>>FEATURE
PLAYRITES FESTIVAL
Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until March 5
Epcor Centre
As Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival enters its 20th year, the founder of the event wants to remind everyone it all happened because of widgets.
"We were looking for funding for the festival," says Michael Dobbin, ATP’s former artistic producer. "Someone wrote a grant (application) comparing a play festival to a widget factory. The deputy minister of Canada Employment called me up and then I went out to Ottawa to talk to him about it."
The result of those discussions was a $250,000 Innovations grant that Dobbin says helped the festival get established 19 years ago.
"The first year there were three plays," he says. They were The Postman Only Rings Once by Sky Gilbert, Winning by David Bolt and Penumbra by the late Linda Zwicker. "The dramaturgy was rough but it gave us a kick-start."
Founded in 1972, ATP’s original mandate was to produce children’s theatre about Alberta’s history. However, the company quickly moved to adult-themed works, often by local playwrights – most notably John Murrell, who became ATP’s playwright-in residence in the mid-1970s.
It was following this period of creative output that ATP started to "drift," says Dobbin, and began producing works by popular American playwrights such as Neil Simon.
"The programming started to look like Theatre Calgary," he says. "There was a lot of talk then, like there is now, about merging the two companies."
Recruited to return to Calgary in 1983 from the Western Canada Theatre Company in Kamloops, B.C., where he was working as artistic director, native Calgarian Dobbin says he was given the assignment to put the company back on track. "I was asked to return ATP to producing Canadian theatre."
Enter the concept of the playRites Festival, a showcase for new Canadian playwriting, which Dobbin says was modelled after the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky.
"It seems like a strange partnership, but Humana, the American health-care company, funds the Louisville festival," he says. "I thought I could do something like that here."
ATP was also in the process of moving out of its original venue, the quaint little Canmore Opera House in Heritage Park, and into the 450-seat, state-of-the-art Martha Cohen Theatre in the new Calgary Centre for Performing Arts (now the Epcor Centre). The festival was an opportunity for the company to both increase its audience and its national profile.
And so, with the help of that friendly federal government bureaucrat, playRites was launched. Despite those rough early festivals, audiences steadily grew and proved that you don’t need a hit play by Neil Simon to sell tickets. "I learned that people will buy Canadian plays if the story speaks to them and the story is about them," says Dobbin.
After a lengthy run as ATP’s artistic head, Dobbin left the company in 2000. He has continued to be involved in productions as an actor and director across Canada and internationally. In 2004, he was the general manager and CEO of the Ottawa-based company Opera Lyra and, more recently, artistic consultant to Wild Rice, a Singapore-based contemporary performing company.
Despite his accomplishments outside of Calgary, Dobbin remains most proud of his role in Canadian play development through playRites and the way the festival has made new playwriting popular. "We’ve created an environment in Calgary that people want to participate in," he says.
Dobbin says that one of the key reasons playRites has continued to flourish is the work of Bob White, ATP’s current artistic director. At the time the festival was first being organized, White was working in Toronto as artistic director of Factory Theatre, a company known for producing new Canadian work. Dobbin lured him west to help oversee playRites.
"Convincing Bob to come here was important," says Dobbin. "I made him sign a two-year contract. That was almost 20 years ago."
Since taking the helm at ATP, White has continued Dobbin’s legacy by remaining doggedly committed to developing new Canadian plays, even when the festival has faced financial difficulties.
"In the early days, funding was difficult," recalls White. "I’m not sure we had much of a long-term vision. We even thought about postponing the festival in the 1990s."
Despite the obstacles, playRites has remained a fixture on Calgary’s and Canada’s theatre scene by becoming an important place for young Canadian playwrights to get their works onstage.
White attributes much of the festival’s success to the playwrights whose works it has helped launch. The first play to gain national – and international – success was Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. "(It) was a breakthrough for the festival," says White.
Written by Edmonton-born playwright Fraser, the edgy comic thriller premièred at playRites in 1989. Since that time it has received productions in New York, London and throughout the world, while a film version of the play by director Denys Arcand was released in 1993.
White says that the very nature of the festival is what allows such triumphs to occur.
"We want to deliver an intelligent first production of (a playwright’s) work," he says. "If you speak to 98 per cent of the writers, they feel incredibly supported here. It’s how Stephen Massicotte can go from working in a porn shop to writing Mary’s Wedding."
ATP can point to a list of playRites successes, from ’89’s Human Remains to 2002’s Mary’s Wedding, to the series of dark-edged comedies, written by Eugene Stickland and directed by White, that proved hugely popular with local audiences. Not about to rest on his past accomplishments, White is currently directing Le Gros Spectacle, a new comedy by Calgary’s Wind-up Dames, which will première at this year’s playRites as part of the festival’s new second-stage series, presented in the Epcor Centre’s Engineered Air Theatre.
"It’s a built-in fringe festival to the works in the Martha Cohen Theatre," says White, referring to the second stage. "It’s an opportunity to work with a new generation of playwrights." |
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