Magnetic North: scripts are back in with Vancouver New Play Festival

In keeping with Magnetic North’s mandate as a national festival, this year’s edition of the Vancouver New Play Festival has a distinctly national feel. Moved from its usual May slot to June in order to coincide with Magnetic North, about half the scripts in this year’s play-reading series are from other parts of the country.

The New Play Festival – which opened last night with a playwrights cabaret – has been running for over 30 years and features staged readings of new scripts from a mixture of experienced and emerging playwrights. Not only are the readings a chance to hear new work in development, it is also an opportunity to see some of Vancouver’s top actors working in a more casual setting, scripts in hand. There is a rough joy to the New Play Festival and the chance to “discover” a new work and then act a bit smug when a full production arrives a year or so later (or, better still, become a proselytizer for this exciting play/playwright that no one else has heard of yet).

This is not the first time a play-reading series has featured at Magnetic North. For a number of years the Festival included an event known as On the Verge which featured, among many other notable Canadian playwrights, one Ken Cameron, current Artistic Director of Magnetic North. As former Executive Director of the Alberta Playwrights' Network (APN), a provincial organization devoted to developing plays and playwrights, Cameron knows full well how important it is for both the playwright and their script to be given this sort of platform.

“As a playwright, it’s really great to be able to say we have a reading series nested within Magnetic North once more” said Cameron. “From my experience at both APN and in participating at On the Verge, I saw how much it matters. And as a Festival, we know how this stuff makes an impact. The role the development process has had on a work such as Where the Blood Mixes shows how important workshopping and play-reading are. It was personally important to me that we make room once more for a script series such as the New Play Festival within Magnetic North.”

Martin Kinch, Executive Director of the Playwrights Theatre Centre (PTC), the producers of the New Play Festival, is also pleased that their event can help make up for the loss of On the Verge. Kinch saw On the Verge as an extremely effective way of creating national exposure for individual playwrights and their work. While lamenting the loss of the old series, he is delighted that PTC can step up this year and take the advantage of a national audience that Magnetic North attracts, including, crucially, industry delegates who might be looking for new work. To maximise this opportunity, Kinch has selected work that he describes as “on the edge of production”, that is close to the end of its development cycle.

The Canada-wide flavour of this year’s New Play Festival not only reinforces PTC’s national remit it also demonstrates the growing links between play development centres across the country. For example, Carmen Aguirre’s The Blue Box, directed by Brian Quirt was commissioned and developed by Toronto’s Nightswimming, while Greg MacArthur’s Tyland, directed by Emma Tibaldo was developed at Playwrights Workshop Montreal. Two years ago, PTC launched its own playwrights colony, based on Granville Island, which has now paid dividends with Stori ya by Toronto’s Joan Kivanda.

In a sense, this year’s New Play Festival is a celebration of the health of the play development system in Canada. Kinch believes that the interconnectedness that this year’s Festival displays is an outcome of the dialogue that is taking place on a national level. Play development centres are starting to feel their muscles, which in turn is helping to set up national – not just local – opportunities for both playwrights and their scripts. Kinch believes that this sort of exchanging and showcasing of work from across the country will become an increasing feature in years to come, not just at PTC but at other play development centres and play-reading series nationally. A sample of one innovation is that Great Canadian Theatre Company is proposing to host a play-reading series in years that Magnetic North is not in Ottawa.

The work runs at this year’s Festival ranges from intense, one person pieces through to weird and wonderful animal stories. It will also once again include work produced through The News, PTC’s commissioning program for young playwrights. The program has been very successful at giving profile to playwrights at the start of their careers and this year features work Matthew Heiti and Tanya Marquardt.

The national platform Magnetic North provides to the New Play Festival will allow the wider theatre community to reflect on the value of the well-crafted text. It also provides a nice balance to the largely creation-based work of HIVE2 a few miles to the East of Granville Island. And, at $5.00 a go, the series represents a terrific bargain. Just a quick note, the series format is different this year with two shows running each night, starting this evening with Stori ya at 7:00 pm and the Blue Box at 9:00 pm.

Timed this year to coincide with the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, the 2008 New Play Festival on Granville Island runs June 10-14
and features a packed week of staged readings of brand-new works by
local and national playwrights. Presented by Playwrights Theatre
Centre, all readings take place at PTC Studio in Festival House on Granville
Island, and admission is $5 at the door. To reserve your tickets,
contact PTC at 604-685-6228.