>>PREVIEW
PLAYRITES FESTIVAL
Opens January 31
Alberta Theatre Projects
Check listings for venues and dates
Every year, hot on the heels of One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo, Alberta Theatre Projects takes centre stage in Calgary’s theatre scene with the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays. As breathless as the inclusion of two festivals in as many months can leave theatergoers, the range between both festivals leaves more than enough room for surprise, both negative and positive.
"I’m most happy when people say, ‘I really loved that one’ and ‘I really hated that one,’" says ATP artistic director Bob White of programming playRites. "If they say they loved them all then I feel like we haven’t done our job, that there wasn’t enough of a mix in the work. When you get that kind of mixed response then I figure the program has worked, because every show shouldn’t work for everybody, then it becomes run of the mill and lowest common denominator and we don’t want that."
Now in its 21st year, this will be the second year of the festival’s new format, eschewing four full productions for three mainstage shows (Colleen Murphy’s The December Man, Linda Griffiths’s Age of Arousal and Ron Chambers’s Knowing Bird) and two (Why Freud Fainted by David Rhymer and Vanessa Porteus and This is Cancer! by Bruce Horak and Rebecca Northan) on the BD&P second stage – the Rabbit’s own Big Secret Theatre.
In addition to the festival’s five main shows, peripheral events like Theatreboom’s Shackter Show, the 24-Hour Playwriting Competition and the Platform Play series that allows audiences to take in readings of works still in development. With the first playRites started long before Calgary began its first unsuccessful bid for a Fringe Festival, the festival’s minor events were included as a way to provide audiences with a festival atmosphere, as well as a glimpse into the creative process. This year, for example, rehearsals for the festival’s five productions are scattered throughout the Epcor Centre and even Theatre Junction’s Grand Theatre as a result of increasingly rare rehearsal space. Anywhere, says White, with heating, bathrooms and a space on the floor to tape off.
Before White became ATP’s artistic director, he was hired by then-artistic director D. Michael Dobbin as an artistic associate tasked with producing ATP’s playRites Festival. Having already helmed Toronto’s Factory Theatre, a company mandated to create new Canadian work, White was already well qualified to run point on ATP’s own new works festival. Now, in the throes of four simultaneous rehearsals as the artistic director for one of Calgary’s largest theatre companies, he admits that there is no small measure in the comfort of a programmed mainstage season.
"There is a bit of a relief, quite frankly, when you’re working with established text, because that’s it," says White. "Very rarely are you going to be calling up Edward Albee saying, ‘Say, Mr. Albee, could you change these…’ You’re never going to do that."
Importantly, this year’s ATP’s mainstage season will mark the return of former playwright-in-residence Eugene Stickland’s Sitting on Paradise, which first premiered at the 1996 playRites festival. But while past playRites productions like Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains (1989) or Steven Masicotte’s Mary’s Wedding (2002) have gone on to enjoy robust lives of their own beyond the festival, ATP’s seasons don’t often include past playRites successes.
"What we’ve found is the timing is tricky," explains White. "It’s not that we’re averse to doing it, but if we do it too soon, after it’s been in playRites people say they’ve seen it already, so we get pushback on that. So it’s a matter of timing it.
"Ten years in the case of Eugene’s play," he adds. |
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