The New Waves play festival is designed to help emerging playwrights develop new work.
“Doing new plays is a major part of our mandate,” said Frank Moher, artistic director of Western Edge Theatre, which is hosting the festival. “Grown-up theatre companies do new plays.”
During the next two weeks, the festival features staged readings of never-before heard plays, a full production of a new play by Mark Stubbings, and a question-and-answer session with Stubbings and Moher.
Presenting new work is the riskiest of theatre ventures – no one knows how the audience will react – and the most exciting, said Moher.
“This is the stuff that makes me most excited,” he said.
The feature production of the festival is a full staging of Mark Stubbing’s play Dry the Rain, about love and marriage.
Set in an economy retirement home, Dry the Rain features a particularly lively married couple, seen-it-all Agnes and foul-mouthed Clayton, who aren’t yet ready to spend the rest of their days playing bingo.
Their young and very earnest caregiver, David, does his best to wrangle them, but it soon becomes apparent that he needs their help more than they need his.
As the oldsters help David sort through his mixed-up marriage, and he becomes Agnes’s emotional bulwark when Clayton suddenly disappears, Dry the Rain is an illuminating look at the power of love and companionship, both within a long-lived marriage and across generations.
Moher said he first read the play as a judge in a Writers’ Guild of Alberta competition. This will be only the play’s second staging outside of Edmonton.
“It made me howl out loud when I read it,” Moher said.
The play is witty and wry, yet “right on the money” when it comes to long-term marriage.
“It provides a vehicle for two very strong leads,” Moher said.
As a playwright himself – he was nominated for a Governor-General’s Award – Moher knows the value of a staged reading to let the writer know what’s working and what’s not.
He said he has rewritten plays up to six times after first production.
“Either I got it right, or I made it worse,” he said.
Many of the playwrights benefitting from the New Waves festival are Nanaimo playwrights and students.
“A lot of them come out of my classes at Vancouver Island University,” said Moher, who teaches creative writing and journalism. “This is a necessary extension of what I do in my script writing class.”
The festival opens Friday (March 23) with Dry the Rain at Nanaimo Centre Stage. For a full schedule, please visit www.westernedge.org.
New Waves on two-week run
Dry the Rain – full production of Mark Stubbings’s play at Nanaimo Centre Stage, 25 Victoria Rd., March 23-24, 29-31 at 7:30 p.m.; April 1 at 2 p.m.
ScripTease – cabaret of new writing from Western Edge Theatre’s 2012 scriptwriting workshop, performed by actors, at Headliners, 165 Fraser St., March 25, 7:30 p.m.
The Night We Missed the Apocalypse – staged reading of comedy by James Cochrane and Nathaniel Moher at Headliners March 26, 7:30 p.m. Two roommates kill God in an automobile accident and bring His body back to their basement suite.
Making Tracks – staged reading of Mary Fraughton’s play, VIU Blg. 356, Rm. 111, 7:30 p.m. In mid-winter, a young couple travel to her childhood home deep in the Yukon woods, where an accident occurs, and the young woman’s past gradually becomes her present.
Gladys and Lionel: A Mother and Son Murder and Juvenis Amant – staged readings of comedies by Michael Calvert and Jess Reale, respectively, at Headliners March 28, 7:30 p.m.
Brunch with a Side Order of Playwrights – reading of Frank Moher’s Dwarf Deer, a comedy set in a small, West Coast university, and new work by Mark Stubbings at Diners Rendezvous April 1 at noon.
Admission to staged readings is by donation. For ticket information, please visit www.westernedge.org or call 250-668-0991.
