NotaBle Acts Theatre Company Launch 18th Annual Summer Festival

Emerging and established playwrights from across New Brunswick will have their work showcased at The NotaBle Acts Theatre Company’s 18th annual festival. Featuring sixteen original plays in venues across Fredericton, the festival will have performances ranging from one-acts, site-specifics, readings, and ten-minute plays, there will be no shortage of creative lenses for comedy, drama, or tragedy.

Here’s what you can look forward to seeing.

Headlining the festival are the feature mainstage productions, Fruit Machine and Overlap. Fruit Machine is the collaborative effort of playwrights Alex Rioux and Samuel Crowell, and members of Solo Chicken Productions’ The Coop. It tells the tale of the 1950’s-60s RCMP and Canadian Forces, specifically about how they purged members of the LGBTQ community from their workplace with the help of a device that could “scientifically” detect homosexuality. This dark era of Canadian history will be explored using physical theatre.

Overlap, by Céleste Godin, will be performed by Moncton’s Satellite Theatre, and seeks to explore the nature of the city of Moncton, both the good and the bad. The play will be performed in French with English subtitles.

Fruit Machine and Overlap will both be performed at St. Thomas University’s Black Box Theatre, running July 23rd-25th and July 26th-27th, respectively.

The two winners of NotaBle Acts’ one-act play category in their province-wide playwriting competition will be featured as well. Sophie Tremblay-Pitre’s With Love, Josephine offers Canada’s linguistic and class divides as a backdrop for a cross-generational love story, while Greg Everett’s Gullywhump tells a gothic horror story set in New Brunswick’s backwoods. These two plays will be a double-bill at UNB Fredericton’s Memorial Hall, running from August 1st-3rd.

Taking it to the Streets, the festival’s free hour of outdoor theatre, will feature four plays from the winners of the company’s ten-minute play competition. The Hoard, by Brandon Hicks, offers a comedic take on decluttering craze, popularized by Marie Kondo. Robert Lynn’s Ribbit, Ribbit, tells the tale of a young girl’s encounter with Fredericton’s Coleman Frog. McKenna Boeckner’s The Year Where No One Dies is about two brothers dealing with their mother’s death in an alternate reality, in which everyone is immortal for a year, where dangerous thrill-seeking has become the norm.

Finally, Ghostwriter, also by Tremblay-Pitre, is a comedic story about a reluctant descendant of a dead author, whose ghost enlists her to complete her feminist writing project.

These four plays will be performed at noon on July 29th, August 1st, and August 2nd at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery Café, with additional 7:30 PM performances on July 29th and 30th.

Evening performances will also be followed by A Coward-Bird’s Song, a haunting tale of lost love and regret in a mythical Fredericton that was once populated by bird people, by Carlee Calver.

Finally, seven new plays still in development will be read aloud during the festival, such as Queen James (All the King’s Men), which explores the relatively-unknown, secret homosexual life of King James I of England, by Rob Kempson, and Sue Rose’s The Plucking Dark Ages, a moving piece about the current migrant crisis on the U.S. border. The winners of the 2019 NotaBle Acts’ Middle and High School playwriting contests will also be read.