Premières aplenty on PTE stage next season New Canadian Curling Club playwright returns, Prairie Theatre boss responds to criticism By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:33 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 15, 2024 Last Modified: 9:05 AM CDT Saturday, Mar. 16, 2024 Updates

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Five Canadian productions, four of which are world premières, are coming to Prairie Theatre Exchange’s stages next season, the company announced Thursday.

The season will open on Sept. 24 with a new production of Bed & Breakfast, a dynamic, queer, fish-out-of-water two-hander set in a small-town B&B, written by Ontario playwright Mark Crawford (The New Canadian Curling Club) and produced by the Cameco Capital Arts Centre. Next comes the ancestry-inspired Ponderosa Pine, a solo storytelling performance about life’s beginnings and endings, written by Winnipeg’s Andraea Sartison (Nov. 5-17).

At Christmas, the improv troupe Outside Joke will return to the Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage for a new spin on its holiday showcase, which, for the past few seasons, was built around Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This time around, RobYn Slade, Chadd Henderson, Paul De Gurse, Toby Hughes, Jane Testar and Andrea del Campo will star in Outside Joke’s Christmas Miracle: An Improvised Holiday Rom-Com, turning their laser focus on the Hallmark movie genre (Dec. 10-22).

Artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones, who joined the company in 2018, will, for the first time, serve one of his own scripts to the PTE audience with A Killing at La Cucina, a darkly comedic Michelin-star murder-mystery filled with red herrings and topped with caviar. Co-produced by Calgary’s genre specialists Vertigo Theatre, the show runs from Feb. 25 to March 9.

To close the season, Métis playwright Keith Barker will debut his latest work, Raised by Women, an autobiographical treatment of Barker’s upbringing, told through lessons he learned from the women surrounding him (April 1-13).

For Jones and PTE’s managing director Lisa Li, the slate of programming represents steady support of the theatre’s mandate for new local, Canadian and Indigenous works. This comes as the company continues to experience post-pandemic challenges while attempting — like most performing arts groups — to regain and maintain its subscription base.

The company has experienced a $500,000 decrease in revenues compared with pre-pandemic levels, Jones says.

That financial shortfall led to a recent restructuring, which included the amalgamation or elimination of several full-time positions. Some members of the theatre-going public pointed to PTE’s artistic choices as a reason for its economic challenges.

The most notable, and public, voice to make such assertions was philanthropist, arts booster and PTE patron Gail Asper, who, in a letter to the editor published last month in The Globe and Mail, suggested the drop in subscriptions was “due to risky, unappealing programming.”

“PTE is currently presenting not one, not two, not three but four world premières of relatively unknown playwrights,” Asper wrote, referring to works by Guillermo Verdecchia, Marie-Beath Badian, Hazel Venzon and Tara Beagan, whose Rise, Red River is currently running in a co-production with Théâtre Cercle Molière and Article 11.

“Any world première is inherently risky and often a licence to lose money and subscribers. A Canadian world première is even more risky, as Canadian shows are often underworkshopped and underfunded. They should only be presented if a theatre can withstand the losses,” Asper said.

Discussing the upcoming season, Jones says that the company and Asper had “positive dialogue” in recent weeks, while also saying that the upcoming season’s array of new programming gives him every reason to be hopeful for the future of PTE.

“The history of PTE is built on supporting new works, both locally and around the country. You have playwrights responding to the times they’re living in with a kind of immediacy only possible when it’s a new work. Work can speak over time, across time, but there is something really special about a playwright writing about the moment they’re living in,” he says.

“It’s really important to encourage a local, provincial and national culture of playwrights and creation. One of the best ways for the great playwrights in this country to become better known is for theatres to produce them. A company like ours can be a launching pad.”

That’s been the case for a few shows born on PTE’s stage in recent years, including Darla Contois’ The War Being Waged, the first show PTE produced for live audiences post-pandemic, which has since received publication. Jessica B. Hill’s feminist cosmo-dramedy Pandora, co-produced by PTE and Shakespeare in the Ruins last season, will be published by Scirocco Drama next month.

Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Diggers, produced in conjunction with the Black Theatre Workshop in Montreal, is another PTE-backed production with the potential to be performed nationwide, as are Venzon’s Everything Has Disappeared and Badian’s The Waltz, both of which delve into the Filipino-Canadian experience; it’s not insignificant that all these creators are women of colour.

Aside from its subscription series performances of works, PTE has a number of adjacent productions to round out its season.

The company will hold its first-ever film screening when it shows Les Filles Du Roi by Corey Payette and Julie McIsaac, an Indigenous musical set to be shown on the mainstage on Jan. 16; between that film and Barker’s show, the 2024 season will be the seventh consecutive one to feature a production from Indigenous creators.

After that comes an online presentation of Fat Joke by Cheyenne Rouleau — a combination of standup, storytelling and confessional that examines the weight of fatphobia in our society (Jan. 27-Feb. 2). Bolstered by its successful Valentine’s Day love song showcase These Eyes, PTE will celebrate Mother’s Day with Dear Mom, another instalment of PTE in Concert sure to lead to a few tears and a lot of laughter (May 11).

Meanwhile, this season still has some juice left: Rise, Red River runs until March 23, while the adaptation of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking — starring Monique Marcker and directed by Rodrigo Beilfuss — runs from April 9 to 21. Sharon Bajer and Elio Zarrillo’s campy comedy The Outside Inn will run May 7-19 before PTE readies itself for the season to come — the 52nd in company history.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com