The U of T Drama Festival comes and goes each year, and with it, a bright new crop of theatre talent emerges. One of the crucial tenets of the festival is that all the plays must be original material. So where do all these diverse plays come from? All the plays entered in the festival are student-written works. So how do busy students manage to juggle writing a one-act play that’s good enough to get them into the renowned annual festival? Well, you can’t underestimate a playwright’s need to express an idea or concept through theatre.
The Varsity set out to examine the creative process behind some of the plays at this year’s festival (which took place at the end of January at Hart House Theatre). On a recent sunny afternoon, playwrights Andrew Tyler, Jessica de Bruyn (both from the UTSC Drama Society), and Kara Dymond (Hart House Drama Society) took some time to reflect on their varied experiences in writing their plays.
Although each was already a writer before penning their festival entries, “there isn’t the luxury of separation” that a writer conventionally enjoys in submitting a work, says Andrew Tyler, and the experiences of all three playwrights clearly testifies to this. In the cases of de Bruyn and Dymond, they didn’t just write their plays, but actively participated as director and actor, respectively. Tyler followed the principle that the director is the ultimate intermediary between the playwright’s idea and the vision on stage and decided to work with someone else in that role.
Relaxed and modest talking about his part in creating his play Paul’s Gun (which won the award for Best Work in Progress at the festival), Tyler says that after the crucial step of finding a director he “totally trusted,” he was able to take a minimal role that he suggested was subservient to the director’s needs, mainly consulting on lines. Tyler noted two advantages to this approach: the second perspective a director gives to a story, and that “a good director can help an actor interpret their part.”
de Bruyn, taking a different tack, took on the role of director, which amongst other responsibilities meant a “mad rush to coordinate people’s schedules.” Soon after the script was selected to be mounted at the festival, production challenges emerged. An unproductive audition session led her to “go up to people we knew in the drama department” and ask them if they would join the play. Rehearsals oftenstretched late into the night in January because the Scarborough theatre was tightly booked. And to top it off, the elaborate, brightly-painted clapboard set of Living Arrangements (which won an award for Best Ensemble) always seemed precariously on the brink of falling over.
“You have to be responsible for everything,” de Bryun notes, adding that she had a “fantastic” stage manager. Being both director and playwright means that “it’s an all-encompassing role,” she says, with the advantage of “uncompromised vision.” Although de Bruyn didn’t initially plan directing her play herself, she stresses that if a playwright is not involved in some aspect of the production, they’re “not going to be happy with it” as the creator of the piece.
Dymond auditioned for Losing Berlin (which topped the festival with a triple-win for direction, acting, and script) like everyone else, but with low expectations of getting the role, because she had also written the work. From the beginning, the Hart House Drama Society firmly established the playwright would be a secondary figure in its production by choosing its director. Dymond was guaranteed no role in the play. However, after winning the lead, the writer/actor was completely absorbed in the production.
Although director Jesse Calvert challenged Dymond with his interpretation, and thus separated her initial vision in some sense from the production, as the playwright, Dymond had an intimate relationship to the finished product. Her heart went into the extra material Calvert required for the script, and she attacked the monologues with a ferocity an actor removed from the material could not have. “Sometimes all I could think about in class were my lines,” she recalls.
Far be it from anyone to suggest the value of a writer’s work is directly correlated to the time they spend brewing it–in the cases of de Bruyn and Dymond, the process behind the initial writing was reflected in relatively more involvement in the production itself. Paul’s Gun, on the other hand, was written about two months before submission, in a workshop with Paula Wing. From the start, the play had a very “tense” tone to the writing, Tyler explains, as the main idea centred around the question “What happens when one of the guns doesn’t fall into hands of man in a trenchcoat?”
de Bruyn’s script also came out of a university workshop the previous spring. She bounced drafts off friends over the summer for feedback, but almost forgot about the deadline for submissions for the Drama Festival until a friend asked if she was going to enter anything.
In contrast, Dymond had the basis and first monologue of what eventually became Losing Berlin two years ago when still in a Grade 11 drama class. But she didn’t complete the play until a two-day writing session just days before submission, a productive period she attributes to letting the idea “ferment” in her head.
No matter the length of the writing process though, the intimacy ultimately required of a playwright in the production process always brought an interesting measure of satisfaction and reward. For Tyler, it was gratifying to be a part of something that, if only for the span of the festival, opened up people to each other under the same roof. “Hart House is a staging ground for experiments,” he says.
de Bruyn found the process opened her eyes to the possibilities of directing, a task she earlier had shied away from. “Last year I knew I wanted to be a writer,” she says. “Now I like–I have a feel for–directing, too.” The process seemed to help in directing de Bruyn’s future course of study in Drama.
For first-year student Dymond, it reaffirmed her love of drama (she has long been involved in musical and stage productions), and acted as a stepping-stone to the Drama program at University College, where de Bruyn also hopes to enrol. Another interesting synchronicity between the pair–right after staging their plays at the festival, both came down with bad colds (“I could barely walk down the stairs,” groans Dymond. “I was sick for a week after,” counters de Bruyn). Perhaps testament to another reality of being a playwright: as worthwhile as the journey can be, it’s also exhausting work.
