Celebrating playmakers: Springboards, Workshop West’s signature new play festival, is back

Springboards springs back this week. And with it our chance to catch new Canadian plays-in-progress, a whole bunch of them at every stage of their evolution, as they meet an audience — us! — for the first time.

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Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s spring-loaded new play festival is, as artistic producer Heather Inglis has often put it, “our backstage pass” to the world of artistic creation. It’s our sneak peek, in staged reading form, at Canadian hits to come. And it’s a signature event for a 48-year-old company devoted to the development, the expansion, the profile of the Canadian repertoire — and its creators. Our engagement, our reactions, our feedback are crucial for the playwright, “to see how it lands with an audience,” as Inglis says.  “Sometimes they’re testing a concept, sometimes the script is rough and ready; sometimes it’s more polished….”

This year’s edition, the fifth since the festivities returned in 2022 after a 10-year-absence, features the work of some 30 playwrights — some experienced, some emerging, some newbies. And it connects Springboards for the first time to new partners, the U of A’s New Works Festival and the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

The Next Big Thing, Thursday night, is a double-bill from two of the New Works Festival’s hottest up-and-comers, Elyse Roszell and Josh Greyvenstein, “advised by” Brijesh Magarathinam, the festival’s artistic director. “Both interesting, both well constructed,” says Inglis of The Piano Lesson and I Inherited The Harvest. The former, a two-hander, finds two women mysteriously locked in a room with a piano. The latter, a drama of the gothic stripe with a Hunger Games vibe as Inglis describes, explores the dark inheritance of tradition.

A connection with the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, a first for Springboards and welcomed by Inglis, comes March 29 via These Words Like Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude. A co-creation of Lauren Boyd and Michael Clark, it stars Hamlet’s mom: you remember her, the king’s widow who got married, too soon too soon as her son points out, to her late husband’s brother, a usurper who now wears the crown. For Gertrude, the optics have always been pretty bad. This new piece explores a mother and a son in new ways, says Inglis.

Edmonton theatre audiences know the work of musician/composer/conductor/ musical director Clark by his extensive musical theatre credits, including his Edmonton Pops Orchestra contributions to such Straight Edge Theatre productions as Krampus, the Christmas horror musical. Boyd, the librettist, is an actor playwright improv comedy artist. The staged reading (which includes cellist Nicholas Yee onstage) is directed by Freewill artistic director Dave Horak, who has a particular interest in “Shakespeare-adjacent” work. A  interview with Clark and Boyd is coming soon.

The Butter Chicken Odyssey, Friday night at Springboards, is theatre’s first engagement with food writer and social media star Ramneet Singh (Ram’s Food Reviews, @ramfoodguy), and his remarkable two-year quest to find the best butter chicken in Edmonton. Fifty-one restaurants, rocketing cholesterol, and insights into South-Asian culture, Mill Woods and his own Punjabi roots later — with dramaturg Collin Doyle, the premium playwright who became intrigued by Singh’s writing — it’s a solo play.   Stay tuned for ’s interview with the pair, coming up soon.

The annual Springboards cabaret, a perennial fave, has a lively new form this year. Five-Alive: The Springboards Cabaret Goes Rogue, on Saturday night, is directed by Ron Jenkins, a former Workshop West artistic director and now the U of A’s Lee Playwright-in-Residence. Off Your butts, people. The five-minute plays in Act I, written by participants in the Edmonton Playwrights’ Circle happen in found spaces, the nooks and crannies of Workshop West’s Gateway Theatre home base. Jenkins is an expert at using found spaces; Inglis is delighted, too — found spaces were her specialty in the years she was artistic director of Theatre Yes. In Act II, you’ll be back in the theatre proper, in the seated position, for excerpts of more playlets.

EDMONten, a partnership with the Alberta Playwrights Network is a showcase of five 10-minute originals (selected blind by a jury), happening Wednesday night. The playwrights: Joëlle Préfontaine, Marshall Eglinski, Cat Walsh, Nathaniel Tesfaye, and Grace Fitzgerald. Charlie Peters directs a cast of four: Ben Kuchera, Glenn Nelson, Monica Gate, and Hayley Moorhouse.

And the festival kicks off Tuesday night with The Script Becomes Her, excerpts from new plays by The Women’s Script Writing Circle.

Springboard tickets (all pay-what-you-will) are at workshopwest.org. Or at the door, Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.