Naked in public

New plays are under the spotlight in The Pipeline

THREE FOR THREE:
David Sherman, Amy Lee Lavoie, Arthur Holden

By NEIL BOYCE

Under the straight-talkin’ heading “Three new plays. Three public play readings.” The Pipeline, Infinitheatre’s free series of performed readings, returns for a weekend of informal dramaturgy. If you’ve never been part of getting a play off the ground, it’s an amazing look into one stage of the process, where words jump off the page under an actor’s interpretation.

This year’s entries are winners of a new, juried event sponsored by Infinitheatre, Write-on-Q, the first in an annual playwriting contest for Quebec writers.

Infinitheatre initiated the event this past spring with scripts coming in from all corners of the province. Read by professional actors—with the author on hand to take the heat—it is here a play begins the transformation to a possible staging. “When we have a public reading, it’s different than just around the table,” says Infinitheatre’s artistic director Guy Sprung. “The audience is invited to give feedback: what worked, what they didn’t understand. That’s the whole point—it raises the stakes.”

The jury—Emma Tibaldo (artistic director of Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal), Carolyn Guillet (an associate artist of Infinitheatre) and heavy-hitter Kent Stetson (a member of the Order of Canada)—mulled over a short list chosen from nearly 50 submissions. “We gave them seven plays and said, ‘You figure out how you’re going to solve this,’” says Sprung.

Ignoring the suggestion to single out one exceptional play, the jury picked three, giving top spot (and $1,000) to screenwriter and actor Arthur Holden for his first stage script, Father Land, a story about a local mobster that invokes the sons of Saddam Hussein.

Close runners-up were The Daily Miracle, by former Gazette writer David Sherman, on the pressures of a life spent churning out copy at a news desk; and Rabbit Rabbit by Amy Lee Lavoie, a National Theatre School student who writes the happy tale of a birthday clown paedophile and a 16-year-old prostitute.

Sprung and authors spend a day with the actors who’ll read, including Andreas Apergis, Patrick Costello, Eric Goulem and Taylor Baruchel. They trim the text, discuss character, deepen the work, then put it in front of an audience in a very simple manner—no movement, just text and the stage directions.

Stetson, whose play The Harps of God won him a Governor General Literary Award in 2001, was upbeat about the event. “You know, people have mixed feelings about pitting one artist’s work against another,” he says. “But it does everybody good—pieces emerge that have a certain grasp on the ‘gestalt’ of the time ... you get a sense of what is on people’s minds these days.”

2008 GG Winners

Among the winners at this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards, big congrats to two playwrights: Halifax’s Catherine Banks for her work Bone Cage, and Jennifer Tremblay of Sorel for La liste.

THE PIPELINE NOV. 28–30 BAIN
ST-MICHEL (5300 ST-DOMINIQUE).
SCRIPTS FOR NEXT YEAR’S SERIES
CAN BE SUBMITTED TO INFINITHEATRE
BETWEEN APRIL AND AUGUST, 2009.
WWW.INFINITHEATRE.COM