Progress and Folly

One of Canada's greatest playwrights is Dan Needles, author of the "Wingfield Farm" series of plays, made famous in thousands of performances by one of Canada's greatest stage actors, Rod Beattie. I was fortunate enough to see all seven plays during my years as a technician, and I count my experience with those plays as amoungst my most formative as a writer, director, and actor (not that I act all that often, but...)

The second play in the series is called "Wingfield's Progress," and the third is called "Wingfield's Folly." They relate the further adventures of Walt Wingfield, a stockbroker-turned-farmer, after his tumultuous first year on the land. In "Progress" things go pretty well for Walt, but in "Folly" he lets the pressures of being a farmer get to him, which leads him to do some rather drastic things that he later regrets, and which very nearly cost him his farm, and everyone he holds dear. But since it's a comedy things all work out in the end, and Walt lives happily ever after.

I often think that I'm a lot like Walt Wingfield, except that I'm not a fictional character in a comedy, much as it feels like it sometimes. My "progress" is usually not nearly as entertaining as Walt's, and my "folly" doesn't always end so well. So that being said, this month's post is both an update on my creative "progress" and a stab at explaining a little bit of the creative "folly" that I feel myself being drawn irresistibly into, despite the danger that it places before me. 

So first, the progress:

I've been accepted into the Wellington County Writer's Festival!  I'm very excited to be part of this inaugural version of what I think is a long-overdue event. I hope you will join me at the Wellington County Museum and Archives on April 23rd, and explore all that the local literary scene has to offer (and it's a bigger scene than you might think). You can learn more about the festival here, and watch for more updates on social media as the date approaches, because it seems to be generating a lot of buzz. I'll be reading from my latest melodrama "Shakedown in the Loose Moose Caboose" at 1:30pm, followed by a Q&A and panel discussion with another author to follow. I'll have a vendor table there as well, so please stop by, say hello, and ask me about all things melodrama, theatre, plays, or whatever. I'll have some copies of Shakedown there for sale, but I'll also be taking orders for any other play that you would be interested in. All my plays have royalties, if you want to produce them, so if you mention to me that's what you're interested in I'll happily give you the script in question for free...

Now that the weather has warmed up a little I've been able to get back into the shop and back to my woodworking. Therefore... the new Front-of-House display board is now finally finished! I was going to include a picture here, but I think I'll wait until Jules has a chance to paint it, and it's all prepped for its first show (likely the writer's festival). I've also had some time to build a few things I need for this year's shows, though there are still a couple more pieces that I need to make. Hopefully next month I'll be able to post a picture of the set up in the rehearsal hall. 

There are some workshops being run in support of the local performing arts community that I think will be of considerable interest to many of you. SPARC (Supporting the Performing Arts in Rural and Remote Communities) is hosting a series of workshops called Lights Up: the Performing Arts Return,  and they're meant to help artists, arts organizations, community theatres, etc, brush up on their skills, get their engery back, and basically get back on their feet again. There's a workshop on play production, another on wellness in the arts, one on improving accessibility, and one on networking and promotion. These workshops are being hosted by the Minto Hub of the SPARC network, thanks to a generous grant from the Ontario Trillium foundation. I'm proud to sit on the provincial board of SPARC, and serve as its vice-chair, so please feel free to talk to me anytime about how we can bring more support to rural arts and artists and their communities. You can learn more about the workshops and register for one, some, or all of them right here. 

And finally... drum roll please... finally, I can announce the third show in the Grinder season. We are going to the Guelph Fringe Festival! This August 4th to 7th, at a location somewhere in the Royal City still to be determined, I will be staging my new solo show, "Have You Flogged Your Crew Today?" This show is my attempt to make sense out of some of the the weirdest, whackiest, most woeful moments in the first 25 years of my theatrical career. From pre-setting curdled milk to forgetting to empty lint traps to building an entire set backwards I've done some pretty stupid things over the course of my career, and it took a global pandemic to make me finally laugh about them. You don't need to know much about theatre, and you don't need to know much about me, in order to enjoy this play. We've all made mistakes in our past, and we all have our regrets. We all really should let some things go, but if we can't then at least we should try to find the humour in them, if we can. I rarely step onto the stage as an actor any more (and even more rarely do I choose to be in a play, as opposed to being a last-second fill-in for someone else) so if you've ever wanted to see me put my money where my mouth is, this is your chance. You can learn more about the Guelph Fringe Festival here.

So that's about it for the progress end of things. Now, the folly. 

I'm planning to do two other plays this summer. Both of them are very short, so they don't represent a huge time commitment, but they do represent, well, folly. I can't tell you very much about them. I shouldn't even be talking about them. In fact I probably shouldn't even be doing them, especially now, when it looks like I'm making so much progress. Either one could do a lot of damage (albeit for very different reasons, oddly enough). 

Maybe they won't even happen - it's hard enough for me to find actors in the first place, let alone for plays that I can't even talk about. But I do hope that I'm able to pull off these two additional shows, even if I can't talk about them in any detail on this blog (and I'll probably never mention them here ever again). Unless you happen to know someone who's involved in one you probably won't even hear about them, or come to see them, and even if you do, you still won't be able to tell whether or not the play you're at is one of the ones I'm talking about here, or just another one of the many plays I want to do. 

The reason I want to do these two plays is because, folly or not, they are both key stepping stones on my creative journey as a playwright, director, producer, artist, whatever label the world wants to put on me and what I do. They are parts of what I need to do here and now, in 2022, so that I can do bigger and better things in 2023, and they are just as important to me as all the other plays that I've already announced. 

So I guess the message of this post is that there's more to me than meets the... blog. Once we get into rehearsals I'll be posting more frequently, about the Ennotville shows to be sure, but especially about the Fringe Show, since it represents a sizeable investment of time, money, and emotional capital, and I really do want as many people to come out and see it as possible. I'll also keep sharing anything else that I'm doing that I think would be interesting, like the Writer's Festival. But just remember that behind all that maybe, just maybe, there's something else going on, something that means every bit as much to me as the absurdities of summer stock, the nesting habits of backyard hens, or the stylistic conventions behind the gags in Shakedown in the Loose Moose Caboose.