Chafe returns in all-Canadian PTE playbill

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This article was published 26/03/2011 (5632 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a budding Winnipeg playwright in the late ’80s Rick Chafe saw his first play make it to the Prairie Theatre Exchange stage, but never again.

That personal drought ended yesterday when PTE artistic director Bob Metcalfe announced that Chafe’s father-son drama The Secret Mask would premiere next Nov. 17. The all-Canadian playbill also includes Lost: A Memoir by Portage-born Cathy Ostlere with Dennis Garnhum and the comedy Bingo, the newest work from prominent Cape Breton dramatist Daniel MacIvor, which will open PTE’s 39th season in October.

Metcalfe first encountered The Secret Mask in its infancy when it was a 15-minute short shot that was part of the inaugural Carol Shields Festival of New Works in 2004. It told the story of a son who goes to care for his stroke-stricken father afflicted with severe short-term memory loss. It echoed real events in Chafe’s life.

“It was so interesting I asked him to look at making it a full-length play,” Metcalfe says during an interview outlining his ninth season.

“To me at the time that was the whole play,” recalls Chafe recently. “It summarized all I wanted to say. It was close to documentary.”

The Secret Mask is Chafe’s followup to Shakespeare’s Dog, the 2008 Bard comedy that played the Manitoba Theatre Centre and National Arts Centre in 2008. Chafe’s PTE debut in 1988 was a little remembered collaboration with Bruce McManus and Norm Dugas for student audiences called Talk to Me, Talk to Me. It was quickly followed by his first solo script Player Pool, which was a hit at the first Winnipeg Fringe Festival in 1988. Not only is he celebrating having his new play produced but he has just received news that he has won a major arts grant of $25,000 from the Manitoba Arts Council.

The biggest name on the PTE playlist is MacIvor, who has built a local following with his plays How It Works and especially Marion Bridge. MacIvor is returning the favour by allowing PTE is to be the first company to present Bingo after he personally directs the première production this summer in Nova Scotia.

“It’s the first time I’ve gone for a full-out comedy,” MacIvor says over the telephone from his Toronto home. “I’ve been known to be darkly comic but this is comically comic. This is as funny as I get.”

Bingo is the story of a group of friends coming together again for their 30th high school reunion where they reminisce about the old days when they traded beers and punches in the gut as part of the titular drinking game.

Lost: A Memoir is the stage adaptation of Ostlere’s first book Lost, an account of her quest to find out what happened to her adventure-loving brother (presumed missing at sea) as well as her youthful dreams. The one-woman show starring Jan Alexandra Smith was presented at Theatre Calgary last October.

The February slot has yet to be filled but the season wraps next March with the comedy Till It Hurts by Douglas Bowie, whose Rope’s End was presented at the MTC Warehouse in 2008. It tells the story of a retiring professor who is asked to give a speech summing up his life’s work but can’t think of a significant thing to say until a telemarketer calls.

The annual holiday show is another Debbie Patterson adaptation called The Three Munschkateers.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca