Julie McLaughlin

It’s not as difficult to answer as the birds and the bees — you’re not a stolid ’50s caricature and the answer involves a lot less mess (though more printouts) than its biological equivalent. But the sometimes-arcane process that takes a script from page to stage is a lot like a birth in that it takes a lot of careful hands and a very devoted parent to push the damn thing out. You get the point.

Canadian playwrights weren’t always encouraged to populate their own stages. There was a time when the major regional Canadian theatres produced seasons drawn exclusively from British and American canons. Stratford had Shakespeare, the Shaw Festival had the eponymous George Bernard Shaw and Calgary had Theatre Calgary, originally helmed by a British ex-pat with a strong connection to his native canon. But times change, and with directors, dramaturges and playwrights pushing hard for a strong Canadian presence on Canadian stages, they gave their babies a home.

Now, the Canadian scene in general, and Calgary’s scene in particular, are led by a strong vein of native playwrights with national profiles like Michel Tremblay or Daniel MacIvor and local luminaries like Sharon Pollock and John Murrell. What began as an attempt to distribute theatre through a network of well-funded regionals has become a varied landscape full of companies ranging in size from the smallest possible — a single person — to Alberta Theatre Projects’ 10 annual productions.

“Every theatre company does new work now,” says ATP’s artistic director Vanessa Porteous, in an earlier interview. “It’s not seen as a strange thing to do or a particularly noble thing to do; it’s seen as what you should do if you’re a theatre company.”

She should know. As ATP’s former resident dramaturg, Porteous filled a position designed to facilitate the creation of new work, primarily though the company’s annual playRites Festival. A dramaturg’s job is to ask questions and provide feedback that helps a playwright deepen his or her own understanding of a play and the process has proved so vital to the company’s success that it now employs two staff dramaturgs — Vicki Stroich and Amy Lynn Strilchuk.

But while playRites occupies an important place in the scene as a high profile showcase for new Canadian work, Calgary has a myriad of options available for those companies looking to develop new works and the playwrights desperate to develop them.

Based in Calgary, the Alberta Playwrights’ Network is one of nine Playwrights’ Development Centres of Canada, along with organizations like the Manitoba Association of Playwrights or Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal. The APN helps its member playwrights develop new work through a variety of options including its annual Alberta Playwriting Competition, workshops (private or public readings with professional actors) and dramaturgical feedback. The primary entry point for most submissions to the APN, these dramaturgical sessions begin with a review by a committee of APN staffers and playwrights whose disparate perspectives are designed to provide a balanced assessment before any feedback is given.

“It allows a process where the five of us, all talking about our responses to the play, can feel very confident that one of us sits down at the end of the day with the playwright and we’ve got a pretty thorough response to a play,” says Johanne Deleeuw, APN’s artistic director. “I think it helps me sidestep my own bias, because everyone has them.”

Another method available to members is the company’s playwriting circles, a model of collaboration also known as a playwriting unit. Here, groups of about six people are led by a facilitating playwright and meet weekly over the course of eight weeks. Combined with the experience of the other playwrights involved, it’s a regimented timeframe that puts an often-necessary squeeze on its participants.

“The circle gives them a structure because so many people work better to deadlines,” says Deleeuw of the circles, led here in Calgary by Gordon Pengilly. “Gordon’s role is as a facilitator. In some cases, depending on different playwrights having different levels of experience, he’s giving instruction, things about form and structure.”

These circles end in public readings of excerpts, giving a playwright the chance to hear the play’s words out loud. Unlike a piece of prose, a script doesn’t functionally exist without being spoken and it’s often here that a playwright hears nuances or failures that aren’t apparent on the page.

Cold Read Calgary, a small reading series based on an open call for short excerpts and actors willing to volunteer their time, offered playwrights exactly that during its first season over the summer. While organizer Patrick Creery is careful to point out that its 20-minute limit doesn’t provide the same depth as a full workshop — a period of a few days where actors and playwright can work through readings and rewrites together — the experience of hearing a section read aloud is still invaluable. In a public place like the Auburn Saloon, after all, there’s also the benefit of an audience that will, for better or worse, pass judgment on the play.

“It’s a great indication of what works and what doesn’t,” says Creery of a public reading. “There comes a point where you need to put it in front of an audience because at that point you’re going to find out if what you do is right and resonates. If not, you change it.”

“Back in my touring-kids-theatre days, you could tell right quick what didn’t work in a play doing it in front of an audience, because kids have a short attention span and they’ll let you know. I kind of wish more of that happened.”

Currently on hiatus until next summer, Cold Read existed more as an informal place for film and theatre artists to meet and hear each others’ work than as an explicit component of play development.

Throughout the city, however, there is no shortage of public readings connected to play development. Lunchbox Theatre features an annual reading series, the Petro-Canada Stage One Festival, at the end of each season, and Theatre Calgary’s Fuse features scripts created as part of its artist development program (Fuel), to name a few. But if the lapsed attention spans of an impatient audience is the strongest indication of a play’s success, one of the best places for aspiring playwrights to test their work would have to be Sage Theatre’s Ignite! Festival.

Modelled after Edmonton’s NextFest, Sage’s five-year-old festival provides a forum for emerging artists of all stripes, including playwrights, to try their hand at a full production. Unlike other platforms for independent productions, like the Calgary Region One-Act Play Festival or the Calgary Fringe Festival, Ignite! provides complete access to cast, crew and technicians, along with dramaturgical support from the APN. For Ellen Close, who took over from previous festival director Adrienne Smook, it’s this dramaturgical support and the natural development that takes place on a production that is most important.

“One thing that I did was revise the application process to put more of an emphasis on work that would benefit from the opportunities we offer,” she says. “So, if a playwright has set really clear intentions for what they want to explore with the script, that’s very exciting for us.”

For Close, herself a playwright (The Stranger Series), successfully producing a still-developing script depends as much on the dramaturge and director’s capacity to see the play before it exists onstage as it does on their own artistic vision.

“Ultimately you’re directing the play on the page but also directing the play that lives in the playwright’s mind,” she says, “and I think that’s true of good directors and dramaturgs.”

One of the playwrights whose work has been wrung through Ignite’s collaborative process is Amos Altman, a recent graduate of the University of Calgary’s masters of playwriting program. His experience has run the gamut of the city’s play development opportunities. An alumnus of Stage One (Waiting Time), Fuse and Fuel (Fortitude) and Ignite! (Night Moves), with experience also in workshopping his student plays, he estimates he’s worked on about a dozen plays since beginning to write. After early readings where he lured friends into his living room with wine and cheese, Altman says the public exposure created by a public reading may be appealing but it’s hardly the end game.

“For me it’s development because you’re not doing a reading for thousands of people or for some sort of notoriety,” he says. “It’s nice to showcase your work but it’s more about getting the play into something workable. A buyable commodity.”

“I don’t usually like to talk about my work as a commodity,” he adds, “but that’s where it has to be for an artistic director to look at it and say: ‘This is something we could use down the road as part of our season.’”

It’s that goal that drives Altman and the playwrights who depend on Calgary’s myriad avenues for play development, the hope that their work will eventually join the swell of original Canadian works that define theatre in this country. Between residencies and workshops, reading series and the robust experience of a full production, the development opportunities available to Canadian, or even exclusively Calgary playwrights, are enough to turn an article into a page-spanning list. The birthing process might still be a sticky mass of concerned parties, from directors to actors to dramaturges, but it’s an essential part of every season in Canadian theatre.