Backyard curtain time: Theatre Yes brings it home with The Doorstep Plays

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Meegan Sweet,, Sophie May Healey, Julia Van Dam in Caw CAW!, one of The Doorstep Plays, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The ancient contract between The People and The Theatre gets an intriguing clause, and the personal touch, in the latest venture by the ever-adventurous Theatre Yes. 

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With The Doorstep Plays, they bring the theatre to you homegrown: new Canadian plays, three of them, by emerging Edmonton playwrights. Curtain time happens right in your own backyard — on your lawn, on your deck, next to your shrubbery of choice. All you have to do, besides invite your friends (or not), is stay home, and pull up a lawn chair. And theatre will come to you, in this original outreach initiative by Theatre Yes producer Monica Gate.

Which is what we got the chance to do one afternoon this past weekend. We saw a trio of young actors — Meegan Sweet, Sophie May Healey, Julia Van Dam — dig into three different roles in three very different 20-minute plays, especially conceived for planting in back yards by three up-and-coming playwrights. They’re threaded together artfully by director Brett Dahl so they slide into each other, with minimal props edited for the great outdoors: a planter, a little tent, an axe, a portable barbecue, backpacks.

Common to the three short plays, different though they are, is the idea of hidden relationships, secrets revealed gradually and without exposition — not easy, to say the least, in a 20-minute play. It’s a challenging assignment, both in the writing and the acting. And I don’t want to spoil your fun in discovery, so a little vagueness from me is required.  

In the opener, Caw CAW! by Mhairi Berg, three girls are out camping. And you gather, from the banter-with-edges, that they’re not friends exactly, but joined in an expedition designed to exact responsibility from a guy who’s fed each of them a line of male bullshit. Is it re-education? Revenge? The leader, the one with the playbook (Sweet), attends to the plan, briskly and with a measure of sardonic exasperation. And the tension between girl solidarity and traumatic personal experience causes stress fractures in the female expeditionary force.

Julia Van Dam and Sophie May Healey in Squirm, one of The Doorstep Plays, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Autumn Strom’s mysterious Squirm starts with two girls (Healey and Van Dam) meeting n a garden. You wonder about their history; it’s an awkward reunion. And there’s a startling moment when the play takes a turn into the mythology of magical transformation.

The third, and funniest of the three pieces, is Sebastian Ley’s War!. It takes its title into a homeowner’s association meeting — along with the worldly insight that under the cheery cordiality of the ‘hood, the most inflammatory territorial impulses are tinder waiting for a match. That fire starter would be the arrival of a relative newcomer.

We’re at the meeting, ringside, and we get to vote. Times being what they are, it’s hard not to detect a whiff of topical political satire in this smart little play about power grabs, voter manipulation, domestic division, where every little thing from bird feeders to parking spots is a declaration of hostility. Van Dam has a riot as the beaming HOA president.

The cast, playwrights, and creative team of The Doorstep Plays, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Theatre Yes has a history of taking theatre into unexpected places — a theatre loading dock, urban elevators, a warehouse, an alternative music venue, the basement of a downtown building none of us had heard of before. And now … your place. In addition to bringing theatre to you on location, The Doorstep Plays is an original venture into showcasing emerging Edmonton playwrights, in a way that’s close at hand. All three plays are neatly configured by dexterous playwrights, and eminently discussable.

The BYOV (be-your-own-venue) experience can be yours, for a flat fee ($150). You can handpick the guest list: as many or as few friends, relatives, cohorts as you like. And hey, you could meet your own neighbours.

REVIEW

The Doorstep Plays

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Mhairi Berg, Sebastian Ley, Autumn Strom

Mentor and dramaturg: Monica Gate and Beth Graham

Produced by: Monica Gate

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Sophie May Healey, Meegan Sweet, Julia Van Dam

Where: your backyard

Running: May 20 to June 1

Further information and full schedule: theatreyes.com

Booking: email producer @theatreyes.com

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Horseplay, an irresistible new play about a bond beyond the traces, at Workshop West. A review

Posted on May 17, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Alexander Ariate as Horse, Lee Boyes as Jacques in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifousl Set by Beyata Hackborn, lighting by Sarah Karpyshin

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Lee Boyes and Alexander Ariate in Horseplay, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

There’s a bright buoyant sparkle to Horseplay, the funny, dreamy, heart-breaker of a season-ender at Workshop West. It’s a new play, about things like friendship and ambition, success and sacrifice, by a young theatre artist whose work you will want to follow from now on: Métis actor/playwright Kole Durnford, who’s originally from Stony Plain.

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Horseplay’s feet, and hooves, are on the grass. Its heart, available for the breaking, is in the air. And, in Heather Inglis’s premiere production it happens under a stunning spiral of tiny flying horses (designer Beyata Hackborn), glowingly lighted by Sarah Karpyshin. As Horse, wonderfully played by Alexander Ariate, says from time to time, “to run is to fly.” That’s already an imaginative leap, beyond the actor perpetually in motion — and there will be more.

Horse’s best friend in the world is jockey Jacques (Lee Boyes, a fine performance too). We meet the former the moment we enter the theatre. He’s already there, just hanging out on grass, amusingly just the way horses do. He’s doing nothing — except having bursts of horse-ly energy, being happy,  and engaging in pleasant repartee with us. You know, the way horses do.

