Move aside, Shakespeare. Gone are the days of three-hour plays—at least on Nov. 10 at Arts Court, where the Extremely Short New Play Festival is featuring 10 different plays of only 10 minutes each.
The festival runs on only four actors and one director, although it makes use of 10 different playwrights, whose plays range in topic from the light-hearted to the existential.
Lawrence Aronovitch’s play, The Book of Daniel, is a coming-of-age story.
“Daniel is a little bit different from everyone else and he’s feeling pressured to conform and it’s about the challenges he faces,” Aronovitch said.
The seasoned playwright said he chose to participate in the festival because of the variety it offered.
“The festival is a great idea,” he said. “It gets packed into a single evening. Ten different plays on a wide variety of topics and wide variety of styles. Some are very serious, some are very comic. No matter what your tastes, at least one of the plays will appeal to you.”
But the festival isn’t just for seasoned playwrights.
Caitlin Corbett, an Ottawa actress and one of the participating playwrights, said she chose to participate because it offered a good opportunity for new writers.
“It’s one thing to perform your own work and quite another to see another artist take something you’ve created and bring it to life,” she said via email. “I wanted to get my start writing for other theatre companies and the Extremely Short New Play Festival is a great way of taking that first step.”
The festival has a mandate to produce new work, Corbett said, which meant they were welcoming of a beginner playwright like herself.
Her play, Loyal Opposition, looks at the relationship between Wilfrid Laurier’s wife, Lady Zoé, and her friend—her husband’s supposed mistress. The fact that her play was set in Victorian times provided an extra challenge to writing on a deadline, she said.
Corbett said the time limit was one of the greatest problems she encountered.
“I discovered so much about them and the time period during my research that I kept wanting to add in more detail, about the First World War and the suffragette movement and so on,” she said. “But that’s the good thing about the time limit, it keeps you focused on what really matters, which is the story.”
Aronovitch agreed. He added while longer plays offer more time for character and plot development, that doesn’t make them better.
“I like the challenge [of short plays] because it really forces you to be absolutely focused and to really hone in razor sharp on what you’re trying to say in your play,” he said.
Short plays can offer something longer plays cannot, both Aronovitch and Corbett said.
“A short play needs to get its point across quickly. It’s a snapshot, not the whole photo album. That’s why it’s important for short plays to be presented together as part of something larger, like the festival. Each piece shows one part of being human, altogether making a mosaic,” Corbett said. “Full length plays are great for taking one or two themes and delving into them for greater detail, but short plays are little bite-sized crystallized versions of one idea each.”
This attention to detail is what Aronovitch said makes short plays so accessible. He said he doesn’t believe people will watch them because they have short attention spans—he said they have more to offer.
“You get a beautiful little jewel of a story, because it’s put together so carefully by the playwright. It’s a gem that stands on its own instead of a huge banquet,” he said. “It’s the perfect amount of nourishing food. Once you’ve tasted it, that’s all you need.”
