5 Hot Plays.

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan.

The five selections in this anthology are shorter plays with “origins in the practical universe of the Fringes” and definite appeal to a younger demographic. Four are from Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival and one from Toronto’s 2007 Fringe. Three won official accolades for those fringe premieres. Although editor Dave Carley (latterly playwright-in-residence at the Shaw Festival and author of Writing With Our Feet, a 1992 GG nominee) states that there is a common theme to this collection inasmuch as all the plays have “an aversion to happy endings,” though that does not mean they are devoid of humour or comedy. It almost goes without saying that all are creatively demanding in terms of the stagecraft required for production. Certainly these scripts will prove to be a fertile source of audition monologues and student scene work.

Oonagh Duncan’s Talk Thirty to Me is a collage of voices sewn together from verbatim research. Paul Dunn’s Offensive Shadows features the lovers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in parallel prequel and sequel scenes, which Carley characterizes both as a romp and a “new fashioned morality play.” In an intriguing plot, Daniel Karasik’s In Full Light joins the theme of the consequences of an accident with a subtle home invasion worthy of The Twilight Zone. Hanna Moscovitch veers dangerously close to a send-up of what audiences often expect of Russian plays as she gradually pulls the audience into a tragic personal story set under the Stalinist regime and told in Brechtian direct address. Finally in Spain Michael Rubenfeld demonstrates an amazing ear for laconic everyday speech in a series of dialogues that explore the frustratingly opaque complexities of a modern love triangle.

The anthology includes a deft introduction to the plays and to the authors by Carley, who has previously worked as editor at the Playwrights Union of Canada and who for many years was a script editor at CBC Radio Drama and play editor for Scirocco Drama.

5 Hot Plays is a delight to read. One can only hope that it will stimulate new productions of these fine scripts.