Alexander Ariate and Lee Boyes in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As Horseplay starts — it kind of slides into starting, as signalled by Horse — he and Jacques are together, being jocular (sorry, jock-ular) and sharing carrots. You know, the the way friends do. With the teasing, amiable friends’ banter about playing games with built-in dares, having crushes and denying them, getting a kick out of their shared affection for horse puns. Has anyone ever truly understood “looking a gift horse in the mouth”? Try explaining it. Horse, for one, is baffled.

Durnford’s writing has a clever crackle to it. It’s fun. And that fun is enhanced in performance by the amusement of the characters, who crack each other up.

Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

Horse has blown off the afternoon’s training in order to stand by the fence, and discuss grass with the fetching show horse in the next field. What does a crush mean, Horse wants to know. What does it feel like to be in love? Is it “meeting someone who loves grass as much as I do?” Jacques tries to explain.“You have to ask her out,” he prompts. “I just can’t,” says Horse, as they jockey around the subject of dating.

They’re brothers, says Horse. “Brothers from another mother,” Jacques amends. Their rapport in motion is captured, with ingenuity, in Amber Borotsik’s outstanding choreography for the pair. They move together in an exhilarating kind of horse ballet; it exudes joyfulness in the interlocking performances. You want them to dance together forever. And while Horse acknowledges that we’re in “an alternative reality” in the free-floating meta-framework of the play — how do horses hang onto monkey bars? with their hands, of course — he assumes that’s true.

But friendship will come under duress from worldly pressures. Horse’s certainty that “we get to stay together forever” gets squeezed by … money. As the bearer of news from the human sphere, which seems always to be about competition and winning, Jacques reluctantly explains “that’s not how the world works.” It’s mere weeks till the big race. And if they don’t start winning, Horse will be sold. There will be “no more whimsical joyful dancing between scenes…. We don’t have time to break the fourth wall.”

If pursuing a dream, your personal Kentucky Derby, means sacrificing something crucial to best-friendship, it had better be worth it. The stakes keep getting raised, in a way that never seems forced, always natural, in the play. Can love withstand relentless pressure? Horseplay horses around with questions like that, in a wistful, heart-tugging way that includes ketamine-fuelled dream sequences. And, anchored to our affection for Horse — and the innocence, charm, and commitment of Ariate’s wide-eyed, exuberantly physical performance — it cuts to the chase. “Maybe we should just enjoy what we have…. Hold your horse.”

In its own cantering off-centre way, Horseplay is a coming-of-age play, with the sadness that implies. Jacques tries to ease Horse into the adult human world of success and money, and inevitable disconnection. “I no longer want to grow up,” Horse says, in a moment that makes your eyes water. “It’s hard to be grown up and know the world.”

Hard and getting harder all the time. An irresistible play about love, friendship, dreams, and a bond beyond the traces is something to cherish.

Meet playwright Kole Durnford in this 12thnight.ca preview.

REVIEW

Horseplay

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Kole Durnford

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Alexander Ariate, Lee Boyes

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through June 1

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will, suggested price $40).

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The self in a bind: the RISER New Works Festival opens with Calla Wright’s Binding

Posted on May 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Calla Wright in Binding, RISER New Works Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

New this year the RISER New Works Festival began its weekend of performances and workshops last night with a work-in-progress production of a challenging and playful one-human many-puppet show.

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Destined for Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival in 2026, Calla Wright’s Binding is built on a fraught, conflicted relationship. Cal, the non-binary person we meet onstage, can’t happily or sustainably live with parts of their anatomy that send the wrong identity markers to their bearer, and to the world. As the title suggests, it’s their boobs. They undermine the self, its sense and stability. And this show is an encounter, a challenging, witty confrontation between these problematic parties and Cal. It’s a conversation, and the boobs are articulate, to say the least, and not just size large smart-asses, in sticking up for themselves.

Binding by Calla Wright, RISER New Works Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective

At the moment, the production, directed by Sarah Emslie, seems to be experimenting with its theatrical flourishes of the piece, the outsized props of the trans experience, all retrieved, amusingly, from A Closet. Wright is a smart writer, and their sheer unflinching honesty will knock you back in your seat. There are more performances of Binding this weekend, and stay tuned for the full production at Expanse.

RISER is all about supporting and mentoring indie artists and producers. And this new festival, the brainchild of Common Ground Arts Society, has had he bright idea of a producer’s lab. It taps the resources of the community, in an initiative that sets up one-on-one meetings with this theatre town’s expert professionals.

Details, and the full schedule of the four festival shows, are up on the Common Ground Arts Society website. And you can have a look at 12thnight’s preview interview with Common Ground’s  executive producer Mac Brock here. 

RISER New Works Festival runs through Sunday at the Backstage Theatre (Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.).    

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A horse named Horse, a jockey named Jacques: Kole Durnford’s Horseplay premieres at Workshop West

Posted on May 15, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the new Canadian play that premieres this week, on the gallop at Workshop West, we meet two best friends, as close as brothers, closer maybe. At heart these two love nothing better than hanging out together, having fun. One is a horse (named Horse); one is a jockey (named Jacques).

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And then in Horseplay, by actor/playwright Kole Durnford, pressure is applied by the world, and the stakes of love and friendship are raised by the dream of success. “They’re trying to win the Kentucky Derby,” says Durnford of his unusual pair of dreamer buddies. “And they have to win in order to keep Horse around. Which puts a big strain on their relationship.”

A Métis artist originally from Stony Plain, Durnford, who’s thoughtful and funny in conversation, traces Horseplay back to an unexpected starting gate in 2024: a 24-hour playwriting contest at the Toronto Fringe, and the idea of “a horse who breaks his leg.”

