Meet the Playwrights! ATP Assembles The Playwrighting Unit
Read time: 9.5 minutes
In early September, Alberta Theatre Projects announced the 2020-21 Playwrights Unit, continuing the company’s longstanding commitment to the development of new Canadian plays.
The Playwrights Unit allows both emerging and established artists to have the support of a major theatre company and a cohort of mentors, while gaining access to resources to create new works. The Unit is designed to nurture artists, bringing together new perspectives and approaches to creation. Through this process, Alberta Theatre Projects acts as both an advocate and a home for playwrights, providing flexible and responsive dramaturgical support to feed the creation and production of new theatrical work.
Unit members will meet regularly through the year to develop their projects, culminating in a public reading of excerpts of these new plays in May 2021.
MEET THE PLAYWRIGHTS
Dale Lee Kwong is a Calgary-based poet, playwright, and essayist. A native Calgarian, she is third-generation Chinese-Canadian. Her work explores Chinese-Canadian history, diversity & inclusion, adoption, and LGBTQ issues. She is an advocate and volunteer for Calgary’s Chinatown. In a former life, she was a TV News Editor.
What made you want to be a playwright?
I always wanted to be a writer, though not necessarily a playwright. However, I also knew it would be hard to earn a living as a writer, so I spent almost 30 years working in television. During that time, I took creative writing courses at the University of Calgary and theatre workshops through Alberta Playwrights’ Network. My early attempts were mostly poetry and essay. Once I experienced sitting in the audience while professional actors read my work, I was hooked on playwrighting. The funny thing is that I didn’t realize how my years editing news stories would prepare me for telling stories with just dialogue.
What is your most memorable arts experience?
In February 2017, Mark Bellamy at Lunchbox Theatre announced ‘Ai Yah! Sweet and Sour Secrets’ in their upcoming season. Even though I knew before the announcement, this photo of me captures my complete joy at reaching a goal I’ve had since attending Stage One workshops in high school. Of course, it was nothing but sweet each day of its three-week run a year later.
As a writer, nothing beats hearing the audience response to a live play!
What play would you recommend that any theatre lover should see at some point in their lives?
I was fortunate to visit London, England, last year. The most memorable play was An Evening with Ian McKellen. It was a fundraiser he did for each theatre he performed in, 80 shows before his 80th birthday. He opened with a fantastic performance from Lord of the Rings. The second half of the show he worked his way through every Shakespeare play, either a monologue or anecdote about a time he was a character in said play. What an amazing retrospective that was. In lieu of that, I’d recommend the two-part Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In London if you can!
What’s your favourite place to eat in Calgary?
Chinatown! There are different places for every mood, here are my go-to places: Calgary Court (HK style/diner), Great Taste (Shanghai soup dumplings), Ho Won (classic, inexpensive dishes), Wai’s BBQ House (2-meat lunchbox), Silver Dragon (dim sum), and U and Me (great late-night secret!)
You have 2 hours of chill time, where are you hanging out and what are you doing?
I would be walking or playing fetch someplace nice with my border-collie heeler cross, Fonzarelli Kwong. Fonzie likes to herd me away from the computer, LOL.
Natalie Meisner is a playwright, an award-winning multi-genre author and 5th Poet Laureate of Calgary. Her work often deploys the power of comedy for social change. Some of her work includes: Baddie One Shoe, Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story, Boom Baby (winner of both the Canadian National & the Alberta Playwriting Award), and Speed Dating for Sperm Donors. Her book Double Pregnant: Two Lesbians Make a Family topped non-fiction lists and her first book for kids My Mommy, My Mama, My Brother & Me is about a two-mom biracial family finding community.
Meisner is a wife and mom to two great boys and a Professor in the Department of English at Mount Royal University where she works in the areas of creative writing, drama and gender/ sexuality studies.
What made you want to be a playwright?
Live theatre was the place where I learned I was entitled to full humanity. To be unashamed of who I am... and help others do the same. It was where I learned that what we say to one another and how we say it to one another matters so very much. To stick up for people who are like me, and also people who are not like me. Even when it is hard. Theatre is where I learned to overestimate all audiences, suffer no fools, and waste no one's time. Where I learned that playing pretend is serious business and really can change the world. I miss that moment where we all sit in darkness and breathe. I miss your liveness, your intakes of breath, your bodies in space... until soon, my friends.
What is your most memorable arts experience?
So hard to pick! Being a part of the wonderful atmosphere and working on my play about the Fishery and fishing rights (AREA 33) at the women's work festival in Newfoundland was the last live theatre experience I had, so I keep it close to my heart. www.womensworkfestival.ca
Also taking students on a field trip across the Atlantic and going with them to an eight-hour theatre epic in Vienna!
What play would you recommend that any theatre lover should see at some point in their lives?
The Unnatural and Accidental Women by Marie Clements or Daniel MacIvor's Never Swim Alone.
What’s your favourite place to eat in Calgary?
Blowers & Grafton a cozy cozy pub with great fish. A little bit of the Maritimes on the prairie.
You have 2 hours of chill time, where are you hanging out and what are you doing?
Hiking with my sons. Or reading poetry in a cozy hidden outdoor spot.
