Ottawa contest win ‘encourages’ B.C. playwright

With the late Canadian literary lion Robertson Davies among his predecessors, Vancouver playwright Peter Zednik is in good company.

Zednik’s play Three Things took first prize earlier this year in Ottawa Little Theatre’s 75th National One-Act Playwriting Competition. Winning top honours, formally known as the Ottawa Little Theatre Award, means he not only collects a cheque for $1,000 but gets to work with a guest dramaturge, director and actors to mount a public reading of his play at OLT’s upcoming Playwright’s Weekend. It also means he steps into a winner’s circle that over the decades has included Davies, playwright and humorist Erika Ritter, former NAC English Theatre artistic director John Wood, and other luminaries.

Winning, says Zednik, “will enrich me as a writer. It certainly encourages me.”

The other winners this year are Michaela Jeffery of Montreal who won the Dorothy White Award (second prize) for Always, and Toronto’s Ron Fromstein, who took the third-place Gladys Cameron Watt Award for Henry. Fromstein’s play, Eleanor Gabor, also won the Sybil Cooke Award for a Play Written for Children or Young People, the first time in the competition’s history that one person has won two prizes in the same year. All prizes include a cash award.

Inspired in part by a real-life, slightly unhinged neighbour, Zednik’s play is about a gay couple who have applied to adopt a child, only to have their relationship complicated by an older woman who rents a suite in their home. Competition adjudicator Erica Kopyto of Nightwood Theatre in Toronto praised the play for its twists, big reveals and characters who are both complicated and charming.

Zednik, 58, who also won the competition’s Sybil Cooke Award three years ago, had worked in theatre for before becoming an accountant 12 years ago, and has been writing plays since he was 14.

For him, having a script move from page to stage is an essential part of the creative process.

“If you don’t have a play up on stage and alive, it’s just a bunch of characters locked in your computer.”

One-act scripts are easier for budding playwrights to experiment with than full-length plays, says OLT executive director Lynn McGuigan. That probably accounts in part for the number of submissions the competition gets each year: 40 to 50, most of them never before produced. This year’s 44 hopefuls came from seven provinces.

Asked if the contest also draws hopelessly bad scripts, McGuigan replies diplomatically, “There are certainly people who send entries who have probably never attended a play. But that’s OK.”

One novice effort that did succeed was Eula’s Offer. Garnering an honourable mention at the competition in the mid-1980s, it was written by Catherine Banks, who has since won two Governor General’s Awards for English-language drama.

In an email Banks says, “The Honourable Mention was a nod to my creative self that maybe I could write good plays. I honestly think it meant as much to me at that point in my early beginnings as a win would have. I remember being absolutely over the moon.”

While Banks’s show was never produced, other winning plays have been. Davies’s Eros at Breakfast, for example, travelled to the Edinburgh Drama Festival in 1949. The Wild Guys, a 1992 competition winner by Andrew Wreggitt and Rebecca Shaw, has been produced across Canada and made into a film. Other winning plays have also fared well, some of them mounted at OLT, in other community theatres across Canada and at the Eastern Ontario Drama League’s annual one-act festival.

The first national competition of its kind, OLT’s initiative was an important step in Canadian theatre, concludes McGuigan.

“It was part of the development of the concept that Canadians can write plays, too. It was an invitation to Canadian artists to try their hand at playwriting.”