Horseplay playwright Kole Durnford, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo supplied

It was right after a third production in 2023 of his first play ECHO — a reimagining of the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus — at Toronto’s Next Stage Festival. That production, directed by Durnford’s best friend Robert Morrison, a theatre school classmate at TMU (Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson), came loaded with stress for the pair. “It felt like a really big deal, my biggest playwriting thing I’d done, a big step for the whole team…. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves,” says Durnford, “and I was extremely burnt out.”

“I wanted some low-stakes fun,” he says, acknowledging with a laugh that 24-hour playwriting contests wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of an antidote to stress. “I knew I had to unpack what my last artistic experience was.” At some point in that 24 hours, Horseplay “turned into this piece about me and my best friend and main creative collaborator,” muses Durnford. “A piece about us following our dreams , trying for success, feeling the pressures of the world,  finding a career doing something you love.”

“And it’s also about brotherhood. My friend Robert is my brother in a lot of ways…. We are family. All I kept coming back to as I was writing Horseplay was how much I love my friend.”

He remembers the escalating pressures of working on ECHO for its Next Stage opening night. “We began to lose sight of why we were doing it in the first place…. When you’re an artist, you never do (art) — or at least I think it’s wrong to do it — for success. You have to do it because you love the work and you love the community it creates. And I think I lost sight of that.”

Lee Boyes and Alexander Ariate in Horseplay, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

“I feel like Horseplay was my desire to return to the reason I wanted to make art,” Durnford says. “The reason I cared, and tried to do this … and (laughter) become a broke person.” He’d set aside the “ultra-serious thriller” he’d been struggling with for two years for a play that happened in a 24-hour burst of creative energy. “Objectively,” he says of Horseplay, “it’s so much better. In every single way.”

Durnford describes growing up on an acreage outside Stony Plain — he went to Blueberry school “which is a real place,” he laughs — as a kid who didn’t fit in with the male sensibility of the community. “It was so terrible for me; I hated it so much…. I was a sensitive person; I didn’t understand masculinity in a lot of ways; I didn’t understand why all these people around me pretended not to feel their emotions, care about things. I really struggled.”

By the time he Durnford was in Grade 8, his parents rescued him from Blueberry. Vic, the arts school in Edmonton, was his salvation. “My parents drove me to Spruce Grove and I caught the bus every day….  And it was a game-changer for me!” He’d found his people, and himself. “I’m a person who cares and wants to devote time in my life to feeling my emotions and thinking about the world. And I feel that carries through Horseplay in some ways.”

Horse “doesn’t understand the constraints of the human world. He doesn’t know what money is. Or why best friends don’t spend their whole lives together. Or why you’d go off and get married or anything like that.”

Durnford, who’s in his mid-20s, went to TMU (he graduated in 2022) as an actor. “But I always deep down thought I should be a writer/ director,” he thinks now. It started at Vic, where playwright/director Vern Thiessen ran a program called Theatre Blitz, “a sort of after-school writing club.” Durnford and his 16-year-old classmates wrote plays and read them. “ I’m so lucky to have gotten some of the early writing out of my system,” he thinks. “An early getting-the- kinks-out….”

He works as an actor in Toronto, where he lives at least for the time being, with reservations about “the hustle culture” there. His first Dora Award nomination in 2022 was for Mixtape Productions’ “super-fun camp new musical” Killing Time: A Game Show Musical. Its playfulness and lightness of touch have been “a huge inspiration.” The second, an ensemble nomination in 2023, was for Niizh at Native Earth, “an Indigenous coming-of-age romance” as he describes. Both were happy experiences.

But it’s revealing that one of most memorable classes for Durnford at TMU theatre school was “creative performance studies,” devising theatre in tandem with dancers. And the COVID shutdown year, his third at university, in which acting classes suddenly got transferred to digital platforms — “an online version of The Three Sisters?” he laughs an eye-roll of a laugh — was an impetus to “focus on all the (non-acting) opportunities I had, to direct a film, or write…. I’m honestly grateful. That year forced me to think about my artistry beyond acting.”

Durnford the playwright came fully into being in the course of that year. ECHO happened right after that (it played the Edmonton Fringe in 2022), then Horseplay. Horse and Jacques caught the eye of Workshop West’s artistic director Heather Inglis and resident dramaturg Darrin Hagen when he submitted the script to the theatre’s play reading service. And he’s so delighted with Inglis’s cast, Alexander Ariate and Lee Boyes, that he can’t imagine being in the play himself.

He credits the Edmonton Fringe with underlining the essence of theatre, its live-ness, a quality he’s often found missing in Toronto. “If you don’t give people a reason to be there, live, with you, no one cares….”

“I feel like the Edmonton Fringe is my home base,” he says. “I think when I wrote Horseplay I wanted to write something that’s like an 11 p.m. Fringe show. Very weird and also very alive.”

PREVIEW

Horseplay

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Kole Durnford

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Alexander Ariate, Lee Boyes

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday through June 1

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will, suggested price $40).

  

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Hot theatre choices on Edmonton stages for your long weekend, a 12thnight survey

Posted on May 14, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Horseplay image by Dave DeGagné, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You don’t lack for choices in Edmonton theatre as the long weekend approaches (Queen Victoria wouldn’t have it any other way). Consider some of your options: the premiere of a new Canadian play with a whimsical and profound concept; one of the great plays of the 20th century produced by a new Edmonton theatre company. Plus the continuation of a funny Canadian comedy with a heartwarming undercurrent, and a Canadian adaptation of a 19th century classic novel … and more.

