Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, 2024-2025 season “Saints and Rebels.” Poster image supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre turns 46 with a new season, two Canadian premieres, a Christmas show, and a bold invitation to the audience to “pay what you will” for every ticket to every show.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

“A pilot project,” says artistic producer Heather Inglis of the gutsy ‘pay what you will’ initiative. Workshop West is the only the second professional theatre in the country, besides the Belfry in Victoria, to sign up for the experiment. Says Inglis, it’s all about “maintaining broad access to absolutely everybody!”

“Given the climate of risk in which Workshop West lives,” as she puts it, the hope is to expand the audience, especially the younger crowd, and to encourage donation revenue.

The new season, dubbed “Saints and Rebels” and announced Monday at the Gateway Theatre, is bookended by two new Canadian plays, one from a veteran star playwright and the other from an exciting up-and-comer, Albertans both.

playwright Stephen Massicotte, Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

In Stars on Her Shoulders Stephen Massicotte returns to the First World War setting of his 2002 memory dreamscape hit Mary’s Wedding, a bona fide Canadian theatre classic, and one of the country’s most widely travelled plays ever.

The characters in Massicotte’s new play are nurses, Canadian and British, at a Canadian hospital in Doullens, France, bombed by the Germans in 1918. Two Canadian nurses are working through the night to get the survivors out. “It’s a time of huge international turmoil, and it also happens in the context of the suffragist movement and fighting for rights, and what activism means,” says Inglis, who will direct the premiere production (Oct. 30 to Nov. 17). “One of the great hopes is that women might have the vote.”

“Not only is it set in 1918,” she says, but, unusually, “it’s also written in the style of 1918.” Think Terence Rattigan, the English playwright of nuance, turmoil beneath genteel surfaces. “There is activism, queerness, misogyny in the play, but it’s not about issues; it’s a more poetic experience than that…. It lives in a world of nuance.”

“It’s a unique flavour for us,” says Inglis, who was immersed in the period and the aesthetic in her directing apprenticeship at the Shaw Festival early in her theatre career.

Like Mary’s Wedding, Stars On Her Shoulders breathed its first public air at Workshop West’s Springboards Festival in March. And it had “a phenomenal response,” Inglis reports, “an immediate Wow.” Calls from other theatre company artistic directors ensued.

Inglis’s cast of five includes Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Dana Wylie (the latter making a long-delayed return to theatre from her musical career for the occasion). And the production sponsors are an unusual group: Fruit Loop, the Evolution Lounge, and the Department of Veteran Affairs.   

The season finale is a debut play from an accomplished newcomer actor/playwright, Kole Durnford, a Métis theatre artist from Stony Plain. In Horseplay, a horse and his jockey, Horse and Jacques, bonded like brothers, are faced with an ultimate test of their love and friendship. If they don’t win the next race Horse will be sold. Should they go for broke?  “What happens when a relationship is pushed to the limit?” as Inglis puts it.

playwright Kole Durnford makes his Workshop West debut with Horseplay. Photo supplied.

“Horse should not be played like a horse, and Jacques is not French,” specify Durnford’s stage directions. “A special piece that doesn’t fit into any known category,” says Inglis who, like Workshop West dramaturg in residence Darrin Hagen, was struck by a play “that’s full of whimsy, a vaudevillian sense of humour, and by the same token, heart — enduring friendship and a sense of the magic of theatre…. The characters comment on the dialogue; there’s a meta-theatricality to it.”

“Riding horses, and the feeling of freedom and boundlessness is part of the play too!” says Inglis, who directs the Workshop West production (May 14 to June 2). The cast is yet to be announced, but the set design is by Beyata Hackborn, with lighting by Alison Yanota and score by Jason Kodie.

Workshop West has done shows in December before now. But their first “Christmas show” (Dec. 11 to 22) is Krampus: A New Musical, in partnership with Straight Edge Theatre. Book and music by Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred and orchestrations by Michael Clark, the sassy, sharp-eyed piece debuted mid-summer at the 2023 Fringe. And it returns in an extended form, with the Edmonton Pops Orchestra and new songs.

Krampus, clever and macabre as I know from its Fringe incarnation, takes us to the heart of a “perfectly perfect family” at the #1 time of year for domestic dysfunction and inter-family one-upmanship. Yep, Christmas Eve. The songs are smart and funny, the sense of humour tongue-in-cheek goth. The Grinch and Tim Burton spring to mind.

The season includes an edition of Springboards, Workshop West’s signature new play festival March 25 to 30. It is a tangible festival testimonial that Conni Massing’s Dead Letter this past season, as well as Stars On Her Shoulders and Horseplay, have all arrived on the mainstage via Springboards.

Additionally, Keith Alessi brings his solo memoir Tomatoes Tried To Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life (Feb. 19 to 23), now a global traveller, to the theatre town where it all began — at the Fringe. It’s a true story of the transformation from corporate CEO to banjo-playing banjo-obsessed artiste via a terrible cancer diagnosis. And it started its life at the Edmonton Fringe. The production is a fund-raiser for the theatre (thus outside the pay-what-you-will experiment).

As for that initiative, you’ll be able to choose what you pay for any ticket (suggested price: $40) and subscription (suggested price: $150). Inglis cites a Rozsa Foundation study that the 70 per cent of theatre-goers who aren’t currently going explained that it was too expensive.

“I’d rather have someone who paid $15 for their ticket than an empty seat…. Full houses create an atmosphere — it’s just more exciting for artists, and for the audience.”

“We’re taking down walls,” Inglis says, “to get people excited about Canadian theatre … so absolutely anyone has the opportunity to be part of Canadian storytelling.”

Tickets, subscriptions, and more information: workshopwest.org.