While June tends to be a quiet month for most Calgary theatre companies, that’s not the case with Lunchbox Theatre. In fact, June is an important month for “the world’s longest-running lunchtime theatre,” thanks to the Suncor Energy Stage One Festival of New Work.

For 24 years, the Stage One Festival has been an important ground for developing new one-act plays, many of which will appear on the Lunchbox stage in coming seasons.

Playwrights submit their works-in-progress and those whose plays get selected then have the opportunity to work with a cast of actors and a director to workshop their script. At the end of the weeklong workshop, the play receives a public reading.

At this year’s Stage One Festival there will be readings of eight new plays — seven of which are by Calgarians — on Fridays and Saturdays throughout June.

Lunchbox artistic director Pamela Halstead says she received about 50 submissions this year, about half of which were from Calgary, but that she didn’t plan that nearly all those chosen would be by local playwrights.

“It really depends on what’s in the pile,” she says, adding that Calgarians do have a “bit of an advantage,” as they better understand Lunchbox’s mandate — finding one-act plays that “entertain and engage people, as well as have legs under them in terms of writing and heart.”

While most Calgarians don’t have Christmas on their minds in June, there are two holiday plays in this year’s Stage One mix — Halstead says having a holiday-themed show on the Lunchbox stage in December is a much-beloved tradition, so it’s necessary to have some appropriate plays “in the works.”

One of those plays is by Calgary playwright Neil Fleming; titled The After Party. The action takes place at the office Christmas party, where crushes are revealed and realized.

The other holiday show, James Hutchison’s Christmas Suite, is about a man who rents the titular suite in a hotel so he won’t be home alone on December 25.

“We all like to think Christmas is the most joyous time of the year, but it’s also a reality that Christmas is the time of year with the most suicides and, if you aren’t in a situation with friends and family around, it can be a sad and isolated time for people,” Halstead says.

Besides Fleming, who also wrote last year’s holiday entry, another familiar name for Lunchbox audiences has a work at this year’s festival — Glenda Stirling, who presents the third instalment in her Shopaholic series.

There are also two musicals this year. The first, Homecoming King, with a book by Dave Deveau and music by James Coomber, explores what happens when, in the wake of a car accident, two women are notified that their husbands are in critical condition — as they wait in the hospital, they discover they are married to the same man.

“It’s serious, but it’s also a ridiculous slice of absurdity,” says Halstead.

The other musical, Grant Tilly’s Bingo Ladies, is rather self-explanatory.

Halstead says, in a play-reading situation, there are various approaches when it comes to actually presenting the musical portion of a script. Sometimes, actors will just read the words to a song; other times, the composer might sing a song a cappella.

Ken Cameron’s contribution to the festival is called Star Kiss. It deals with the first interracial kiss on television back in 1968, courtesy of Star Trek, which Cameron can’t actually identify by name because of licensing issues.

Halstead says Stage One is a venue for both established playwrights, like Cameron, and for those who are emerging. One of those is Brieanna Blizzard, whose play, The Surrogate, “is a crazy fun piece about how family can drive us bananas,” according to Halstead.

The final piece is courtesy of Dirty Laundry — “Calgary’s only totally live, totally improvised Soap Opera” — called Anethesia’s Antique Road Show. It offers a bit of a departure from the usual Stage One offerings.

“This is the first time we have done something that is not playwright driven. Whole parts of the play are improvised, depending on what the actors get from the audience,” Halstead says.

The thrust of the show is that Anethesia is trying to recall significant moments in her life, with the help of “artifacts” provided by audience members. The show closes this year’s Stage One with two outings on June 22 and 23.

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Alice Nelson’s physical theatre approach to storytelling keeps the narrative moving along in varied, interesting and unexpected ways.

Braden Griffeths and Julie Orton perform a scene from Mockingbird Close (Photo Courtesy Colleen De Neve, Calgary Herald, 2012)

David Lynch meets the Brothers Grimm — or more specifically, the Blue Velvet of Twin Peaks meets Hansel and Gretel — in the production that completes Lunchbox Theatre’s current mainstage season. The play performed is Mockingbird Close by Edmonton playwright Trevor Schmidt, which Alice Nelson selected as the vehicle for her debut upon completing Lunchbox’s 2011-2012 RBC Emerging Director program.