Randy Brososky as Salieri in Amadeus, Initium Theatre in partnership with Psychopomp Theatre. Photo siupplied

•Edmonton’s newest theatre company, Initium Theatre, introduces itself with Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, in collaboration with another indie, Psychopomp Theatre. At the centre of the 1979 play, Shaffer’s most popular, is the 18th century career composer Antonio Salieri, whose star in a music-centric culture (and place in history) is eclipsed forever by a boorish young genius named … Mozart. Salieri, waging a war of vengeance against his divinely gifted rival, is a figure with tragic dimensions. In Jon Shields’ production, this great plum role is taken by Randy Brososky, with Drake Seipert as the upstart Wolfgang and Cassie Hyman as Mozart’s pert wife Constanze. Amadeus runs through Thursday at Campus Saint-Jean (8406 91 St). And the music is sure to be good! Tickets: showpass.com.

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Horseplay playwright Kole Durnford, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo supplied

•At Workshop West, the best-friendship of a horse named Horse and a jockey named Jacques, “bonded like brothers,” is the point at which Horseplay saddles up. The new play by the young actor/playwright Kole Durnford, a Métis artist originally from Stony Plain, premieres Friday in a Heather Inglis production that stars Alexander Ariate and Lee Boyes. It runs through June 1 at the Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd. Tickets: workshopwest.org. Stay tuned for a 12thnight interview with the playwright, coming up shortly.

•In Where You Are, the season-ender at Shadow Theatre, we meet a family with dark (and dark-ish) secrets roiling beneath the tranquil comic surfaces of retirement. The comedy by Canadian playwright Kristen Da Silva has a fulsome measure of funny lines, and takes a turn into heart-warming, and tragic, in Act II. You’ll laugh and possibly cry. John Hudson’s production, led by Coralie Cairns and Davina Stewart, with a delightful performance by Nikki Hulowski as a daughter with problems of her own, runs through Sunday at the Varscona. Take a gander at the 12thnight review. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

•Little Women, the evergreen, much-adapted 19th century Louisa May Scott novel, taken off the page and onto the stage by Canadian playwright Jordi Mand, continues its run (through May 25) at the Citadel. It’s a (very) faithful adaptation, a series of book highlights more than a play, delivered by Jenna Rodgers’ excellent cast led by Hayley Moorhouse, Christina Nguyen, Donna Leny Hansen and Erin Pettifor, with Nadien Chu as Marmee. Have a peek at the full 12thnight review. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

Kory Fulton, Niko Combitsis, William Lincoln, Devon Brayne in Jersey Boys, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•At the Mayfield, release your inner Sherreeeeeee, as Jersey Boys continues, with its dramatic story of the rise and fall of the pop band The Four Seasons  — and dozens of their ridiculously contagious hit songs. It continues through June 8. The 12thnight review is here. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051.

   

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The Doorstep Plays: showtime for emerging playwrights in your own backyard

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Make yourself at home, people; you’re already at the theatre. All you have to do is step outside your door, and it’s showtime in your own personal venue.

Theatre Yes, specialists in theatre that happens in unusual configurations in unusual places, will bring three new 20-minute Canadian plays, by a trio of up-and-coming playwrights, to you — on location, at your place May 20 to June 1. The Doorstep Plays are custom-tailored for your own backyard.

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For a flat $150 fee, “you can invite as many people as you want. The Doorstep Plays can be just for you and your partner. Or if you want to have a whole garden party, you can,” says the ebullient Theatre Yes resident producer Monica Gate. “We don’t care! It’s a unique experience to each yard…. The audience has much impact on how the story is told as the actors do.”

Gate is, I venture to say, the only theatre producer in town who hears advance commentary from audiences like “I’ve prepared my deck!” or “I’ve picked up all my dog poop!” or “I’ve got a reverse-pie lot.” She says “it’s pretty endearing to see how excited people are.”

Each performance is BYOC (bring your own chair). “We don’t supply lawn chairs,” says Gate. “OR you can do ‘standing room only’, maybe leaning on your neighbour’s fence,” says veteran playwright Beth Graham, Gate’s partner in curating the submissions, mentoring the creative team and dramaturging the new Doorstep pieces by Mhairi Berg (Caw CAW), Sebastian Ley (WAR!), and Autumn Strom (Squirm).

And, hey, “you don’t have to worry about parking,” as she points out.

For the audience The Doorstep Plays is an unusual adventure in theatre accessibility. As for emerging artists, Gate “pitched it (to Theatre Yes co-artistic director Max Rubin and Ruth Alexander) as a mentorship opportunity…. There’s no warmer audience than the people who invite actors to their home. It’s a great opportunity to put emerging artists in front of audiences who want their work. It’s a unique, special, intimate relationship when artists are invited to people’s homes.” It’s no accident that support for the new project came from the Edmonton Arts Council’s “connections and exchanges” program. This is all about community. As Gate says, “so many people post-COVID don’t even know their neighbours! This is a great way to meet them.”

Theatre Yes’s call for submissions last year was an invitation to “emerging playwrights,” a descriptive which, for Theatre Yes, has nothing to do with age.  As curators, Gate and Graham were looking for playwrights who’d never had a professional production of their work. They got 15 submissions in the first two weeks, and then months later, 20 more an hour before the midnight deadline one Sunday night. Thirty-five in all, and encompassing a wide variety of creative responses to the mandate: a 20-minute play with a cast of three actors.

