The black box theatre of the Dorothy Somerset Studio was blank and dimly lit, with rows of chairs lined up, holding murmuring attendees mulling over the evening’s playbill.
This year was the Bryan Wade Brave New Play Rites Festival’s (BNPR) 40th anniversary. It began in 1986 as an effort from the late Bryan Wade, a professor teaching the creative writing program, to give emerging student playwrights a way to see their work read aloud in front of a live audience.
22 ten-minute plays were performed over the course of four days. BNPR is entirely student-led, with creative writing students getting to showcase their work and volunteer as stagehands, producers, directors and actors. Participation in the festival is part of the CRWR playwriting course, available to both graduate and undergraduate students.
The show is distinct for featuring an aspect of the theatrical production process audiences usually don’t get to peek into: the stage reading. After a script is complete but before it goes into production, it’s common for playwrights to hold workshops to see their writing come to life — after all, there’s no better way to improve your play than to hear it read aloud.
Stage readings at BNPR usually went like this — the audience saw actors speak the dialogue with the theatrical emphasis it demanded while a narrator sat separately and read aloud scene designations, setting descriptions and stage directions. This mode of play-viewing is vastly different from the usual experience where the script’s bones are not nearly as visible, and actors fully embody the script on elaborately constructed sets.
As such, the BNPR festival is a unique form of theatre — essentially the bare medium of the play-script brought to life, not its final product. The playwrights participating in the fest were no doubt familiar with what the viewing experience would be like, and as a result, many of the plays dabbled heavily in metatheatre, using the script’s technical details as their own form of dialogue and character.
Many of the scripts were about plays or writing, about scripts being read aloud, about actors rehearsing. Fourth wall breaks and interruptions from the narrator were common, making BNPR an almost Brechtian exercise for both playwrights and the audience.
The 10-minute duration for each play was both a restriction and a spur, with some writers depicting scenes from larger stories and others creating stand-alone short pieces.
Logan Naab, a graduate student in the creative writing program, wrote The Corn Room #1, a play about killing witches and doubting the existence of God. The play, which was painted with queer undertones, began in the aftermath of a gruesome murder — Naab’s way of playing with the 10-minute rule that led playwrights to sacrifice exposition and buildup in favour of fast-paced action.
“[In a] full length play maybe I'd be able to show the lead up to the big event, the big event itself, and then the aftershocks,” Naab said. “But because it's 10 minutes, I had to choose which one I wanted to do, so I chose the aftermath.”
In a festival put on by and for students, the 10-minutes slot per play can be exciting — the brevity allows for the audience to get little snippets of theatre that mimic short-form content. Riley Yau, a 4th year undergraduate student in creative writing, appreciated the restriction for this very reason.
“For me 10 minutes is great,” Yau said. “I had a lot of fun playing with this one because it felt more like improv and I was able to throw crazy ideas in there.”
Yau’s crazy ideas came through in her play, Grandma Marge, which saw two women grappling with having cheated on their spouses with each other. The play quickly delved into an absurdist black comedy of incestuous revelations and internet lingo. If you’d like to see the term ‘AO3’ used in theatre, student plays are the place.
Peihwen J. Tai, who is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing, was the producer of this year’s BNPR. Every producer leads the festival differently, and for Tai, she found her vision for the festival to be in its potential as a low-stakes entry point for emerging playwrights, actors, and directors.
“I feel like a lot of people want to get a foot into the acting industry, the theatre industry, but they don't know where to start. [BNPR] is a pretty low-stakes way for them to start doing that,” Tai said.
Tai wants BNPR to continue expanding through potential collaborations with other arts communities on campus. She hopes that performance arts clubs like UBC Face Drama or the Anime Club, as well as UBC programs like acting and creative writing can work together with BNPR to boost arts on campus.
“I can't speak for the whole institution on its own, but I feel like it's a matter of folks in the fine arts program[s] getting together and creating something together. I hope that is the future for the festival and our program itself.”
In a cultural climate where even film and TV are having difficulty competing against the instant-gratification generator of short-form content, the future of playwriting as an art form, as well as theatre festivals like BNPR, is contested ground.
Naab thinks some theatre may shift online, onto platforms like Twitch which preserve theatre’s ‘live’ quality, if only in part.
“[Live streaming] takes the kernel of what theatre is, which is a very live human experience where anything could really happen,” he said. “It's the human error that makes up theatre and the fact that things could go ‘wrong’, but that's what gives each performance its unique flavour.”
Tai said a festival like BNPR — which is all about the process of creation and writing brought to life in front of the audience — may be exactly what future audiences inundated with AI want to seek out.
“I do think in the age of AI the process of why humans do things will be more important than the results. It's really hard to find a [film] production where they would invite audiences to come see like their rough production that they haven't put up. I feel like in theatre there's lots of opportunities to see the process of theatre-making, such as [this] festival.”
With 40 years under its belt, BNPR will have decades ahead of it as long as students continue to write, see new things, and engage with the work of fellow students and emerging playwrights.
