Springboards 2023

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

After its return last year for the first time in more than a decade, Springboards springs back this week.

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And with this edition of Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s signature new play festival, works-in-progress by some 19 playwrights, at every stage of their evolution en route to opening night, will get staged readings and catch their first public oxygen. It all happens at the well-named Gateway, Workshop West’s new home for five nights starting Wednesday. 

For playwrights, Springboards is a crucial way to test their work in front of a live audience. For audiences, as Workshop West’s artistic producer Heather Inglis has pointed out, Springboards is a kind of backstage pass into the world of play creation and development. And that celebration of the process is at the heart of the 45-year-old theatre company, devoted to expanding the new Canadian theatre repertoire, honing and showcasing it, supporting its creators.   

“In Springboard’s first year back in 2022, we concentrated on local playwrights,” says Inglis, a theatre maker herself whose first professional theatre gig, in the ‘90s, was directing at the festival (“I was terrified”). “This year we’ve broadened it to include provincial and national writers….Which takes it back to the first years of the company.” It’s a way, she thinks, of “providing exciting opportunities to local playwrights and connecting to the theatre community across the country.” Theatre Yes, the strikingly well-connected little indie theatre she founded and finally left to take up the Workshop West job, is a model in spreading the word nationally (witness the cross-country roster of writers who contributed to Anxiety and The Elevator Project). 

Submissions from Workshop West’s multiple playwriting programs find their way into Springboards — the Script Reading Service that Darrin Hagen oversees, the Edmonton Playwrights Circle run by Beth Graham, the Creative Incubator (for BIPOC artists), the Playwrights Exchange for senior playwrights, Graham, Hagen, Collin Doyle, Cat Walsh, and Mieko Ouchi among them. 

Three playwrights, one from Edmonton and two from Calgary, are featured in the full-evening readings at Springboards. And all three plays, a trio of high-contrast offerings, are “ready and produceable,” says Inglis. 

playwright Conni Massing

From Edmonton’s Conni Massing comes Dead Letter, the fifth of her plays to be developed at Workshop West, where four have premiered. Inglis calls it “a comedic mystery,” small in scale. The protagonist,  “hungry for omens,” discovers mysterious connections between mundane occurrences that the less insightful would write off as happenstance. It’s very funny, and “there’s lots of food,” says Inglis. Massing’s long-time collaborator Tracy Carroll directs Friday’s staged reading. 

playwright James Odin Wade

Everyone Is Doing Fine, by the young Calgary up-and-comer James Odin Wade, came to Springboards from Workshop West’s script-reading service. Inglis describes the comedy-drama as “really exciting, fast-paced, contemporary, edgy, sexy,” an “urban exploration” set at the intersection of art and capitalism. It follows the fortunes of two art school friends who get a job with a hedge-fund manager. Thursday’s reading is directed by Margaret Muriel, a recent arrival in Edmonton from Halifax.  

playwright Stephen Massicotte

Stars on Her Shoulders is the latest by the notable Canadian playwright Stephen Massicotte, the author of the hit Mary’s Wedding and an expert in World War I history. An exploration of heroism, it happens after the 1918 bombing of No. 3 Canadian Stationary Hospital, where a group of nurses are patients. Inglis directs a cast of five women in the Saturday reading. 

The festival opens Wednesday, in partnership with Alberta Playwrights’ Network, with an edition of EDMONten. Five finalists of APN’s 10-minute playwriting competition are featured. Bridgette Boyko,  Victoria Kibblewhite, AJ Hrooshkin, Linda Wood-Edwards, and Calla Wright undertook the crazily difficult task of penning a play with a 10-minute duration between curtain up and curtain down. Andrew Ritchie directs. 

The grand finale Sunday night, in celebration of World Theatre Day, is the Springboards Cabaret, in association with Script Salon, curated by Darrin Hagen and directed by Davina Stewart. It’s a showcase of excerpts from new plays-in-progress by 11 Albertan playwrights, from relative newcomers to established voices. The playwrights include Trevor Duplessis, Naomi Duska, Gavin Dyer, Linda Grass, Jacquelin Lamb, Danielle LaRose, Nicole Moeller, Shawn Marshall, Sabrina Samuel, Celia Taylor, Cat Walsh.

And a bonus: after Saturday night’s reading of Stars On Her Shoulders we’ll find out the winners of a Workshop West brevity challenge even more extreme than the 10-minute plays of EDMONten. Final Draft has solicited 54-word plays destined to be printed on Analog Breweries beer cans. That’s 54 words including the title and the name of the author. 

In the interests of accessibility, all Springboard tickets are pay-what-you-can at the door. 

Workshop West is throwing an inaugural Swing Into Spring fund-raising bash April 1. The entertainment is headlined by Girl Brain, the hit Edmonton sketch comedy trio fresh from their recent engagement at Toronto Sketchfest. And DJ Funkasaurus (aka actor/ director/ playwright Chris Bullough) will be in charge of the music. The proceeds are destined for a new and flexible $60,000 riser system (the current risers are on loan from the City of St. Albert). Tickets: workshopwest.org.