Camille Pavlenko is a playwright and actor. This season, as part of the Playwrights’ Unit at Alberta Theatre Projects, she’ll be working on expanding her award-winning comedy, Go for Gold, Audrey Pham. This October, look for her radio play, The Hitchhiker which will be produced by Vertigo Theatre as part of their Mystery Radio Series. Camille was most recently seen onstage in Noises Off (Theatre Calgary), The Outsider (Stage West Theatre), and Blackbird (Verb Theatre). She is the recipient of the Allied Arts Council’s Young Artist Award and is a Betty Mitchell Award nominee. Camille is currently the Playwright in Residence at Alberta Theatre Projects.
What made you want to be a playwright?
I’ve always been into writing. When I was a kid, I wrote a lot of poems and short stories and Lord of the Rings fan-fiction. I liked that it could help me imagine and explore and rant and dream on a page, in a way that didn’t start with “Dear Diary”, and with the intention of eventually sharing it with other people.
When I started going to theatre school, though, for acting, it was a while before I made that connection from love of writing into writing for theatre. Legitimately, one of the reasons it took me a while to even consider trying to write a script was that I already had a friend who was a playwright.
That’s his thing, I thought, I don’t want to step on that. Which—there are not enough LOLs in the world that can describe how ridiculous that is. But thinking like that was sincerely an early barrier for me starting out.
What is your most memorable arts experience?
This is a very deep-cut, hipster answer, but *pushes tortoise shell glasses up* I saw this show at the Edmonton Fringe a few years ago that blew my mind. It was called My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice, and it’s one of those plays that is probably OK as a script on paper (no offense, British theatre group who made this) but it just sings once it’s actually onstage. That show employs spectacular design, performances, and all of the best kinds of theatre magic.
I’ve never before seen an audience of adults, myself included, just be so charmed for an hour and a half.
What play would you recommend that any theatre lover should see at some point in their lives?
It’s not done nearly enough, but The Matka King, by Anosh Irani, is my favourite play. It’s full of magic realism, gorgeous details, and heartbreaking characters. He’s a novelist as well, so the script itself reads fluidly, like a story.
My hope is obviously that it gets to go through one of those simultaneous resurgences, like when theatre companies coast-to-coast all do Venus in Fur in the same season, but until then, I highly recommend it simply as a read.
If you haven’t ever read a play before (other than Shakespeare, forcibly, for school) it’s great—it takes a couple of hours to read the whole thing, tops, there’s a massive selection of them at the public library, and you get to sound so cultured the next time you talk to someone you want to impress.
What’s your favourite place to eat in Calgary?
There’s this tiny, little bakery hidden away in the Devenish building on 17th Ave, called Butter Block. They make amazing pastries, like egg tarts and a stellar rosemary ham & cheese croissant. And they haven’t closed down! They’re still going!
You have 2 hours of chill time, where are you hanging out and what are you doing?
If it’s in Calgary, I’m gonna go to WOW Chicken downtown because their cheese fries are everything, and then I’m getting a fish waffle ice cream from Uzu Taiyaki. And then I’m going to the Zoo. Because I have a membership and I love doing things that I think are free, but I’ve actually just paid for them in advance.
However, if it’s anywhere in the galaxy and we’re playing by superhero/teleportation rules, for sure Venus. They just found possible evidence of life there, so it seems like the cool place to be right now. I mean, it’s probably either spores or gas-related spores, but still cool.
Makambe K. Simamba is a Dora Award winning playwright and actor for her solo work, Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers (b current performing arts). She is 2020-21 Urjo Kareda Artist in Residence at the Tarragon Theatre. Makambe is a University of Lethbridge graduate, and a proud Zambian whose intention is to be of service through her ability to tell stories.
What made you want to be a playwright?
I did my undergrad at the University of Lethbridge. I found the drama department to be full of magic, but lacking in melanin! So, I decided to write for myself, and the rest, as they say, is herstory. Also, my ancestors told me to. They know literally everything, so when they speak, I listen.
What is your most memorable arts experience?
When my solo show Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers premiered in Toronto in April 2019, I was delighted to meet the several Black teens who came to the show. I remember a particular matinee at which I met a young man of about fifteen. I learned that mine was the first play he'd ever seen. I was so delighted that the very first play he'd ever seen was dark-skinned, and slang, and hip hop, and Blackity Black. Then, in an instant, I was humbled that this play that so acutely reflected his demographic was about a teenager whose life was brutally and unfairly taken. Suddenly, the moment was just as bitter as it was sweet. It was a humbling reminder that my play is not just a play, but a prayer. In retrospect, I can now articulate that plays are the vehicle through which I am supposed to execute my life's purpose...and I won't stop driving anytime soon.
What play would you recommend that any theatre lover should see at some point in their lives?
bug by Yolanda Bonnell.
What’s your favourite place to eat in Calgary?
Simply Irie! If you haven't had their oxtail...are you even living?
You have 2 hours of chill time, where are you hanging out and what are you doing?
LOL, what's chill time??
Just kidding! (Sorta) One of the best gifts that Calgary has given me is an immaculate group of friends. When I'm not hustling, you can find me curled up on one of their couches, cradling a cup of tea, and basking in the beauty and scrumptious safety of chosen fam.
