I was compelled to tell that story to friends – to grief groups –I’m just compelled to share it. I don’t know how many times my mom and I would get on the phone after it happened and we’d end up retelling that day – the actual event – when we found the suicide note – when we called the police – when my brother went out to look at the body that afternoon.

And I originally thought the play was going to open with that scene, but then I went to a Playworks Ink Conference in 2011 and I signed up early and got into Daniel MacIvor’s workshop. And he started the workshop by reading the scene you’d submitted. And he’s a pretty fantastic actor and he did all the different parts. I had my sister there, my brother there, my mother in the scene, and the character that represented me. We were all there and he just read through that first scene from beginning to end and when he finished – it was silent and he said, “That’s a hell of a way to start a play. People discovering a suicide note.”

And I went, “Yeah, yeah I guess it is.  I wasn’t really thinking about that.”

He said, “We’re going to end the scene right here where your brother hangs up the phone and I want you to write the next scene.”

And I wrote the next scene and that became the first scene of the play because I took his advice – that is a hell of a way to start a play. But I think I needed to write the suicide scene first because that was the hardest scene to write – bar none – and to go back and remember those moments in specific detail.

JAMES

How much do you credit that workshop with moving forward on the play?

MEREDITH

Huge. He looked at me and said, because I had some humour in there, “Meredith, any play that can bring levity to the topic of death needs to be written.” He said, “I myself am terrified of the medical system. I’m not afraid of dying – I’m terrified about becoming a patient of the medical system.”

And here’s this man who has written all these beautiful plays with all this fabulous experience and wisdom but at the same time he’s a really good teacher too. He really has the right touch. And I think he just knew the right thing to say to help keep me going. He also made us promise, before we left the workshop, to send him the first draft by a certain date. And I did, because it’s Daniel MacIvor, right. I wasn’t not going to do it. I was two weeks late, but it made me finish it.

JAMES

You worked on the play for a couple more years and then entered it into the New Plays of Merit Contest in 2013 and won. What was it like getting the phone call that the play had won?

MEREDITH

That’s what my dream was up to that point. That someone was going to phone me up and tell me that I was good enough to win a contest. And I felt really good about it because it was New York. Because to me that was the place where all the good playwrights go. So, that was a real shot in the arm – no question. I felt pretty good about that – but I was stunned.

JAMES

What was it like to go see your play on stage?

MEREDITH

I vowed that I wasn’t going to be critical of my work because I don’t know if this is ever going to happen to me again. The idea of going to New York to see your play – Off Off Broadway in a little old theatre with a little old 92 year old Broadway performer running it. I mean this theatre had a lot of history. Tennessee Williams’ plays were performed there. And I thought, don’t ruin it by sitting there thinking about all the things that are wrong with your play. It wasn’t perfect, and I still think there are things that can be improved about the play, but I just vowed I was going to go and enjoy it.

JAMES

It’s interesting to me because there’s a certain completion to the journey. From the experience of your father having committed suicide, to writing the script, to winning the contest, to getting it produced. How you would sum up the whole experience as you were watching the production with your family?

MEREDITH

Well the first word that popped into my mind was surreal, and the second thing was how much I enjoyed the performances, and how much the actors brought to it. I just vowed I was going to go and enjoy it and I wasn’t going to worry about my family as far as taking care of them or worry about their reactions to it either. But you know, I also worked through a lot of stuff with that play.

When dad was suspecting a bad diagnosis – this was three days before he completed suicide – I phoned his room at the Moncton Hospital from Calgary. And he said, “Oh they’re going to do some tests and things.” Because at first they thought it might be a bowel infection and a reaction to antibiotics. But there was a moment where he hesitated on the phone and in my mind I wondered what was he was going to say next. To me there was something that he meant to say and tell me. Like he opened his mouth to say it and it didn’t come out and I wondered if it was, “Listen if it’s a bad diagnoses this is what I’m going to do.” But he didn’t say anything, and I heard this kind of breath, or hesitation, and I wondered, and wondered, and wondered about that afterwards.

And then I thought, well what would you have done if he had said, you know, this is not going to go well…would I have suspected…because we knew his philosophical stance on end of life.  He always said, “If I ever got a bad diagnosis that would be it.” But it’s a leap in your mind to hear those words and really imagine your father actually doing that.

So I thought, in my state of mind, what would I have done? I probably would have called mom and told her not to leave him for a minute. And then there’s a part of you that would have said, “Okay – whatever you need – I’ll do it – I’ll help you.”

And I did end up inadvertently helping him complete the act by flying to the Maritimes, because when my mother came to pick me up at the airport that’s when he completed. So I felt complicit in that, and that bothered me for a long time, even though it was inadvertent. It was a window of opportunity, and he took it, and I provided that. So, in a way I helped whether I wanted to or not.

I changed the play so that the character who plays me actually does make the decision to fly home to get her mother out of the house so that her father will have the window of opportunity very knowingly not inadvertently.

JAMES

Dramatically that’s a good choice.

MEREDITH

Dramatically it was a hell of a lot better choice than what really happened.

JAMES

Because then the character is active.

MEREDITH

Yes.

JAMES

What do you think your dad would think of this play?

MEREDITH

Wow. I just think he’d be horrified, because he was such a private person. I had to struggle past that a little bit because he’d be so horrified that I laid it all out. But you know what? Whatever form – and I do believe there is some kind of spiritual form that he takes now – I don’t think he has those same opinions any more.

And after he was gone, I pretty quickly said this is more about me than it is about him. This is more about us. And that’s how I was able to write it. I was lucky, because my family wasn’t upset. But dad would have been. I think for sure. But I wouldn’t have had to write it – you know what I mean – unless it had happened.

