Play Reading Series kicks off Saturday

Three P.E.I. playwrights will have their plays read at the Watermark Theatre as part of the theatre’s Play Reading Series.

The three plays are “Through Eden” by Stuart Smith, “Past Artistry” by J.J. Steinfeld, and Jennifer Platts-Fanning’s play “Held to the Fire”.

Actors from the Watermark acting company, with scripts in hand, will read the plays to an audience. This allows the playwrights to further develop their work.

“Plays are meant to be heard and it’s so helpful to the development of a play for a playwright to be in a theatre amongst the audience to hear how the play is working,” says Watermark artistic director Robert Tsonos.

Smith’s play tells the story of Evey Gaudet who has arrived back on P.E.I. to see her old flame, Aden MacKenzie, after a threeyear absence. Over the course of a single, storm-filled evening, old resentments are revisited, and new secrets are revealed.

Steinfeld is a fiction writer, poet and playwright who has published 18 books. “Past Artistry” deals with the relationship between creativity, the past, family, artistic life and artistic vision. A 47-year-old artist is visited by the man, now old and wanting to confess his act before he dies, who shot him 32 years before. The shooting, when the artist was 15, led him to become an artist, and he does not want to know the truth about the unknown assailant who has never been caught.

A playwright and short story writer, Jennifer Platts-Fanning’s ultimate goals for writing “Held to the Fire” are to help people struggling with bipolar feel represented, understood and heard and to give those outside the disorder a better understanding of this life-changing illness. Her play’s main character, Phoenix, is spinning, caught in her own maelstrom. Inner demons threaten to dismantle her life. A lover, a mother, a woman saddled with a frenzied mind, she journeys from constellation mythologies to moon gardening, yurts to communing with death.