LOCAL TALENT COMES OF AGE AT TREMORS
This year’s festival focuses on emerging playwrights
Before moving on to his new role as assistant artistic director at Arts Club, Stephen Drover will wrap up his tenure at Rumble Theatre with one last Tremors, a festival that he helped reinvent.
“When I came on, the festival was very different,” he said. “It was a presenting festival in which Rumble would present the work of smaller companies. It was more like the PuSh Festival.”
Drover, who received two 2018 Jessie awards for outstanding direction (in both large and small theatre categories, for the Arts Club’s Hand to God and Rumble’s The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, respectively), joined Rumble as artistic director in 2012.
One of his first moves was to put Tremors on hiatus.
It re-emerged as a festival that produces work, rather than presenting it.
This year’s Tremors differs from previous editions in that the focus is on emerging playwrights.
“It’s always been established work from established playwrights,” said Drover.
This year’s Tremors also marks the first time that all three pieces are by B.C. residents.
The three plays are Christine Quintana’s Selfie, Dave Deveau’s Tiny Replicas, and Norman Yeung’s Theory.
“In many ways, all three to some degree or another are about coming of age and figuring out the next step in their lives,” said Drover. He curated and selected the scripts, selected the directors and assigned the creative teams.
If the plays share a common theme, it’s coming of age, says Drover.
“Because the playwrights are in their 20s or 30s, they’re writing about people in their 20s and 30s.”
In Yeung ’s Theory, a young professor’s decision to encourage her students to participate in an unmoderated online discussion group backfires when someone begins posting offensive comments and videos.
“The main character is just a couple of years older than her students, and everybody’s just figuring out who they are,” said Drover.
Deveau’s Tiny Replicas is about a young gay couple trying to have a baby.
“They’re just learning what it means to be adults themselves.”
Quintana’s Selfie concerns the nature of consent. The play features three characters of high school age.
“Something happens between two people who love and trust each other, and the results are devastating for everyone involved,” Quintana said.
The east Van resident says that she looked at “high-profile sexual assault cases in the United States that were so extreme and violent and unjust that it was easy to go, ‘well that’s America, that’s football culture, that wouldn’t happen in Canada, that wouldn’t happen in my school,’ or in my workplace, or whatever.
“But as we know, it does happen, it happens all the time. And a big part of that is that we don’t know what it looks like when it happens, and we’re still reticent to name it when it does.”
The play was previously produced at Young People’s Theatre in Toronto, where audiences consisted mostly of high school students. The 28-year-old Vancouver playwright is expecting a different, perhaps older, audience when Selfie comes to Tremors. (For the second time, the festival takes place at the Italian Cultural Centre. The three plays are mounted in different rooms; there is also a lounge with a bar.)
“I’m excited to have this in front of an older-ish audience,” she said. “The central questions — about the nature of consent, and the gap between how we view ourselves and the kind of person we think we are, and what our actions can do — that is timeless.
“A couple of times working on the show, people my age have said, ‘I’m actually reflecting differently on sexual encounters I’ve had. It’s opened up some questions I decided not to ask about things in the past.’ God knows adults can be no better at consent than teens.”