Author: nbacts2013

Meet the Playwright: Tilly Jackson

We’re very happy to have Tilly with us again this year.  When it comes to Fredericton theatre, Tilly has done it all. As an actor, a writer and a director who has appeared in productions by UNB Drama, Theatre St. Thomas, and Bard in the Barracks, Tilly brings a wealth of experience to this year’s festival.

This year Tilly will be directing a reading of Alex Donovan’s new play The Forerunner as well as Mercury, a new play by Clarissa Hurley. She also wrote a play for this year’s Taking It To The Streets series of lunchtime performances.

We caught up with Tilly to learn a bit more about her work with the festival this year.

What can you tell us about your play Everything Bagel?

Everything Bagel is about Chris, a girl who’s recently gone through a bad breakup, and her sister Cecily, an actress who is visiting from New York. They meet up in this bagel shop in Chris’s hometown to catch up after some time apart, and they talk about everything from cardigans to soulmates. The conversation seems light, but they’ve each got their own issues going on under the surface. Even though they’re sisters, they’re very different people, which is always great fodder for comedy, but there are also some really touching moments.

How many plays have you written now for NotaBle Acts?

This is my third play to be produced with NotaBle Acts – my one-act Jolt was one of four staged Acting Out readings in 2015, my 10-minute Here Be Dragons was featured in Taking It To The Streets last year, and of course Everything Bagel is also in Taking It To The Streets this year. I feel very lucky to have this wonderful festival in New Brunswick that creates these amazing opportunities for local artists!

Did you write Everything Bagel specifically for the Taking It To The Streets series or was it an idea you’ve been playing with for a while now?

This idea and these characters have been floating around in my head for a while. The story actually started as a rambling work of fiction in the hazy days of a boring summer job several years ago, and while I quickly abandoned the work, the characters really stuck with me. Two years ago, on the eve of the annual NB Acts playwriting competition deadline, I sat myself down and hammered out a 10-minute play about them and submitted it. The play didn’t get into the festival then, because it was a terrible first draft, but it was more of a challenge to myself to actually hone my ideas and see what I could do with them. After quite a bit of revising and rewriting and reshuffling, I submitted it again this year and here we are!

You’re also directing the one acts, Mercury and The Forerunner. How’s that been going? 

They’re both going really well! The Play Out Loud series is always one of the highlights of the festival for me, as it provides this awesome opportunity for playwrights to hear their work performed, and also to hear feedback from an audience, but without the pressure of having it all finalized and figured out. Often the scripts in this series get reworked and re-submitted after the fact and become something totally different, and it’s really freeing to see the whole process.

How does this compare to other plays you’ve directed for the festival?

I directed Caroline Coon’s one-act It Happened At A Party last year, and before that I’d previously directed a couple of the street theatre pieces in other years. I love working with evolving scripts, and of course this year it’s a little less stressful knowing that they will be readings and not fully produced shows. I’d say the processes are pretty different: in previous years, most of our rehearsals focused on blocking and getting off-book and having sets and costumes and everything; however, with a reading, our rehearsals are mainly about the characters. It’s kind of a stripped down way of working on a show, where you can just really delve into a character without getting wrapped up in the technical details. Since NB Acts is such a playwright-oriented festival, I see the Play Out Loud readings as being mostly for the benefit of the playwright and their continued development of the script. In that sense, then, my job as a director is much more scaled-back; it’s less about having creative control over a production, and more about getting people together and discussing the script in depth so that the playwright can see how it works out loud.

All in all, I’m very excited for this year’s festival, and can’t wait to share what I’ve been working on, and also to see all the other incredible shows!

Taking It To The Streets: Four 10-minute plays |  12 p.m. – 1 p.m. | Outdoors at the Café Beaverbrook atrium July 30th-Aug 1st; Outdoors at Picaroons Roundhouse Aug 2nd-3rd. Free Admission, with donations accepted.

Play Out Loud: Readings of New Plays in Development | Mercury – 3:30 Sat, Aug 4th at Renaissance College, Admission by donation

Meet the Playwright Jean-Michel Cliche

Jean-Michel Cliche is no stranger to the NotaBle Acts stage. For the past several seasons he has participated as an actor, a director and as a playwright.  Though his work with Next Folding Theatre Company, Solo Chicken Productions and his recent work with the Hot Garbage Players as a writer, performer, and educator, Jean-Michel has become one of the foremost proponents of live theatre and live performance in the city of Fredericton.

At our festival this season, Jean-Michel is both a featured playwright and a director. His piece S.C.O.P.E. will be featured as part of this year’s site-specific walking tour of performances. He is also directing Alex Pannier’s play Casualties, one of two plays featured in this year’s Acting Out series of one acts plays.

We started our conversation with Jean-Michel by asking about this year’s site-specific work.

“S.C.O.P.E. is a pair of monologues that I wrote that are both set in these sci-fi future worlds,” he said. “The idea is that it’s taking very common everyday life problems and cranking them up to 11 in a sci-fi universe. I really like the idea of how sci-fi is able to take subjects and look at them under a microscope and analyze them in such a weird/fantasy way that doesn’t feel preachy.

“One monologue is about a teenage girl who is dealing with the feeling of being a teenager where she doesn’t feel like she can be herself and she takes it all out on a robot who is waiting for the bus. The other one takes place in Officer’s Square and features a time traveler who has come back in time to warn Fredericton not to cut down the trees in Officer’s Square. Two things that were born on their own and I thought they’d fit together well thematically.”

While both appearing under a single title, S.C.O.P.E.’s monologues will be offering something new to the festival’s traditional site-specific model.

“I’ve written a few site-specific plays for NotaBle Acts before but I wanted to try and do something different, so this time, instead of writing one play for one location, I thought about these micro-moments that could show up and almost act as junctions between some of the other site-specific plays,” he said.

“I had so much fun writing these two plays that I’ve already started to write more of them in hopes of creating a collection for future festivals. It’s been a fun process and I think they’re different enough from the way other site-specific plays have taken place in previous years that they’ll be a fun way to break up the traditional model which is something I think is important.”

S.C.O.P.E. will be presented July 30, 31 and August 1 as part of this year’s series, Street Scenes: Three Site-Specific Plays.  

As one of this year’s featured festival directors, Jean-Michel will also be directing Alex Pannier’s play Casualties as part of the series Acting Out: Two One Act Plays which takes place August 2-4 and Memorial Hall.

“I think it’s a really, really interesting piece of theatre,” said Cliche.

“It sort of deals with these two siblings who are commiserating together about this trauma they’ve had in their lives.  The whole play takes place through memory so sometimes the actors are playing adults and sometime they’re children. We get to see that as they go back through various experiences in their lives. They’re popping all through time exploring their past trauma and their past shared history.”

Without giving too much away, the play also incorporates the use of masks when the actors are remembering their parent’s words and actions.

“It becomes this really interesting archetype of what parents are like and how children remember their parents,” said Cliche. “The masks allow us to do all this hyperbolic exaggeration as to how the kids remember their parents being.

“Alex did a really good job creating all these different tools for telling the story, but he also did something not of lot of young playwrights feel comfortable with. He let go in the sense that he created these elements but didn’t hammer in a lot of specific stage direction. So there are a lot of different ways we can play and explore.

“It’s a beautiful play.”