| The Alberta Playwriting Competition, Canada’s richest provincial playwriting contest, has handed out its prizes to a trio of Edmonton writers this year.
Daniela Vlaskalic and Beth Graham shared the $3,500 top prize in the Full-Length Category for their play The Last Train. Mark Stubbings won the $1,500 Discovery Category award for a work called Dust.
The Last Train is a historical fantasy set in a boxcar during the Second World War, in which the Nazis are transporting a collection of confiscated paintings by the likes of Picasso and Degas. In the course of the play, the female subjects of the pictures come to life and share intimate details about the great artists who loved and painted them.
Dust is a black comedy about a group of cynical hearse drivers who, in the words of playwright Stubbings, "come face-to-face with their own mortality while trying to make their jobs manageable."
The awards, in their 37th year, are funded and administered by the Alberta Playwrights’ Network. The jury for this year’s competition consisted of Calgary playwright and director Sharon Pollock, former Edmonton director Stephen Heatley and Edmonton dramatist/screenwriter James DeFelice.
According to APN executive director Ken Cameron, there were 42 submissions to the competition this year, 27 of them in the Discovery Category, which is open to playwrights whose work has not been professionally produced.
Past winners of the competition have included such well-known Alberta talents as Pollock, John Murrell, Brad Fraser and Paul Gross of TV’s Due South. |
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