Nelson has fun with her choice.

And so, happily, do we.

The show is a poetic, moody little thriller-with-a-twist about a young suburban couple played by Julie Orton (Iris) and Braden Griffiths (Hank) who seem to have lost their son and don’t know where to find him. So they end up looking in all the wrong places — which in this case turn out to be the houses of secrets that comprise the rest of their cul-de-sac, Mockingbird Close.

We know we’re in weirdsville right from the start, because we get back-to-back conflicting accounts from Iris about the kind of day it was when the little guy disappeared, and Hank — a Mad Men type in an orange-y suit who says stuff like, “You can rely on the routine because it happens all the time” — angrily snaps at her, “No, that’s not the way it happened.” Uh-oh.

Once the two begin ringing doorbells and canvassing their neighbourhood, ingeniously conveyed by a big pull-toy string of houses and the suspended white pickets of fences,we meet an amusing assortment of misfits, ranging from a perv with something going on in the basement, to a desperate housewife and a boy who likes to dress like his mother.

All are played with undistracting comic appeal by Orton and Griffiths — who also play the famous brother and sister lost by their parents in the grim Black Forest tale, which is interwoven with Mockingbird Close.

Everything about this production of a satirical fable of loss is fresh, inventive, well thought-out — and inviting.

Nelson’s physical theatre approach to storytelling keeps the narrative moving along in varied, interesting and unexpected ways.

She rarely loses track of the light in the darker moments, or the darkness in the lighter ones, so there’s almost no sense of shifting gears between what’s cheerfully sinister and what’s sinisterly cheerful.

Review

Lunchbox Theatre presents Mockingbird Close by Trevor Schmidt to Saturday. Tickets: Call 403-265-4392. Rating: Four stars out of five

bclark@calgaryherald.com

FIVE FACTS ABOUT

Alice Nelson is the Emerging Director for Lunchbox's 2011-2012 Season (Photo Courtesy Alice Nelson)

Alice Nelson

Published by Jon Roe on Jun.01.2012

The RBC Emerging Director at Lunchbox Theatre gets her chance in the director’s chair with Mockingbird Close.

1. Before the Emergence  Nelson was the assistant director on four productions this season with Lunchbox, and got a taste of the style of three different directors: Eric Rose, Pamela Halstead (also Lunchbox’s artistic director) and Kelly Reay. Nelson says assistant directing is like being a fly on the wall. “There’s a part of you that’s like, ‘Oh, I want to be able to say something. I want to be able to take part in all this stuff,’” she says. “Holding back and absorbing everything was pretty paramount to actually now having to step into that role.”

2. Doing Her Homework Before she was even selected as the emerging director, she started the process of looking for a script to direct by canvassing friends and scouring libraries. “I tend to lean towards more surreal or darker stuff,” says Nelson. “A lot of that doesn’t go great with lunch.”

3. Mockingbird Close She settled on Mockingbird Close, Trevor Schmidt’s story of a suburban couple in the 1950s who discover their son is missing and go door to door in their neighbourhood trying to find out what happened.  “I read (Mockingbird Close) one night and as soon as I was done reading it, I started reading it again. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s a sign.’”

4. Send in the Clowns Nelson attended Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California and her training shows through the stylized movements of the characters in Mockingbird Close. It was at Dell’Arte that she first became involved in Clowns Without Borders, a charitable organization which brings laughter to children affected by crisis in developing countries.

5. And on to the Next One Later this month at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival she dons the clown makeup once again in Raunch, her two-woman show inspired by the book Female Chauvinist Pigs. But before that and right after Mockingbird Close closes, she is holding auditions for her new musical-comedy-in-progress, Keep Sweet: A Polygamy Musical, inspired by the fundamentalist colony in Bountiful, B.C. Oh, and she directs The Boys Own Jedi Handbook at the Empress Theatre in Fort Macleod in July. It’s a busy summer for Nelson. “It’s nice I have a directing job right after so I can keep growing,” she says.

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