Three plays will each get a day’s workshop, followed by an public reading and audience discussion

Skullduggery at the local lilac festival!?!

You bet!

That’s some of the fun on stage this week as the Port Stanley Festival Theatre wraps its 2024 summer season with its annual playwrights’ festival of new Canadian comedy.

Three plays each get a day’s workshop, followed by an evening’s public reading and audience talk-back, starting Thursday with Shannon Patte’s Festival Season pitting two competing lilac festivals against each other. She’s a London, Ont., author.

Artistic director Liz Gilroy says the festival – newly renamed this year to honour veteran artistic director Simon Joynes, who pushed for Port to include new play development in its mandate – is an important incubator for new Canadian theatre.

“It’s incredibly important. If you look around, it’s a lot of the smaller theatres that are doing these types of things, getting Canadian playwrights to write and then taking the time to read them.”

And through the years, the readings have led to premieres in Port and elsewhere of new plays by Mark Crawford (Stag and Doe), Kristen da Silva (Five Alarm) and, more recently, Barb Scheffler, whose Beaver Club was a Port Stanley hit last season, returned for an encore this season, and is to be staged in the winter by Theatre Orangeville.

This summer, the Port Stanley Festival Theatre produced a full staging of Ephraim Ellis’s Bigfoot, read at the 2023 playwrights’ festival.

Liz says Port has developed a reputation as a theatre company to send new scripts to. In her first season as artistic director, she has already received more than 30 new plays.

“Simon’s responsible for that, and I’m trying very hard to continue that. I’ve said I will read everything that I get – it may not be until January, but I will read every single thing.

“Simon did. Simon read everything.”

It’s a rep she hopes local audiences will begin to appreciate more.

“I don’t know if the local community understands how amazing it is. I’ve........

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