JAMES

Was it cathartic for your family in some ways?

MEREDITH

Maybe in some ways. I sat right beside my mom and my aunt and I could feel the seat shaking because they cried and cried and they laughed too, but there was a lot of tears you know. I know that my aunt and mom told me they sat up all night in the hotel room talking about it. My brother said, “Man it’s weird to see your life up on stage like that.” But it was probably not as cathartic for them as it was for me

JAMES

What are your hopes for the story?

MEREDITH

I would love to see it produced again, of course. Published and produced. Those are the things that I’m looking for with all my plays. I don’t really want them to just sit stagnant. You want to write the kind of play where people are going to go home and talk about it, and think about it, and talk about themselves a little bit. You know, my God, if it got people to think about their own mortality a little bit, how could that be a bad thing? We all run around scared to talk about it, but we’re fascinated by it at the same time. The idea that we’re mortal. Just to have that discussion opened up wouldn’t hurt.

***

Next week, in Part Two, I talk with Meredith about her play Book Club, and its upcoming production at Lunchbox Theatre.

***

Meredith Taylor-Parry Survival Skills - Survival Skills Poster

Survival Skills by Meredith Taylor-Parry

A father takes his life.  The family gathers to mourn.  Only one saw the body.  Only one knows what really happened.

Winner: 2013 New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest

Premiered at 13th Street Repertory – NYC April 3 – May 1, 2014, with the following cast and crew.

  • Directed by Leanora Lange

Cast

  • Kathleen – Aimee Thrasher
  • Annalise – Kristen Busalacchi
  • Eliza – Mary Ruth Baggott
  • Oscar – Jason Kirk
  • Len – Danny Sauls

Crew

  • Stage Manager – Alex Bishop
  • Properties Assistant – Aimee Thrasher
  • Dramatrug – Kurt Hollender
  • Producer – Sandra Nordgren

***

Playwright Meredith Taylor-Parry

Meredith Taylor-Parry is a playwright based in Calgary, Alberta. Her play Survival Skills won the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2013 and was produced Off Off Broadway by the 13th Street Repertory Company, NYC in April 2014. Her play Devices received a production in Week One of the New Ideas Festival at Alumnae Theatre in Toronto in March of 2015. Her most recent work, Book Club, was developed as part of the Suncor Energy Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary in 2014 and will receive a world premiere at Lunchbox in February 2016. Meredith is Co-Artistic Director of Bigs and Littles Theatre Society and also enjoys writing and performing for young audiences.

You can contact Meredith at LinkedIn by clicking the link above or by email at: mtaylorparry@gmail.com

***

Survival Skills by Meredith Tyalor-Parry – Synopsis

“He saw a window of opportunity.”

A man diagnosed with terminal cancer commits suicide, leaving his family behind to struggle with the aftermath. Our journey begins 20 years later as Annalise and her sister sit at their dying mother’s bedside. The daughters are compelled to relive with the audience the horrible days following their father’s death when those closest to him came together to mourn and try to understand his choice. The play moves between past and present.

Their father’s decision is a controversial one. It was terribly painful for his wife and children to experience such a sudden, violent loss. But as we watch the sisters sit with their mother we begin to understand the motives behind his action. Is the choice to let death come in its prolonged and often agonizing way any less traumatic for those involved? Should we have the right to choose?

As in any time of family crises, personalities clash and sibling rivalries are revisited. Annalise’s frustration grows as her father is both accused of being a coward and applauded as hero. Finally she reveals an awful secret; her father needed her help. It is only by sifting through the memories that haunt her, that she will find forgiveness.

New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest

New Works of Merit is an international playwriting contest developed in 2003 to bring works of social significance to the general public.

13th Street Repertory Company

The 13th Street Repertory Company, founded in 1972 by Artistic Director Edith O’Hara, provides a place for actors, directors, playwrights, and technicians to develop their craft in a caring, nurturing, professional environment.

Link to Interview with Juliet Liraz
Link to The Hemingway Solution Parts Unknown, and Anthony Bourdain

Creative Process – Playwrights – Actors – Directors

Posted on by James Hutchison

Welcome to my corner of the world where you can download my plays and read them for free. You can also read my interviews with other playwrights, actors, and directors about their work and creative process.

Way way back in the early days of community cable television myself and a group of friends used to produce a show called Profile. We did exactly what I do in this blog – talk with creative people about their work and process.

My very first guest on Profile was a guy named David Cassel. A quick Google search shows he’s been a busy guy over the last forty-plus years. He was a mime artist. Is a mime artist – as well as a designer, writer, producer, and director.

Other guests included Playwright Sharon Pollock, Theatre Director Louis B. Hobson, and Vicki Adams Willis from Decidedly Jazz Dance Works.

When I got back into theatre and started writing plays, I also wanted to include the occasional interview on my website with other creative people.

Link to interview with Christopher Hunt about his work and creative process.
Link to interview with Ahad Raza Mir about his work and creative process.
Link to interview with Meredith Taylor-Parry about her work and creative process.

Check out some of my more recent interviews over the past few years with such wonderful and talented individuals as film and television director David Winning, playwright Caroline Russell-King, theatre photographer Tim Nguyen, Artistic Director of Lunchbox Theatre Bronwyn Steinberg, and playwright Kristen Da Silva.

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If you enjoy listening to great interviews with creative people then check out Q with Tom Power and this terrific interview with John Irving. Or this interview from the Dramatists Guild Foundation between playwrights Christopher Durang and David Lindsay-Abaire. Or this raw and uncensored interview from the Writers Guild Foundation with author and screenwriter William Goldman.