Copyright 2001 by Edward Willett

For the last couple of weeks the Pulitzer-Prize winning play Wit has been on at the Globe Theatre. This intense piece about an English professor dying of ovarian cancer has touched many people very deeply. If you missed it here, perhaps you can catch it elsewhere; it's being done all over the country.

Last week, as well, Regina Little Theatre presented the farce Will Any Gentleman? Audiences got a kick out of this story about a very dull man whose inhibitions are released by a stage hypnotist, with unpredictable and funny results.

This week, there's even more live theatre to choose from.

To begin with, there's Opera Saskatchewan's production of The Marriage of Figaro, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (a promising young composer who's really making a name for himself--as you'll see in Globe Theatre's production of Amadeus, a play about Mozart, coming later this spring!).

The Marriage of Figaro runs at the Centre of the Arts Thursday and Saturday evening at 7:30 p.m. It features an all-Canadian cast and a local chorus and orchestra, and contains some of the most glorious music ever written--don't miss it!

But if you do miss it, check out On the Line at the Globe Theatre. Globe calls this a "free-fall through new work," and that's a pretty accurate description. Back in the fall Globe, in cooperation with the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, solicited new scripts, no longer than 15 minutes, from Saskatchewan writers.

Of the 40 or so scripts that were received, 20 were chosen to be given staged readings this coming weekend. Of those 20, 10 were chosen for additional workshopping--a process that involved meeting with a draumaturge and the other writers being workshopped to discuss the scripts, a considerable amount of rewriting, and finally a reading with actors, leading to the final scripts being staged this Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Globe's Templeton Cabaret space.

I'm very familiar with this process because, as it happens, I'm one of the writers whose scripts were workshopped.

Now, I've acted in more plays and musicals than I can count, but its quite a different thing being the writer of a play and acting in one that someone else has written.

Years ago a one-act play of mine was staged by Western Christian College, then in Weyburn (as was I), and I remember being astonished at how nervous I was as the play began--far more nervous than I almost ever am waiting to go on stage myself.

Yet, its exhilarating, too, quite different from the thrill one gets as a writer simply having a short story published. The difference is that theatre is a collaborative art--perhaps not quite as much so as film, where it seems everyone involved in a production tries his or her hand at rewriting the script, but still, collaborative.

It was fascinating to sit in on the rehearsal last weekend of my piece (which is called Threads, by the way, and will be the last play performed on Saturday night), and hear how the director and actors interpreted my words.

I can't speak for all playwrights, but when I write a play I see the play in my head as I write, see the actors moving in certain ways and hear the words said in certain ways. What I saw in my head was quite different from what Globe is putting on stage--and I couldn't be happier. The director and actors brought their own abilities and sensibilities to bear on my words and images, and the result, though different than what I imagined, is also better and richer than what I imagined.

On the Line runs Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. each night. Writers featured are David Sealy, Darren Foster, Susan Parkin, Dolores Ewen, Robert Currie, Doreen Cutting and Roy Challis on Thursday, Betty Terschuur, Marcia Frid, Vincent Murphy, Cliff Burns, Dan MacDonald and Ken Mitchell on Friday, and Marie Mendenhall, Bruce Rice, Marion Young, Susan Parkin, James Misfeldt, Dave Margoshes and myself on Friday.

Many of the scripts in On the Line have a "fringeish" flavor, in that they wouldn't be out of place (if they were a bit longer) at one Canada's many fringe theatre festivals.

Regina doesn't have a fringe festival, but Rod McDonald, who loves fringe theatre and has written and performed his own plays, is giving the city a taste of fringe theatre this weekend.

He's arranged for two plays that have been hits on the fringe festival circuit, Burnt Tongue and Shylock, to be presented this Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Centre.

In Burnt Tongue, Shannon Calcutt embarks on the search for Mr. Right, while Shylock is John Huston's dissertation on the sanitization of the theatre.

If you've ever wondered what fringe theatre is all about, here's your chance to sample it. Who knows? Maybe someday soon, Regina will have a fringe festival of its own.

Posted September 22, 2004