Liz Best, Me, Leslie Ann Walcott

I recently got together with these two ladies.  The last time we three posed together was back in 2019.  Over four years ago.  Time really does fly.   Liz was and has been a huge champion of my play ANIMAL when it received a public reading at the Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival back in 2018.   She directed the reading and the play was subsequently staged at the Alumnae Theatre’s Fireworks Festival.  I brought Leslie Ann in as the stage manager for that production as she had worked with me on other shows.  We three gathered because Liz was back at the Alumnae Theatre directing a play by George Walker called Better Living – described as “a black comedy that revolves around a family of women and the father who deserted them after trying to burn down their house”.   I enjoyed the play.  The dysfunctional aspect of each of the characters and this family, mixed with the oftentimes bizarre hilarity that ensued, reminded me of my writing.

Liz also encouraged me to become a member of the Playwright’s Guild of Canada, which is an organization that provides a host of programs that promotes and protects playwrights.  They help get your plays out to the community at large by giving access to the public.   After the Alumnae production of ANIMAL, numerous re-writes and readings of the play followed (which you can read about HERE).  And after doing a polish on my play BLUE, I felt it was time to join the PGC as an official member.  I should have done this sooner, but sometimes life gets in the way.  Below are short synopsis’s, posters and links to each of the plays on the PGC site.

Raina Shepherd, a 42-year-old quirky woman with a wild imagination and a flare for painting, has barricaded herself in her parents’ living room. She has strewn about her mother’s dresses and bras. From the basement, she has dragged up items that belong to her father including his workbench, buckets of clay and ceramic animal figurines that he sculpts.Raina and her mother are planning a trip to the Grand Canyon to visit the very spot where the Shepherds met and fell in love. But is the trip in doubt? And is there something more going on with Raina? Why does the living room look like a hoarder’s nest? Why does her mother keep bringing up a psychiatrist and reminding Raina to take her medication? When her parents leave for the day and her brother, Daniel, and Raina’s son, Griffin, show up, seemingly out of nowhere, what unfolds are a number of searing revelations from the Shepherds’ collective pasts that rock this already fragmented family to the breaking point.  Both heart breaking and wickedly funny, ANIMAL depicts one woman’s struggle with mental illness and the devastating effects it has on her family.  You can find ANIMAL on the PGC website HERE.

Joel invites his siblings, Adam and Gloria, to his newly purchased cottage by the lake to celebrate the success of his first novel. As the family gathers over a weekend, we discover Joel has spent much of his life under the tyranny of his now deceased parents and in the shadow of his siblings.   Adam has traveled the country as a successful motivational speaker to athletes. Gloria is an honours student, completing a degree in journalism while interning at a New York City newspaper. Her job this weekend is to write an article about Joel’s successful book, which is a #1 bestseller on the New York Times and has put Joel in the spotlight.The sunny afternoon clouds over and the celebratory weekend turns into a time of reckoning with buried pain.   As Gloria digs through the hidden meanings in Joel’s novel, secrets from all of their lives rise uncomfortably to the surface.   What is revealed changes each of their perceptions, both of themselves and their collective family history.  Profoundly moving and told with a sarcastic wit, BLUE is a bold take on a family picking up the pieces of their lives to find healing in the dark places where no one wants to go.  You can find BLUE on the PGC website HERE.

Meanwhile, on the film front, my screenplay A PROMISED I MADE TO MR. BAGELS, made The Short List of the Barnstorm Festival, which champions screenplays.  BAGELS was one of 261 screenplays that made The Short List.  For a complete list of the screenplays/writers visit HERE.