It’s festival time
2018 Elizabeth Boardmore One Act Play Festival a spring highlight
As someone once sang, “It’s Festival time, It’s Festival time, It’s Fesstttivvval Tiiiimmmee!”
The 2018 Elizabeth Boardmore One Act Play Festival runs Thursday, March 22 to Saturday, March 24 at 7 p.m. nightly at the Boardmore Theatre on the Cape Breton University campus with five original scripts and one award-winning previously published work.
Some of our island’s best playwrights, actors and directors had their start, often as high school students or younger, during this festival’s five decades of existence. National and international theatre artists like Bryden MacDonald, Ron Jenkins and Daniel MacIvor, all premiered early works at the Boardmore.
This year offers an intriguing mix of returning writers and directors and as well as first-timers.
Thursday’s opening night will feature “I Know I Love Him,” a work of speculative fiction on the nature of love in a world that has no time for that emotion. The play was written and directed by Jonathan Lewis, most recently seen on a Sydney stage in the Highland Arts Theatre production of “Next To Normal.”
The same evening sees a return of a work presented almost 20 years ago on the Boardmore stage: “Scab Avenue,” written, directed and performed by Todd Hiscock.
Using interviews with residents of a Whitney Pier neighbourhood, this intense one-person show dramatizes a family’s struggle to cope with the polluted, toxic effects of a father’s chemical imbalance.
Friday, March 23, offers two original works.
“The Time of the Lone Wolf,” by first-time playwright Ronald Labelle (a CBU instructor and the current Cape Breton Regional Library storyteller-in-residence), looks at the encounter of a man and a woman and who is more ready to move on from past romantic bruises to attempt an new start.
The evening’s second play, “Tell Me Where It Hurts,” is written and directed by Brittany Fagan-Steele, a young writer with a lot of experience on stage not only as a writer/ director but as an accomplished actor.
Her latest work sees a bookish young man forced to confront the real world and a group of high school misfits so
unlike any characters he has met in his comforting world of fictional adventures.
The final day of the festival, Saturday, March 24, offers a new play by the award-winning playwright Paul MacDougall, who also penned “The Venetian Gardens” and “Rockabye Baby.”
The festival brochure describes the play, directed by Mike McPhee, this way: “An aging cabbie tries to protect a young runaway, who seeks haven in a downtown pizza shop; but on the longest night of the year, trouble just keeps on piling up.”
The final play of the festival, “Ferris Wheel,” is from another award-winning author, Mary Miller. Miller, who lives on an island off the state of Georgia, has been called one of America’s “finest playwrights”
winning over a dozen national playwriting awards including the John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award for “In the Kitchen” and the Dayton FutureFest for “I Witness & Waiting for Oprah.”
This production, directed by Jule Ann Hardy (who had great success at last year’s festival with “Lost”), sees two people on a ferris wheel dealing with a fear of heights and a fear of giving up smoking and a fear of being with another person.
On each night of the festival, following the two performances, Gary Walsh — who celebrated his 50-year involvement with the Boardmore Theatre by directing January’s “Marat/Sade” — will give a public adjudication of the evening’s productions. On Saturday night, he will also present the awards for outstanding achievement during the festival. This will be followed by a reception.
If you want a sneak peak of the various productions, the Governor’s Book Pub on Tuesday presents its annual selection of play excerpts from the one-act festival. Usually, this special book pub comes after the festival, but this year it acts as a preview. This book pub is often marked by shameless overacting, sometimes by actors.
As usual with the book pub, it comes with admission by donation which gets you a chance at a fabulous door prize drawn from the jar of consequence. The book pub evening will also feature the open stage where aspiring writers in the audience with a short excerpt from an unpublished work can read it to an appreciative audience.
Who knows, it could be a short bit of a play destined to be in next year’s one-act festival?