“They were idea pitches,” says Graham. “Beth and I were looking for a proposal that made the best use of the space of a backyard,” says Gate. And choosing the trio for The Doorstep Plays, with a through-line that would link the three in some way as an evening’s entertainment, wasn’t easy.

“Three very different artists, three very different worlds,” says Graham of the Doorstep lineup, from an intimate two-hander to a wild and crazy HOA (Home Owners Association) meeting, to a three-girl set-up in the back country. And they’ve made very different imaginative uses of the backyard space.

Gate and Graham started working with the playwrights in October; there was a week-long workshop at the end of February. And the playwrights had till the end of April to make adjustments. Gate is still wonderstruck by “the level and the quality of the writing.”

The three actors — Sophie May Healey, Meegan Sweet, Julia Van Dam — have risen impressively to the challenge of learning three characters in three different plays, and in record time (a two-week rehearsal period). “It takes a certain kind of actor to engage in this way,” says Graham of the unique Doorstep challenges, which include a different performance space for every single performance.  “That’s the pain and the joy of it!” she smiles. “ Scary but an adrenaline kick.”

In addition to the emerging playwrights there’s an emerging director (Brett Dahl), and an emerging stage manager (Sarah Yorke) too. “I’m not an emerging producer,” says Gate of her career history on both sides of the Atlantic, which includes the extreme complications of community-building in Theatre Yes’s two-night sin which scenes were assigned to 20 Edmonton performance groups. “But this, The Doorstep Plays, were certainly an emerging dramaturgy project, to be working with playwrights in this way.”

She laughs. “I’ve just come to expect that working at Theatre Yes. Every project is something you’ve never done before. That’s the beauty of it…. Even if we do this again next year, it’s not going to be the same: three different stories and totally different challenges!”

Gate has her Doorstep mantra: “Go big or go to someone else’s home!”

PREVIEW

The Doorstep Plays

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Mhairi Berg, Sebastian Ley, Autumn Strom

Mentor and dramaturg: Monica Gate and Beth Graham

Produced by: Monica Gate

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Sophie May Healey, Meegan Sweet, Julia Van Dam

Where: your backyard

Running: May 20 to June 1

Further information and full schedule: theatreyes.com

Booking: email producer @theatreyes.com

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Once more unto the park in 2026? Freewill Shakespeare Festival launches a ‘save the fest’ campaign

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

The Comedy of Errors, Freewill Shakespeare Festival directed by Jeff Page 2009. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For 35 summers the Freewill Shakespeare Festival has been banishing the winters of our discontent (not to mention, bringing on joy and mirth, and generally inspiring a holiday humour). Summer Shakespeare à la Freewill is a bona fide Edmonton institution.

But as summer #36 approaches — and with it David Horak’s 12-actor production of As You Like It (June 27-July 20) in Louise McKinney Riverside Park — “the future is at risk,” says Horak, the company artistic director. “It’s serious!”

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It’s the third year of Freewill’s punishing three-year exile from their traditional home base in Hawrelak Park, closed by the city (in a stunning burst of non-creativity) for renovations for this lengthy period. And, as Horak explains, it’s currently doubtful whether the company will be able to return to that site in 2026 with a pair of full-scale full-cast professional festival productions in Freewill’s signature bold, accessible performance style.

The road back to Hawrelak Park is a rocky one. “Can we get back to the park and on that scale? … some years 17 or 18 actors, designers, composers, 10 people at least running the show, stage managers? …. It’s hard.”

That mounting uncertainty is exacerbated, of course, by the repercussions of COVID,  declining audiences, unstable funding. Accompanied by the instability and dwindling of grants, the loss of corporate sponsorships, a 30 per cent rise in building costs and materials in the last five years, the loss of office, set-building, and rehearsal spaces … the list goes on. And so far the city has failed to reveal any details about the renovated Heritage Amphitheatre, possible infrastructure changes, even whether, for example, the $100,000 stage extension Freewill built will now be usable. The unknowns in production costs and security requirements are accumulating.

Which is where you come in. Freewill has launched an urgent fund-raising campaign with a $150,000 target — about 20 per cent of their $600,00 or $650,000 budget for a two-production Hawrelak Park festival — and a deadline by the end of the upcoming run of As You Like It. “We will continue,” says Horak. “We can, we will … we know how to go small if we need to. But what it will look like we don’t know.”

The Comedy of Errors, the inaugural Freewill Shakespeare Festival 1989. Photo supplied

From its debut 1989 production of The Comedy of Errors, the Free Will Players took their adaptable resident playwright to the great outdoors in Hawrelak Park. Since that modest beginning they’ve played his comedies, from the farcical to the moody; they’ve also brought his tragedies, romances, and the odd history play to their home base in the park, at first singly and then in pairs. And in course of 35 Edmonton summers, a company that started when a co-op of enterprising U of A theatre school grads found a glaring gap in the theatre scene here, turned into a first-rate rep company that attracts the best of our actors, designers, composers, emerging artists and veterans alike.

Dave Horak and John Wright in King Lear, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2013. Photo supplied

Not only has Freewill provided artists with opportunities to work in big casts on a large stage, it has nurtured whole generations of top actors who performed with the company, then turned their hand to directing. Ah, and then artistic directing. The company’s first a.d. James MacDonald was one, as were his successors John Kirkpatrick and Marianne Copithorne. Horak too was a professional actor when he made his debut as the Fool in the 2013 Jim Guedo production of King Lear that starred John Wright. Horak’s directing debut was a Freewill Comedy of Errors in 2018, then The Winter’s Tale in 2019, the last pre-COVID summer run.

