Let's Write A Play

by Dennis Johnson, Community Theatre Coordinator

I’ve just finished reading 38 plays—all of them submissions to our forthcoming Playwrights Canada Press anthology.  All of them were plays premiered at community theatres in Ontario, written by local playwrights rooted in the community where the play was produced.  Of those 38 plays, there are 16 that I would label comedies and 17 dramas.  The rest are a bit of both—everything from verse drama to murder mysteries to historical pageants to melodramas. And there sure were a lot of kilts.

Kilts are a versatile costume.  They can produce comedy, historical tragedy, laughter and tears.  And when they appear in a play, poetry is recited and bagpipe music is magically heard in the distance.  Cue the sound designer.

I jest.  Reading these 38 plays does in fact give me a clear picture of what is important to Ontario communities.  What their passions are.  Who their voice is.  Even when they aren’t wearing kilts.

What is clear from my reading of these plays is that Ontario is a place that shares its thoughts, its hopes and fears, with similar places around the world.  Our concerns are universal.  Together these plays gave me a picture of the world we live in, the issues at the heart of our experience—Citizenship, Death, Old Age, Young Love, Sisterhood.

The relationship between two sisters and their dead or dying parent is a recurring theme.  (Alzheimers also emerges as a form of death resulting in its own form of grieving.)  When a parent fades away, attention must be paid to certain changes.  What is my role in the family?  What will be my role when mother is gone?  Who is my sister?  Is she part of my future?  Often it is photograph albums, old letters, even recipes that force us to recall and re-structure the past.

Sisterhood is part of a wider theme, the family.  A young urban professional, uprooted from the family of childhood, relocated in a new place, attempting to consolidate a new circle of friends—this is the stuff of love stories and comedy.  A character who has lost his roots is in a storm of chaos, a life full of surprises both adventurous and funny.  The unexpected is dramatic.

The workplace is another theme that our community theatre plays examine.  What better location for a murder mystery than a place where a police officer is completely ill at ease—an art gallery for example, or amongst a group of lawyers.  The workplace is not a stable place.  Jobs are under threat.  Personal relationships interfere.  Boredom creates subversive activity.  Outsiders and newcomers feel out of place. Insecurity can be great fun for an author and an audience.

But secure roots can produce a different form of anxiety.  A young person reared on the farm, or emerging from years and years of idyllic summer holiday routines in the same place, can suddenly be faced with choices and changes forced by the outside world.  The city beckons.  Farming methods change.  New ideas make enemies.  University can shift a young person into a new level of society rendering childhood friends obsolete.  War challenges our principles and our patriotism.  Marriage, especially for women, takes away independence—and dreams.

Most of these plays examine our roots (or lack of them) and how they affect our choices.  Where do I belong?  Urban or rural?  This job or that one?  There or here?  Home or away?  With this spouse or that one?  Soldiering or protesting?  These are plays about individuals who are exploring the changes that life forces on them as values and events change around them.

Some would call our community playwrights amateurs—whatever that means.  It is difficult to convince publishers that a play is worth publishing if it has not had a professional production—whatever that means. Many thoughtful and producible plays are overlooked in our culture because we have strange criteria for separating worthy from not worthy.  Thanks to Playwrights Canada Press, this initiative to publish an anthology of locally written plays will rescue a few of the worthies from oblivion and these plays may see future life on the stages of Ontario’s theatres.