Healing, Health, and Hope: Grinder Productions 2024

Happy New Year from Grinder Productions! 

It’s a new year, and that means that it’s time to announce our new season. After a whirlwind of activity in 2023, where the company put on eleven plays over four productions, this year will be less about the number of scripts that we stage, and more about how we stage them. This is a year to focus on the process.  

Our theme this season is Healing, Health, and Hope. Let's face it - the world has got some problems: war, sickness, greed, hate, and greenhouse gases all had a banner year in 2023. Hunger, poverty, homelessness, and inflation all competed, alongside many others in a macabre beauty pageant, vying to be crowned "Preventable Problem of the Year." Political machinations at home and abroad (and especially in our Screaming Cheeto-endowed neighbours to the south) have impeded the boring, necessary work of sane and sober people to move the needle on many pressing issues. Most alarmingly, we've seen a rise in people talking about the need for "kindness." There's nothing wrong with kindness, of course, but if we have to make a point of telling each other to be kind, then it points to an underlying problem - the world is not as nice a place as it was on this day four years ago. 

Me on New Year's Day four years ago.
Building flats for what I thought was going to be my best year ever.

So I want to do something about it. I want to help. I can't change the world, or force those in power to adopt the obvious solutions that would assuage most human suffering (both now and in the future), but I can put on plays. I can bring people together in a space to witness an event, and while I can't tell them what to think or what to feel I can, for a few moments, unite them in a shared experience. Perhaps, in that brief flash of collective humanity, I can do something that helps.

Our first week of shows at the Ennotville Library will be called "Benches and Couches." This anthology of (mostly) comedic sketches all take place on, you guessed it - benches and couches. I’ve written the couch plays in response to a contest prompt (I didn’t win) and I’ve written the bench plays because someone told me once that I wasn’t allowed to write plays that are set on park benches.  Benches and couches are simple props, but they serve as a place to gather - both a bench and a couch will accommodate more than one person - so they become sites of communication, or conflict, or contrition, or anything else that can define a relationship. And while I'm sure there are some exceptions, I think that few hostile corporate takeovers happen on a bench, and even fewer wars are fought from a couch. They are spaces for personal relationships, some romantic, some not, but all involving at least one person in a close, emotional connection to at least one other. I'm interested in exploring these relationships, and seeing if it's possible to discover (or rediscover?) some of the common ground that has, perhaps, been lost over the past four years. 

Is it a bench, is it a couch, or is it a rehearsal prop?

Week 2 is going to be the signature production this year. It's my newest play, called "Maid of Stone," and it's unlike any other play that I’ve ever written, in that it takes place in the past, the present, and the future. A young woman meets her grandmother for the first time in the hospital where her estranged mother, a rich, successful chemist and the CEO of a multi-national pharmaceutical, has just been admitted with life-threatening injuries after falling (or did she jump? or was she pushed?) out of her office window. It’s a dystopian tale of a brilliant-but-flawed Millennial, set against the backdrop of a world descending into a neo-fascist hell-scape. Okay, so perhaps it's not the most cheerful thing I’ve ever written, but it does have three very strong female roles, and is one of my first real forays into a multi-generational story line.

This is not the maid I'm looking for.

"Maid of Stone" is one of the few plays that I was actually able to write in 2023, and it took a long time coming to fruition. I struggled with what it would look like, and what it would mean, and my understanding of the play is still evolving. I do know that this play is a response, a response to all of the bad things I mentioned above, and many others - I know that these things affect me as a person and as an artist, but I don't exactly know how. All I do know is that this is a story that I have to tell, and that this is the time to tell it. 

So those are the two biggies in the Grinder 2024 season - I have some other shows in the pipeline, but I don't want to say much about them yet, except to say that they're all on the same theme: healing, health, and hope. I've just submitted my application to the Guelph Fringe Lottery, so if my name is pulled I'll be back there again this summer. It looks like "Just Play" will be back at the Grand this fall, so I'll try to fit in something brief for that. I'm also working on a secret project that I can't say much about, but if you know, you know. 

This year, healing is what I need to continue to do, health is what I need to continue to re-define, and hope is, well, just what I need to continue on. I imagine that I'm not alone in that, so perhaps my journey will help others find the healing, health, and hope they need too.

Happy New Year.