Blood, sweat and cheers

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This article was published 07/08/2024 (757 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What started as an assignment at the National Theatre School ended with local playwright Kinsey Donald winning the top prize at this year’s Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival.

Donald, 27, wrote the Harry S. Rintoul Award-winning A Taste of Blood in the Mouth during her first year at the Montreal institution as the result of an open-ended assignment of writing a “unity play,” with two characters entering a room for 60 minutes of action without either being able to leave.

“It sounds simple, but it was very difficult,” says Donald, a graduate of the University of Winnipeg’s honours acting program. “It teaches you where all the trapdoors and sneakouts are.”

The concept of the play — a cat-and-mouse interview between a female journalist and a female inmate — was inspired by what Donald heard and didn’t hear when listening to true-crime podcasts.

“As someone who has admittedly consumed a lot of true crime, there isn’t much representation of women being the bad guys,” says Donald, who wanted to reframe the genre to consider that dynamic.

“And then as I was writing, I thought, ‘What’s the most interesting choice I can make as the writer I am? What’s going to surprise me?’”

The strategy paid off at this year’s fringe, with Christine Leslie directing Donald and Katie Welham in the two-hander, which received stellar reviews before earning the Rintoul Award, established by the Manitoba Association of Playwrights in 2002 to be given to the best new local play at the fringe.

Named for the founding artistic director of Theatre Projects Manitoba, it’s a $750 prize, with the runner-up receiving a $250 stipend.

The version of the play that ran at the fringe was much better, funnier and spicier than the written product, thanks to Leslie’s direction, Donald says.

Originally, Donald intended the hour-long production to take place across a standard interrogation table, but Leslie did away with it, instead choosing to set the action on a large platform with the audience on either side in an alleyway configuration.

The show almost didn’t go on: Donald’s Cerridwen Productions didn’t get drawn in the original lottery, which meant she had to participate as a Bring-Your-Own-Venue play, which incurs an additional cost. In the end, A Taste of Blood in the Mouth sold out four of 10 shows, buoyed by word-of-mouth, a four-star Free Press review and a spot on the Rintoul short list.

The short list featured five of the top Manitoban plays as determined by a volunteer jury: Between Gigs by Heather Madill and Joseph Aragon, a two-time Rintoul winner; House of Gold by Thomas McLeod; The Ethan in the Room by Ethan Stark, a runner-up last year; and as runner-up, The Mailroom by 2023 Rintoul winners JHG Creative.

“I got to pay my team, which was really awesome. It’s really important to pay indie artists, especially when they’re in school or just out. The whole ‘paying in exposure thing’ just doesn’t work in this day and age,” says Donald.

After graduating from U of W in 2020, Donald submitted two plays written during a university playwriting course to the National Theatre School. The application required two submissions over 20 pages.

“I’d only written two,” she says. But she sent them in, and after three individual interviews and one group interview, Donald was accepted.

“I got in, which was very surprising. I wasn’t expecting it, but when the NTS asks you if you want to study with them, you go,” says the graduate of the Transcona Collegiate Institute. “So I became a playwright and moved to Montreal.”

In two weeks, Donald returns for her third year of study in the playwright’s unit with two productions on the docket. One is a show for young audiences loosely based on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible; the other will be a fully produced show as part of the theatre school’s New Words Festival.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com