The hopeful season PTE releases 2020-21 schedule, but is keeping an eye on the progress of the pandemic By: Randall King Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 15, 2020

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This article was published 14/04/2020 (1620 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After teasing Winnipeg theatre-goers with the announcement of the final show of Prairie Theatre Exchange’s 2020-21 season three weeks ago, artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones finally gives us the full monty on PTE’s lineup. The season includes no fewer than four world premières (not counting the previously announced nightly improvised musical from local troupe Outside Joke, which will be performed April 14 to May 2 next year). They include a comedy by the author of Kim’s Convenience and another work by one of Canada’s top playwrights.

Jones, who took over the AD job from the retiring Robert Metcalfe in 2018, says the season announcement is made in a necessarily upbeat spirit, given the current slowdown of arts in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The idea is to optimistically plan and look ahead as if everything was back to normal,” he says in a phone interview from his home. “By the time September hits, we will have a sense if that’s going to be possible or not.

“I think every theatre in the country is running speculative models about: Do we return this time of year? Or do we return a month later or a month later than that?” he says.

“The main thing is we want to commit to a season that we had planned. We feel like it is still responsible to do so,” he says. “A lot of it will be determined by the city or the province or with the health authority. So when we get the information, then we will react.”

On the program:

Bad Parent

(Oct. 7-25)

Playwright Ins Choi (Kim’s Convenience) wrote this world première, a co-production with Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre, which takes an up-close look at an Asian couple as they try to navigate their new life as parents. Choi will also be acting in the show, along with Winnipeg’s Stephanie Sy, says Jones, who says he felt a connection to the subject matter. The play’s characters have a 1 1/2-year-old child; when Jones read the play, his kid was the same age, so the material spoke to him.

“It’s a really genuine look at those early years of parenting — what they look like and feel like,” says Jones. “This is one of those comedies that’s funny because it’s true.

“It’s thrilling to have (Choi’s) voice and everything that encompasses his experience with Kim’s Convenience,” Jones says. “But then also to have him want to return to the stage and want to be in the show, as well as writing it for himself and another actor, it’s just been an amazing process.”

 

Both Alike in Dignity

(Nov. 18-Dec. 6)

Two playwrights, Winnipeg’s Rick Chafe and Saskatchewan’s Yvette Nolan, collaborated on this world-première drama. It follows a couple, freshly moved into the Wolseley neighbourhood, who discover the house next door is a low-income housing property for Indigenous families. Over an epic span of 17 years, the relationship between the neighbours evolves. Last year, with Ian Ross’s The Third Colour, Jones committed to showcasing Indigenous themes in each PTE season, and this show fits that bill.

“Yvette is one of the trailblazers in Indigenous theatre in Canada,” says Jones. “She and Rick are of an age and they know each other from growing up here (in Winnipeg) together.

“It’s amazing that they chose to write this play together. It’s a play combining an Indigenous experience and the non-Indigenous experience,” Jones says. “It would be difficult to overstate how important this piece is. Or how important I feel this play is… to happen here in Winnipeg.”

With a cast of seven actors, it’s a “very very big play” for PTE,” Jones says, adding: “Yvette is directing it too, which is amazing.”

 

Pathetic Fallacy

(Jan. 20-Feb. 7)

Everybody talks about the weather; Vancouver’s Anita Rochon wrote a play about it.

This production of Vancouver’s Chop Theatre explores our complicated relationship with weather. Jones says Rochon recognized the hypocrisy of attending a touring production of a show that touches on climate change, and came up with a solution that is both provocative and hilarious. The show will still tour, but the performers will be chosen from a local pool. What’s more, each show will be performed by a different actor, each receiving their stage instructions live while performing in front of a broadcast media green screen. That amounts to 21 different performers for each of the 21 shows, Jones says.

“She created the form of this touring show that has almost no one touring with it,” Jones says. “It’s wildly intelligent and exciting and it also feels very contemporary. I’ve never seen anything quite like this play.”

 

Post-Democracy

(March 10-28)

Arguably PTE’s biggest get of the season is a world première from hot playwright Hannah Moscovitch, whose play Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story is part of the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s upcoming season.

It’s set in a boardroom, where a quartet of the business elite are caught up in a potentially ruinous scandal during a business deal in another country. It’s a darkly comic look at how corporations have accumulated greater power than ostensibly democratic nations.

Jones says former AD Metcalfe commissioned this play from the Ottawa-born Moscovitch more than a decade ago. “And when I got the job, a few days later, Bob said, ‘You’re probably going to hear from Hannah.’

“And then I got an email from Hannah saying, ‘Hey I’m a little late on the commission…’

“It’s extraordinary, all set in the world of corporate power,” Jones says. “Obviously she’s prolific writer, but that’s because she’s a genius playwright. She’s quite brilliant.”

 

Outside Joke: The Improvised Musical

(April 14-May 2, 2021)

The season closer is an expanded, two-act variation of the extemporaneous musicals the six-person troupe Outside Joke has been performing for years at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival.

“After seeing their show at the fringe, it just floored me,” Jones says.

 

Mud Puddle

(Dec. 17-Jan. 3, 2021)

For years in December, PTE put on a kind of Robert Munsch anthology show put together by local playwright Deb Patterson, until last year, when local performer Alissa Watson adapted a single Munsch story, The Paper Bag Princess, for the annual family holiday show. It was such a hit, Watson is doing it again with a new adaptation of a Munsch tale in which a girl is pitted against a sentient mud puddle that exists to get her dirty.

“We just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do that again?’” Jones says.

 

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PTE’s experimental Leap Series features two different shows this season. Nature Vs. Nation (Oct. 29-30) is a live electronic concert in which the DJ Aaron Collier (performing as “Chandelier”) takes the audience into a dream world by creating a live remix out of our world backed by a wall of stunning video projections. The second show, Broken Tailbone (Feb. 18-20) sees performer Carmen Aguirre giving the entire audience a Latin American dance lesson, woven with hilarious stories of her experiences in the hidden world of dance halls in Canada.

“(The Leap Series) is going really well and it’s growing incrementally over time,” Jones says. “The people that are coming are a mixture of people that will go to our subscription series and this new set of people who have never been to our theatre before and are coming specifically because they’re excited about the programming.”

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing