Madeline made her NotaBle Acts debut in 2020 and is back this year with two new plays.  

It’s always great to welcome back playwrights from past seasons, and it’s especially great when we get to see new playwrights willing to share their work with us. Madeline Savoie fits into both these categories. After making her debut last year with her first play, Out of Water, Madeline is back with a pair of plays in our 2021 lineup. Her work this year will be included in both our Taking it to the Streets series of 10-minute plays, and our Play Out Loud series of readings. 

You made your debut at last year’s festival. Can you backtrack a bit and tell us about your experience as a featured artist in last year’s NotaBle Acts?

It was such a wonderful experience. Out of Water was not only my first foray into NotaBle Acts, it was my first completed play. Naturally, I was very nervous, especially since the subject matter of the play, which deals with coming out to a parent as a queer teenager, was so personal. However, every person I interacted with over the course of the festival was immensely welcoming and happy to help me develop my writing skills. I learned a great deal, and I don’t think I could have asked for a better debut as a playwright.

What was one of the big takeaways from your 2020 NotaBle Acts experience? 

The experience taught me the value of play readings. In a year where large-scale, highly produced shows were understandably scarce, I gained a great appreciation for the worlds that can be created by a handful of actors sitting at a table. It’s ‘theatre-of-the-mind’ in a very literal sense. Ever since, I have been trying to seek out readings, both to participate in as an actor, and simply to enjoy as an audience member.

 What can you tell us about your play Graffiti, which will be featured in this year’s Taking it to the Streets series? 

Graffiti is a play chronicling a single act of rebellion within a high school, and the ripple effects it produces among the students and staff. It’s short, quippy, a little angsty, and a lot of fun.

What’s your relationship to the story and what inspired you to put this story into a play?

From a technical perspective, I was interested in writing a play that contained several short scenes. There are five scenes within the span of ten minutes. I also wanted to explore the idea of perspective. How do different people respond to the same situation? How do they discuss it amongst themselves? A high school felt like the perfect setting to explore these ideas. It’s so rich with tropes and character archetypes, and I had a lot of fun playing with them.

You have two plays in this year’s festival, the other being Limbo, which will be presented as a runner-up in the Acting Out category. What’s that play about?

Limbo is an emotional, funny, and slightly spooky exploration of what it means to grow up and graduate, and how it feels to live in the space between childhood and adulthood. I’ve been working on it for nearly a year, and the characters have begun to feel like close friends to me. I’m very excited to hear it out loud.

Can you comment on the value NotaBle Acts provides to young writers like yourself? 

There’s something truly magical about hearing your words brought to life. NotaBle provides that opportunity by pairing playwrights with a director and team of actors who care deeply about the work they do.  NotaBle also does this really generous thing of allowing playwrights to sit in on rehearsals. There really isn’t anything like hearing a director praise a subtlety of your script that was completely unintentional, or listening to an actor contextualize a character’s choices in a way you’d never considered. To be able to be a part of that space, especially as a young writer, is very valuable indeed. Additionally, the opportunity to receive professional dramaturgy from an experienced theatre artist is a very rare and important one. I’m so happy these opportunities exist in New Brunswick, especially the middle and high school contest categories. Not only are we allowed to enter the space of older, more experienced playwrights, there is within those categories a space created specifically for us. 

Madeline Savoie is a playwright, actor, musician, and recent graduate of École Sainte-Anne.  Her debut play, Out of Water, was featured in the 2020 editions of the NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival and the Plain Site Theatre Festival. She has acted with several local theatre groups including Theatre New Brunswick (Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz), the Calithumpians, Impulse Productions (Matilda), and St. Thomas University’s Propel Festival (Knock). Madeline will be attending Concordia University in the fall and will be pursuing a BFA with a specialization in Performance Creation. In her free time, she enjoys biking with a podcast in her earbuds, and trying to make a perfect fettucine alfredo. 

Hicks’ short comedy about life in 2021 will be staged as part of this year’s Taking it to the Streets series of 10-minute plays. 

We’re excited to welcome back filmmaker, illustrator and playwright Brandon Hicks for our 20^th anniversary festival. This year Brandon’s work will be featured as part of our Taking it to the Streets series, a collection of four 10-minute plays performed in an outdoor setting.  This year’s series will mark Brandon’s fourth festival appearance. His play A Reunion of Lovers will be featured together with work by emerging playwrights McKenna Boeckner, Madeline Savoie and Monika Rennick.

Brandon traces his love for creating theatre back to his time as a producer with Next Folding Theatre Company. After finishing school and leaving Fredericton, he has remained connected to theatre through his involvement with NotaBle Acts and cites the short play format as a contributing factor, especially for a comedy writer. 

“It’s perfect for comedy. All you really need is a funny concept and a couple of engaging characters, then you can just fill the thing with jokes,” he said. “Longer plays require deeper, overarching themes, multi-faceted characters, and an involved plot. Not that you can’t go deep in a short play, but the fact is, you just don’t have as much time.”

Working within time restraints allows very little time for an actor to develop a character’s personality, which is another reason Brandon enjoys working within this format.

“You need to fulfil the potential of your funny idea as quickly as possible,” he said. “The upside of this is that I get to see the actors and directors really bring more of themselves into it. The characters are often less specifically outlined, which forces those filling the roles to bring more of themselves into the play, which I believe brings a great deal of life and vitality to the production that goes far beyond the script. As a playwright, that’s extremely satisfying.”

With A Reunion of Lovers, Brandon looked to the current climate for comedic inspiration. 

“I wanted to write something that feels very ‘of the moment,’ and takes a head-on approach to addressing just how weird it is to gather together and play pretend after a global pandemic. I was fascinated by that tension of trying to move forward and create, while at the same time, remaining anxious and uncertain about what the future holds. It’s exciting to return, but it’s also kind of scary. And, like all things that scare me, I wanted to try to find a way to laugh at it.”

Brandon describes A Reunion of Lovers as a play about the state of live theatre itself as actors, directors and producers try to move forward after the recent pandemic.

“It’s very much a ‘2021’ play, which I’m especially excited about,” he said. “The fact that it’s a live performance about something very specific happening right now in our culture makes it feel like a very singular event. My plays tend to require a lot of props, costumes and intense physicality. I’m a cartoonist, by trade, so it’s just how my mind works. And this is probably my most complex yet. I don’t envy the actors, but they have my full confidence.”

In putting each new festival lineup together, we enjoy seeing new work from new playwrights as much as we enjoy receiving submissions from writers like Brandon who have, through repeated submissions, become part of our extended family. 

“If it wasn’t for Notable Acts, I don’t think that I’d still be writing plays at all. It’s really hard for someone who isn’t consistently and actively involved in theatre to find an outlet and to get their work performed. You have to write the play, find a space, find actors, find directors, and market it. For many, that is just a series of impossible tasks. Notable Acts has all of that infrastructure in place, and they take chances on unique plays from anybody who wants to submit. There are a ton of wannabe playwrights out there just looking for their chance. Notable Acts gives them that opportunity.”

Brandon Hicks is a writer, cartoonist and filmmaker based out of New Brunswick. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including CBC, The Maritime Edit, The Manatee and The Rumpus, where he also serves as Comics Editor. He’s written and directed a number of staged plays, and his short films have won awards from international film festivals. In 2021, he released two illustrated books—That’s Not True! (with Shauna Chase), and Seven Easy Steps to Go To Hell. He loves what he does. 

See Brandon Hicks’ A Reunion of Lovers as part of our 2021 Taking it to the Streets series. These plays will be performed as an hour of free theatre July 26-29 in Officer’s Square beginning at 7:30 p.m.