PTE turns 50 with lineup of new works, timely topics

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This article was published 11/04/2022 (990 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prairie Theatre Exchange has a 50-year anniversary to celebrate.

So expect the Portage Place-based company to mine for gold with an bigger lineup of plays, available both online and in person. PTE’s season set list includes holdovers from past cancelled seasons, exciting new plays (including no fewer than five world premières), and a Christmas show that should throw the usual festive offerings for an improvisational loop.

“A 50th anniversary is a major milestone for an arts organization,” says PTE’s artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones. “It is an invitation for us to gratefully reflect on the past that has brought us to this moment, and to dream about what the company is and what it can be, moving into the future.”

In a kind of acknowledgement of the past two years of topsy-turvy pandemic programming, the first play will be available online and free of charge, hearkening back to PTE’s digital pivot after the beginning of the pandemic.

Katharsis (Sept 22-Oct. 2) by Yvette Nolan, was an online performance by Winnipeg actress Tracey Nepinak first presented in June 2020. It’s a meditation on the healing power of theatre presented in just 17 minutes, as directed by Jones.

Ponderosa Pine (Oct. 6-16) is another freebee, viewable online. It’s a world première by Andraea Sartison (better known as the artistic producer of One Trunk Theatre) and is described simply as a family story woven together with music.

Lighter, brighter and refreshingly comic, Bad Parent (Nov. 2-20) is the long-delayed offering from playwright Ins Choi (Kim’s Convenience), a co-production with vAct and Soulpepper Theatre Company. After being cancelled last season, the comedy about dubious parental choices should find a receptive audience starved for some laughs.

That feeling is even more in evidence in PTE’s spirit of Christmas present, the saucily titled A Christmas Carol: Big Dickens Energy (Dec. 13-23), from the legendary local musical improv troupe Outside Joke, who are also closing PTE’s season this year from May 4 to 22 with Outside Joke: The Improvised Musical. (Jones is clearly investing heavily in the company, and with good reason, given their reliably excellent reception at Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festivals of seasons past.)

PTE teams with local Bard traffickers Shakespeare in the Ruins in January for the classical (if not Shakespearean) Pandora (Jan. 25-Feb. 12, 2023), by Jessica B. Hill. It’s described as a modern epilogue to the cataclysmic myth of Pandora’s box, presented by Pandora herself.

Things get electrically current in February with Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers (Feb. 1-19, 2023), a personal look inside the Black Lives Matter movement by playwright Makambe K. Simamba, produced in conjunction with Tarragon Theatre and Black Theatre Workshop.

Influencers from beyond the stars? Expect the unexpected in local playwright Frances Koncan’s world première Space Girl, a story about influencers and identity set on the moon from the reliably impertinent playwright who gave us Women of the Fur Trade.

In contrast to that show, Reckoning (April 12-16, 2023) is a digital presentation told in movement, video and text, in response to the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The final show of the season is another world première from a local playwright, Volare (April 26-May 14, 2023), a drama by Liam Zarrillo about unpacking family history.

Ticketing information for the 50th anniversary season is now available at pte.mb.ca.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com

Twitter: @FreepKing