The Comedy of Errors directed by David Horak, 2018. Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

There isn’t a more resourceful, adaptable company in this theatre town — even by the standards of a post-COVID age that has demanded extreme flexibility. Horak became the Freewill artistic director at the very moment in 2020 when live theatre got shut down. The festival was cancelled, and “in order to do something and hire some actors,” he devised travelling Shakespeare troubadour-style variety entertainments for a trio of performers, “busking shows for backyards, parks, farmers’ markets, community leagues….”

Chris Bullough in The Winter’s Tale, Freewill Shakespeare Festival, directed by David Horak. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

In 2021 Freewill was back in Hawrelak Park with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and their first production ever of the “problem comedy” Measure For Measure. “We weren’t sure what the rules would be,” says Horak, who directed Dream and blocked scenes for social distancing. “We performed outdoors, yes. But we started rehearsals (indoors) in masks. I didn’t see people’s faces till we moved outside.” And it turned out, as he says, that “people were still nervous about coming back (to the theatre),” even en plein air.

Laura Raboud, Nadien Chu, Rochelle Laplante in Macbeth, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2022. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Evicted from Hawrelak Park, Freewill adapted again in 2022 with small-cast travelling versions of Much Ado About Nothing, and an all-female three-actor Macbeth — with separate casts for reasons of safety. Horak directed the shows at Louise McKinney Park and took them to the Fringe, a first for the company.

In 2023, still in exile, Freewill took a big chance with audiences who have demonstrably preferred their Shakespeare outdoors. A reduced-cast (nine actors) Romeo and Juliet ran alternately with Twelfth Night in a vintage Spiegeltent at Northlands. The tent was beautiful. But the audience capacity (1100 in Hawrelak Park) was reduced to under 200, and in an unfamiliar location.

Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by West Coast Spiegeltents

For last year’s edition Freewill took The Tempest to four community league hockey rinks. As Horak points out, “without the Hawrelak Park infrastructure — fences, bathrooms, a tent, power — costs go up dramatically.”

Ingenuity counts, to be sure; it’s a theatre specialty. And Horak continues to think about “possible co-productions? a Shakespeare musical?” But the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have taken their toll on a beloved Edmonton tradition, and one that has played a big role in the continuing liveliness of the theatre scene here. And now, it’s a moment for audiences to step up on behalf of a festival that has kept our top theatrical talent in town for the summers, covered with mosquito spray maybe, but here and working.

Calgary’s summer Shakespeare is no more. Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach has reduced its programming. “My goal,” says Horak, “is to come back full-strength: two plays, full casts.”

Contribute to Save Freewill at crowdfunding.alberta.ca. Ticket options and full schedule for As You Like It: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.

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The rise of RISER: a new works festival from Common Ground

Posted on May 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Binding by Calla Wright, RISER New Works Festival. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

RISER has risen. Again, and in a new, expanded form.

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Edmonton, where theatre is the leading arts industry, was always the right place for the visionary national initiative — launched by Toronto’s Why Not Theatre — to support, profile, mentor multi-disciplinary indie artists and companies. And Common Ground Arts Society, well-connected in indie circles, was, from the start, RISER’s natural host company.

RISER has expanded, as Common Ground’s indefatigable executive producer Mac Brock explains. Learning how to produce indie theatre, and learning from the experience, takes time. Which is why RISER lives on a two-year model now. At the inaugural RISER New Works Festival, coming to the Backstage Theatre Thursday through Sunday we’ll be seeing four new works-in-progress that will each premiere in 2026 at one of Edmonton’s major festivals: Azimuth’s Expanse Fest, SkirtsAfire, or the Edmonton Fringe.

Says Brock, “80 per cent of learning happens at the end of the first (showing). Now there’s a second kick at it!” The new festival is a way for the playwright to assess the audience response and adjust accordingly before a full premiere.

First up is Calla Wright’s Binding, a solo show by and starring the playwright, and destined for the 2026 Expanse Festival. “Campy, wildly funny, surprising,” says Brock of the piece, first seen at last year’s Fringe. Design choices have been expanded since then. There are, as billed, “elements of clown and puppetry,” as Wright explores questions of “queer and trans bodies, trauma and dysmorphia, in a very personal way,” as Brock puts it. “Challenging,” yes, but “there’s joy, silliness, playfulness in Calla’s work…. talking between Calla and their body!” Sarah Emslie directs the RISER workshop production.

playwright Jameela McNeil, whose play Ms. Pat’s Kitchen is at RISER New Works Festival. Photo supplied.

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen, by actor-playwright Jameela McNeil, had an initial outing at the 2024 Nextfest. And it’s been expanded since. It’s a large-scale multi-generational piece that takes us into the heart of the Edmonton Jamaican community, a family, and the fractious relationship between a mother and her 18-year-old daughter. Sue Goberdhan directs.

POCBS: Tales of the Diaspora, is, says Brock, “a huge undertaking,,” on a scale that will challenge the Fringe when it premieres there in 2026. It’s a cabaret fusion of “comedy, poetry, music, dance” by multi-disciplinary artists Alexis de Villa and Topkunbo Adegbuyi.

Postal Prophets by D’orjay Jackson, RISER New Works Festival. Photo supplied

The Postal Prophets is the playwriting debut of singer/songwriter D’orjay Jackson. A “musical play” it’s set in a dystopian future in the aftermath of a great war.”

