PUENTE THEATRE

February 12 @ 8pm: Paz  by Alicia Payne  (Canada)
                                                Directed by Ana de Lara

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Paz  A child goes missing after her nanny is fired.  The missing child’s mother confronts the nanny in a park. Featuring an ethnically diverse cast, the answer to the question “Who’s child is this?” takes on expanded meaning. In many Canadian communities, nannies and live-in-care-givers abound. Many of them have left their homes and work in foreign lands.  They’re more than an employee but not a relative so when it comes to their employer’s family structure, where do they fit in?

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Development History:
In 2011, PAZ was accepted for a one-on-one session at the Black Theatre Workshop conference “Since Mama Done Got Off the Couch” in Montreal.  It was a finalist in the 2010 and 2011 Doorway Arts Ensemble Play Reading Series in Washington, DC.  Before that, PAZ received a workshop presentation at b current’s rock. paper. sistahz 7 festival in May 2008. b current subsequently recommended an Ontario Arts Council Theatre Creator’s Reserve grant that enabled the playwright to rework the script and incorporate feedback provided by a group of Filipina live-in caregivers at a private reading.  Excerpts from PAZ were first read at a Salon Luncheon during the 2006 AfriCanadian Playwrights Festival. 

Alicia Payne is a Toronto-based performer, writer and artist educator. Born to West Indian parents, she immigrated to Canada from England as a child. The inspiration for PAZ comes from Alicia’s time as an au pair (live-in-care-giver) in France and an article she read about a nanny who kidnapped a child.

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Ana de Lara (Born Ana Bartulabac) immigrated to Canada from the Philippines at the age of seven.  She grew up in Victoria, BC and studied acting at Presentation House Film and Theatre School in Vancouver, under the direction of Catherine Caines and Anthony Holland.  De Lara's films have screened internationally at numerous festivals including the Rhode Island International Independent Film Festival and the Montreal World Film Festival. She has received funding and support from the BC Arts Council and the National Film Board, and is a Women in the Director's Chair alumnae.  She has also worked as an acting instructor for numerous schools, including the Screen Actors Studio, the Victoria Motion Picture School, and the Pacific Film and New Media Academy.

 

CAST 

 

Paz............................Ana de Lara

Mrs. Knowles...........Tracey Roath

Kim..........................Natalie Pepin

Narrator...................Joane Wannan

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February 19 @ 8 pm: Nocturnal  by Juan Mayorga  (Spain)

                                                           Translated by David Johnston
                                                           Directed by Mercedes Bátiz-Benét

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Nocturnal (Animales Nocturnos)

 

When you're alone in a big city, how far would you go to make a new friend?

Two men meet in a restaurant. The smaller of the two blackmails the other into becoming his friend.  Unless the one does what the other says, he will be turned into the authorities as an illegal immigrant.  Nocturnal is a brilliant new satire about obsession, insomnia, and blackmail by one of the most important Spanish playwrights working today.

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Juan Mayorga is one of the most important Spanish playwrights of his generation.  His first play, Siete Hombres Buenos (Seven Good Men), was awarded second place in the Marques de Bradomin Prize in 1989.  Since this first accolade, Mayorga has won a series of national awards, most prominently, Spain’s National Theatre Prize, which he was awarded in 2007 for services to Spanish theatre.  Mayorga’s work has been translated into many languages and performed widely throughout the world.  In addition to his role as playwright, Juan Mayorga has adapted versions of classical dramas for the Spanish stage.  In January, 2007 he provided a version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People for Madrid’s Centro Dramatico Nacional (CDN), for which he also adapted King Lear in February, 2008.  He was a founding member of – and continues to collaborate with – the El Astillero theatre company that was established in 1993.  In 1998 he began teaching dramaturgy, history of thought, and sociology at the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramatico in Madrid.

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Mercedes Bátiz-Benét is a multi-diciplinary artist and writer.  She was born and raised in Mexico and in 1997 she moved to Canada.  Productions of her work include Faust: Ignis Fatuus, at the international festival "Faustfest," Shining Through, Lágrimas Crueles, With Open Arms, and as co-writer, The Secret Sorrow of Hatchet Jack Macphee for The Caravan Farm Theatre, and The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan with the Old Trout Puppet Workshop.  Her latest film credit, camera and cinematography, is for the feature-length documentary about the singer/songwriter Feist, Look At What The Light Did Now (Revolver Films 2010).  Mercedes is the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction editor at Bayeux Arts, and the Artistic Director of Puente Theatre. 

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CAST

 

Tall Woman..........................Alexandra Wever

Tall Man...............................Harris Anderson

Short Woman.......................Mily Mumford

Short Man............................Judd Palmer

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February 26 @ 8 pm:

                           How Can I Explain a Thing so Beautiful

                             by Elizabeth Pringle  (England)
                             Directed by Will Weigler

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How Can I Explain a Thing so Beautiful is an encounter with the 16th-century Spanish mystic Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila as she talks to herself, to a fish she's eating for supper, to a mouse who has moved into her convent, and (in her imagination) to her imprisoned friend Juan de la Cruz, her mother, her Inquisitors, and God. It is a wonderfully funny, touching and spiritual one-woman play that is rich with hope.

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Elizabeth Pringle is a playwright, director, actor, and arts & media producer/educator. She has written plays, musicals, opera and zarzuela adaptations, operettas, articles, poems, websites, grants, a film and more.  She loves working with language and image to discover meaning and hopefully make art.  She has taught emerging playwrights and actors in DC (Theatre Lab, Kennedy Center, Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Young Playwrights) and beyond.  Elizabeth is also the creator/director of The Shortie Awards: International Film and News Festival, celebrating and promoting youth-made media.

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Will Weigler has been a community-based director, teacher, and playwright for over twenty-five years.  He is the author of the award-wining book Strategies for Playbuilding: Helping Groups Translate Issues into Theatre, and has been seen around Victoria in role as the 19th century political reformer "Amor de Cosmos".  Will recently completed his PhD in Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria, where he now teaches. For his doctoral dissertation, he analyzed hundreds of descriptions of people’s most unforgettable moments as audience members so that he could develop a theory about what made those moments so astonishing.  Based on his analysis, he developed a vocabulary of staging strategies that offers community participants and theatre artists a way to collaboratively engage the power of the theatrical event.  Just prior to immigrating to Canada from the US, Will wrote, produced, and directed Common Wealth, a large-scale intergenerational musical play created in collaboration with the Settler community of Darrington, Washington, and the nearby members of the Sauk-Suiattle First Nations tribe.

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CAST

 

Teresa of Avila...............Gina McIntosh