By Ryan Pike
In Calgary, February is typically a horrible time of year. Snow covers the city and eventually turns to ice while temperatures plunge far below freezing and force citizens indoors to wait out winter’s frosty embrace. Every year, though, Alberta Theatre Projects provides Calgarians with a reason to brave the cold: the Enbridge playRites Festival. Produced annually by ATP since 1987, playRites is a showcase for a collection of new Canadian plays. For past few years, the task of putting together an all-star line-up of plays has fallen upon ATP dramaturg Vicki Stroich and her team. She notes that plays have to meet a set of specific criteria before they’re considered for a spot in the festival.
“First of all, we’re the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays,” says Stroich. “So we’re looking for plays that haven’t had production yet or plays that haven’t had professional production yet. We’re looking for something that’s new and something that’s still in process, the writer or the creators are still working on them very hard to put together for production.”
The process of choosing plays for the playRites festival is long and arduous, beginning a long time before the festival actually opens. Stroich and her team pour through hundreds of plays per year, looking for unique projects to put centre stage.
“Over the course of the year we read or listen to readings of about 150 plays, somewhere between 150 and 200 depending on the year,” says Stroich. “We process a lot of stories. We think about a lot of stories. We usually are bringing it down to a list of probably about 10 or 12 projects, and then we choose the five we are going to put in the festival. Usually just as the festival is ending, we make the decision for what we want to program in the festival in the next year.”
Stroich notes that the festival is constructed with the audience in mind. Each play is meticulously examined and weighed against the others, with only the cream of the crop emerging each year on their stage.
“We’re responding like we would if we were in the audience,” says Stroich. “How interested are we in the story and how touched are we by the characters? How interested are we in some of the ideas or some of the emotions the play puts together? We want to put together a very interesting group of five plays for our audience to experience, so we’re looking for the uniqueness of the way they tell the stories and how interesting the story is to us.”
The festival organizers take great pride in presenting a diverse, unique festival from year-to-year. Stroich says that while playRites aims to vary which playwrights are showcased each year, they’re not averse to bringing back creators whose work merits it.
“We have a lot of playwrights that come back to the festival several times,” says Stroich. “But we’ll try not to put the same playwright two years in a row or something like that. There is a bit of a thought put into varying the festival from year to year, but we really do think of each of them as their own animal.”
In the hustle and bustle of Calgary’s cultural life, people looking for entertainment in their lives have more choices than ever. The Enbridge playRites festival designs itself to stand out from the crowd.
“Calgary has a lot of wonderful new work that happens,” says Stroich. “For me, the benefit is that it’s the opportunity to see something absolutely new–actually, to see five absolutely new, entirely different things. The uniqueness of the experience is in the variety and the freshness of the work.”
For Calgary theatergoers, Feb. is most definitely not a barren wasteland of ice and snow. Instead, it may be the highlight of their year, with the playRites festival shining bright as a showcase for Canadian playwrights from Victoria to St. John’s and many points in between.
Check out atplive.com for full festival schedule and ticket info.