It’s the Year of the Arts here in Newfoundland and Labrador, and Persistence is celebrating with a massive Women’s Play Festival! And, with a little sense of déjà vu, I am heading down to the First Light Centre for Performance and Creativity on Cochrane Street to see my own work twice.
First up: tonight, an all-star cast are reading Factory Girls, with direction from the amazing Jeannette Lambermont-Morey. Jeannette read the script a while ago and has been looking for a way to get it in front of an audience ever since. It does have 10 people in it, so financing any professional version of this is pretty tricky, but with help from Persistence, we were able to get a group together for one rehearsal and a tech before tonight’s reading.
Reading a new draft of the play (thanks to the incredible help of Berni Stapleton and the workshop actors at the Women’s Work Festival back in March), we will have:
Allison Clarke, Willow Kean, Alexis Koetting, Kiersten Noel, Jillian Rees-Brown, Willa Small, Robyn Vivian, Bridget Wareham, Melissa Williams, and Alison Woolridge.
Dreamy.
Then, on Thursday, another incredible group of womxn will do a more-staged-than-average staged reading of Is This The Hill You Wish You’d Died On? by Trudy Morgan-Cole, with direction by yours truly.
Trudy is an awesome novelist, and she also wrote The Mirror and A Place to Call Home for the Cupids Legacy Centre, so we have worked together a little bit in the last couple of years. We were recently paired for a manuscript evaluation through WritersNL, and that’s when I first met Taylorbeth and her complicated graveyard family. To my delight, Trudy asked me to extend my dramaturgy into a bit of direction for this festival, so I have been happily working with Mandy Armstrong-Singer, Jean Graham, Christine Hennebury, Melissa Ralph, Nicole Redmond, Gabrielle Therrien, and Alison Woolridge to bring these women ‘to life,’ so to speak. As a bonus, Emma Cole joined us as production assistant and provided a little costuming.
The festival has been going since the 17th, to great acclaim, and Persistence has done something very smart: they have engaged a reviewer! It is darn near impossible to get a live performance reviewed in this town in traditional media, so as a leg up to the artists involved in the festival, Persistence has paid for one to turn up and write about us. Her notes on the performances are here – I imagine some thoughts about these two works will turn up in there pretty soon!