In addition to hosting RISER Common Ground produces the annual Found Festival in July, devoted to unexpected meetings between artists and audiences in unconventional spaces. The full lineup of this year’s edition awaits announcement. But the Fresh AiR mainstage presentation is a new play by Louise Casemore (Gemini, OCD, Undressed). Lucky Charm, which got its first audience tryout in the basement of the Black Dog pub at last year’s Found Fest, takes us this time to “a secret residential location in the Ritchie neighbourhood.”

That secret is safe with Brock, who does divulge that (a) a basement is involved and (b) he production, a partnership between Defiance Theatre and Theatre Yes directed by Max Rubin, is the only Found show with a magic consultant.

We meet Bess Houdini, the widow of the global magic star who’s been trying via séance to make contact with the great man. And Casemore’s show is an invitation to join in at the table (or watch). The alluring mystery of whether there is life after death is ours to jointly explore. “Big surprises and effects,” says Brock.

Like last year’s Fresh AiR production Brick Shithouse, Lucky Charm will get an extended two-week run July 10 to 20. Tickets go on sale in June.

In the fall Common Ground launches a new “Prairie Mainstage Series.” As Brock explains, the goal is to enhance touring opportunities for “stories built on the prairies,” by giving two or three shows from here and across the prairies a full production debut. “We’re starting this year with two shows that are near and dear to us,” he says. Both were initially developed at Found Festival.

Kris Alvarez’s Banana Musik gets its title from the name the playwright’s father gave his original music from the ‘70s, recorded on 8-track in the family basement. And it’s fuelled by a strong connection between the generations. It’s an invitation into playwright’s family home to meet her parents and see their stuff. Brock calls it “a powerful and memorable experience,” the first touring show created by the Regina artist. Banana Musik runs Sept. 16 to 27 in the Backstage Theatre. Judy Wensel directs.

Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez’s Ecos, an immersive dance-theatre piece which runs at Mile Zero Dance Warehouse Oct. 30 to Nov. 9, was called El Funeral when it first ran at the Fringe in a Strathcona funeral home. The play, a multi-generational exploration of the immigrant experience, has been transformed since then, says Brock. “It’s gigantic! Folks can expect a more linear experience and a much bigger technical design,” he says of Andrés F. Moreno’s production, which will have a cast “in the six-to-10 actor range, and a creative team that might (total) 30 or more.”

RISER New Works Festival runs Thursday through Sunday at the Backstage Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.) Further information and full schedule: commongroundarts.ca. Tickets:  fringetheatre.ca.

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A theatrical index to a beloved novel: Little Women at the Citadel, a review

Posted on May 9, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Hayley Moorhouse, Donna Leny Hansen, Christina Nguyen, Nadien Chu, Erin Pettifor in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The March siblings, growing up in genteel poverty in Civil War America, might well be literature’s most famous sister act since Jane Austen’s Bennets. And ever since they stepped out from the pages of Louisa May Alcott’s hit 1868/69 coming-of-age novel Little Women, Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth have gathered the stage and screen history to prove it.

In every kind of adaptation — plays, musicals, operas, ballets, movies, animations, TV series — there they are, teenage sisters  jostling with each other and the expectations of their world. They’re a permanent temptation to writers of every age to use the bleached-out word “iconic” as the younger generation of March’s struggle, each in her own way, with the novel’s ever-renewable central question. What does it mean to be a woman?  — a “little woman” or a big one for that matter — and claim a meaningful life?

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In the season finale production of Little Women at the Citadel, the characters are set forth by Jenna Rodgers’ excellent cast in a vivid, recognizable way. And they’re led onstage by a heroine for us to love. Jo (an amusingly brisk, abrupt, exasperated performance from Hayley Moorhouse) is the impulsive, fretful, difficult sister, chafing at the confines of her 19th century life and the way it squanders her talents and stifles her creativity.

Adapting Little Women doesn’t take virtuoso brilliance to ferret out contemporary relevance. It’s a self-renewing resource that way. For one thing it’s perennially war somewhere, as well we know. And as for family squabbling, or the tension between renegade feminine ambition and cultural expectation, well, they haven’t exactly vanished from the earth either. So it’s curious to find a stage adaptation so tied (the word might be shackled) to the novel, incident by incident, that it seems more like a very long series of vignettes than a play.

Donna Leny Hansen, Christina Nguyen, Hayley Moorhouse (rear), Erin Pettifor in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Commissioned from the Canadian playwright Jordi Mand by the Stratford Festival (where it premiered in 2022), this Little Women unrolls, at three long hours (including intermission), as an exhaustive index of famous moments. And though they’re annotated by Jo, a narrator with an appealing skepticism about her as Moorhouse conveys, there an awful lot of them (Little Women was originally two novels). And they’re given more or less equal weight.

One scene ends, another begins: the Christmas breakfast, the skit, the skating episode, the curling iron fiasco, the hair-cutting incident, the scarlet fever near-miss, the grand party and ankle sprain, the Jo meets Laurie scene, the visit to Aunt March, the news from the front and the departure of Marmee, the gift of the piano from Laurie’s rich gruff Mr. Laurence (Troy O’Donnell), the return of father, Jo meets Friedrich, Jo visits a publisher in New York, on and on…. If you’re familiar with the book, or the book via an assortment of movies, you won’t feel shortchanged by the dutiful scene count. Au contraire. But it’s by no means an exciting build-up of momentum.

