After making both her playwriting debut and her festival debut last year, Fredericton playwright Gill Salmon shares her latest play Lakeview Hotel as part of our 2023 Acting Out series. 

Gill Salmon is a trained improv performer, a stand-up comedian, and an emerging playwright and screenwriter who recently made her acting debut in Strike Pictures’ upcoming feature film. She also collects prosthetic limbs and has a 12-foot skeleton statue in her backyard that doubles as a Christmas tree during the holiday season. For these reasons and a wealth of others, we are overjoyed to have Gill involved in her second straight season with NotaBle Acts.  

Last year, Gill made her festival debut with a pair of short sketches as part of our Taking It To The Streets series.  And this year, her latest play Lakeview Hotel will be featured as part of our Acting Out series of one-act plays. 

Lakeview Hotel is a ghost story told from a ghost’s perspective, sort of.

“The idea for this play came to me as I was reading a book about writing last August and the book was discussing different perspectives in an environment,” she said. “I’d also been reading a lot of Stephen King and was thinking about where The Shining maybe came from. 

“Hotels are also kind of a weird single serving experience for humans. You’re there for a night or two, you move on. But there are people who work there behind the scenes that you never really see, but their absence would be notable. What if the hotel is known for being haunted, like the Algonquin in St. Andrews? What if people go there for that experience and the hotel management lean into that and somehow convince a few bored ghosts, who are just there passing the time, to do something meaningful while they’re waiting for their unfinished business to be addressed? I liked the idea, drew up an outline, and Lakeview Hotel was born.”

Moving from last year’s site-specific outdoor sketches to our festival stage at Memorial Hall is a big jump for any emerging playwright. Gill is one of just a few in our festival’s history to follow-up both their playwriting debut and their festival debut with a one-act production across back-to-back festivals. 

She credits the variety of local opportunities for inspiring her writing and giving her many of the tools to stay focused on her craft while growing artistically. 

“Fredericton is so rich in resources,” she said. 

Since last year’s festival, Gill has attended workshops at Theatre New Brunswick with Jena McLean and others; took part in NotaBle Acts’ writing workshops with Anthony Bryan; and attended Ryan Griffith’s winter workshop series at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre. She also helped establish the local improv group Dead Serious (whose core members are all featured playwrights in this year’s festival!), and completed the Foundations in Visual Arts program at NBCCD. 

Across all her creative experiences this past year, Gill says the most important thing she learned was to ask questions and step outside her comfort zone.

“The biggest theme for me throughout this past year was getting to the point that I felt comfortable asking these magnificent and brilliant artists for feedback on my work,” she said. “Work with a lot of people, get a lot of different experiences, ask for feedback, do the revisions, build something cool.”

Lakeview Hotel and Night Train by Merrit Johnson will be performed at UNB’s Memorial Hall, August 3-5 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets available at the door for 15$ regular, 10$ senior/student/underwaged.

Photo by Kelly Baker.

As part of our summer theatre festival programming, NotaBle Acts Theatre company is offering a free playwriting workshop with 2023 Playwright in Residence, Julia Lederer.

Date, time, and place: 11 AM-2:30 PM (with a break—bring a snack), Sunday, July 23, Carleton Hall, UNB.

To register, email julia_lederer@yahoo.com

WRITING WORKSHOP: VOICE, CHARACTER, AND CURIOSITY

This workshop will provide participants with new ways into their work: finding driving questions, images, and characters that excite and surprise them.

We will look at different ways of developing characters, exercises in monologue and dialogue writing, and how to create plays that need to happen in a theatre. If desired, participants will have a chance to hear their work on its feet. 

The class will also touch on adaptation from theatre to film, and look at the differences in writing for each medium. 

Julia Lederer is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her plays have been produced all over North America and in Europe, in: Los Angeles, Chicago, Alaska, New York, Paris, etc. Her work has been described as: “wonderfully weird, piercingly poetic and unexpectedly moving” (Crain’s Chicago); “laced with sophisticated poetry and wry insight” (LA Times), and as, “ris[ing] to a rare level of universal truth, all while making us laugh. A lot.” (NewCity Chicago). Julia is an alumnae of Nightwood Theatre’s “Write From the Hip” program, the Whistler Film Festival’s Screenwriters Lab, was a 2023 resident playwright at the Banff Centre for the Arts, working on her play, I AM AN ISLAND. 

Julia’s films have screened at major festivals worldwide, including: the Toronto International Film Festival, Palm Spring, South By SouthWest, Aesthetica, etc. Her work can be found streaming on CBC Gem, Omeleto, and HighballTV.

Most recently, she adapted her hit play, WITH LOVE AND A MAJOR ORGAN, into a feature film that was named “one of the best movies out of SXSW 2023” by Mashable and described as “proof that great stage plays can be adapted into wonderful movies… a whimsical, heartfelt force to be reckoned with” (Dread Central).

Julia worked on KIM’S CONVENIENCE (CBC’s emerging writers room), in addition to writing audio dramas, award-winning commercials, and her first chapbook of poetry (I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT VANISHING, Baseline Press). 

Julia bases her work in emotion and a love of language. She approaches everything with a curiosity about the world and how strange it is to be a human here.

www.julialederer.ca