Erin Pettifor, Hayley Moorhouse, Donna Leny Hansen, Christina Nguyen, Nadien Chu in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Still, there’s entertainment to be had seeing the familiar portraiture come to life in 3-D onstage. As played by Donna Leny Hansen, Meg, the beautiful and conventional sister who finds she wants marriage and motherhood, has Meg-ish charm. Erin Pettifor is suitably mild and conciliatory as poor doomed Beth. Christina Nguyen is an amusingly sulky whiner as self-centred Amy, who suffers from the family poverty more than anyone, as she’s fond of saying.

Hayley Moorhouse and Troy O’Donnell in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

And Moorhouse as the would-be writer (the Alcott stand-in), is appealing as the awkward sister, who never quite knows where to put her arms and whether to shake hands or salute, as men do, when she meets people. “I need to leave; I need to be somewhere else; I need to do something new.” By the third hour you may well feel the same.

Their fractious sibling dynamic is conveyed in scenes refereed by Marmee (Nadien Chu), the maternal paragon who advises her girls to be charitable, look within, and find a true self to be. It’s a tall order. She confesses to a continuous secret anger that you’d like to know more about. “I am angry every day of my life,” she says unexpectedly to hot-tempered Jo, who’s amazed.

Gabriel Richardson and Christina Nguyen in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price. Costumes by Deanna Finnman

The smaller roles are ably filled: Gabriel Richardson as rich boy Laurie, Steven Greenfield as the kindly, bookish Friedrich Bhaer, the German professor Jo falls for in NYC; Patricia Darbasie as imperious Aunt March, Troy O’Donnell as gruff but generous Mr. Laurence, Paul-Ford Manguelle as the professional tutor. And Deanna Finnman’s beautifully detailed period costumes identify the nuances of soci0-economic class in a way that the dramatized scenes aren’t always able to do.

Robin Fisher’s un-atmospheric set, a skeletal house (lighted by Whittyn Jason) with beige walls — the writing is literally on the wall — is austere enough but seems rather vast under the March family circumstances.

In the end, this is a production that gives you what you need to remember a cherished book from your childhood (or conjure a prize story from your movie-going). That said, it won’t propel you into a fresh new engagement.

REVIEW

Little Women

Theatre: Citadel Theatre

Based on the novel by Louise May Alcott

Adapted by: Jordi Mand

Directed by: Jenna Rodgers

Starring: Hayley Moorhouse, Nadien Chu, Donna Leny Jansen, Erin Pettifor, Christina Nguyen, Gabriel Richardson, Patricia Darbasie, Troy O’Donnell, Steven Greenfield, Paul-Ford Manguelle

Running:  through May 25

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

 

   

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Shadow Theatre announces a four-show upcoming season, launched by a new Canadian musical

Posted on May 6, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Shadow Theatre’s upcoming four-production 32nd season will launch with the premiere of a much-anticipated new Canadian musical.

In Morningside Road, by the remarkably versatile Edmonton artists Mhairi Berg (book) and Simon Abbott (music), a girl connects to her grandmother’s stories of growing up on the title street in Edinburgh — with the gathering complication that the old woman’s memory is being eroded and diverted by dementia. Can truth and fiction be unknotted?

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The Celtic-flavoured musical breathed its first public air at Nextfest and a staged reading followed at Script Salon. Morningside Road received a Sterling Award nomination for its Fringe incarnation last summer. The Shadow production directed by Lana Michelle Hughes (Oct. 15 to Nov. 2),  Shadow’s associate artistic director, is its expanded full-length premiere. Berg and Maureen Rooney are joined onstage by a three-piece band led by Abbott, Grindstone Theatre’s resident composer/musical director.

The lineup announced by artistic director/ Shadow co-founder John Hudson includes two American plays, both with classical antecedents and contemporary resonances. An Iliad, by the team of Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, is a modern re-telling of the Homer epic. “Our narrator is Homer,” says Hudson. “He’s been travelling and telling the story for 3,000 years. And he stumbles into our theatre with a suitcase,” says Hudson. “He arrives onstage at the (Varscona) theatre at a very specific point in a 10-year war” — you know, that famously infamous Trojan War.

“Powerful and funny,” says Hudson of the award-winning 2012 piece that digs into “the ongoing stupidity and horror of war…. It really points the finger at all of us.” He directs the Shadow production (Jan. 21 to Feb. 8, 2026)) starring Michael Peng, who’s onstage with one musician.

The four characters in The Revolutionists, by the prolific American star playwright Lauren Gunderson (Christmas at Pemberley), are real historical head-strong women who lived on the knife edge of their time, the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The doomed queen Marie Antoinette, playwright cum feminist activist Olympe de Gouges, the Marat assassin Charlotte Corday, and the Haitian activist spy Marianne Angelle.  “They interact, back and forth, in and out, during this very smart and witty play,” says Hudson, whose initial idea for his production (March 18 to April 5, 2026) is “period punk.” Alex Dawkins will play Olympe; other casting remains to be announced.

The English playwright Peter Quilter has been in touch with Shadow Theatre ever since the Edmonton company produced his play Glorious! (the story of the supremely untalented celebrity soprano Florence Foster Jenkins) in 2008. Quilter’s 2023 comedy Autumn is the finale of the upcoming Shadow season, “a beautiful two-hander about two eccentric sisters … lovely, full of heart, and very funny,” as Hudson describes. The play unfolds during their preparations for the wedding of the daughter of one of them. Hughes directs the Shadow production May 6 to 24, 2026.

Meanwhile, the current season continues with Kristen Da Silva’s Where You Are, through May 18. The 12thnight review is here.

Further information and subscriptions for the 2025-2026 Shadow season: shadowtheatre.org.

   

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