Dartmouth’s Eastern Front Theatre starts up home delivery

With the Plays2Perform@Home Eastern Box Set, EFT artistic director Kat McCormack hopes local theatre will soon be enjoyed in the comfort of people’s homes

HALIFAXtoday\ Steve Gow

Dartmouth’s Eastern Front Theatre has teamed up with a BC-based stage company to create an innovative opportunity for those who are missing live theatre.

After creating brash offerings of stage productions like the Micro Digitals Project in an attempt to satisfy audiences’ lack of theatre throughout the past 18 months, Eastern Front Theatre (EFT) has now collaborated with Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo to help curate Plays2Perform@Home and contribute to an Eastern Box Set of short plays for people to perform in the comfort of their own living rooms.

“Every once in a while you see something so clever that you think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ and Plays2Perform@Home is one of those things,” admits EFT artistic director Kat MacCormack in an email about the Canada-wide box sets of plays. “I really jumped at the chance to work with Boca Del Lupo because their work is so playful and relevant and Plays2Perform is a particularly great opportunity to show off some of our very talented Atlantic Canadian playwrights on a national scale.”

Following up on last year’s successful creation of a Western Canada box set of what Boca Del Lupo called “home delivery theatre”, the Vancouver-based group reached out to EFT to assist designing an Eastern Box Set, which is comprised of four short plays written by such East Coast authors as Newfoundland’s Santiago Guzmán and Halifax’s own Mary-Colin Chisholm.

The Plays2Perform@Home are specifically geared towards being performed with or without an audience in any home environment. The respective plays within the Eastern Box Set are intended for up to four characters with an individual copy for each character to be able to play their part.

“The first reading of any play is arguably the most exciting part of creating theatre — it’s the moment the characters truly meet and come to life,” adds McCormack. “Mary-Colin Chisholm and Santiago Guzmán are both Atlantic Canadian writers that speak to and from the heart and I’m thrilled for folks to experience that first-read magic from the comfort of their own homes.”

Chisholm is also excited about being involved in the innovative Plays2Perform@Home project.

“First off, I was incredibly flattered,” says the 64-year-old writer, director and one of the founders of LunaSea Theatre. “Then when they explained it, I thought it was such a brilliant adaptation to the pandemic and it’s a project that boils down what the essence of theatre is — it’s sharing a story.”

For her contribution to the Plays2Perform@Home, Chisholm specifically wrote a short play called A Kind Nest that she describes as a “drama ghost story.”

“I had never written a short play,” admits Chisholm. “So at first it was a bit daunting — also to know that it was going to be read by anyone, anywhere – that took me a while to circle around.”

As such, the 2018 Theatre Nova Scotia Legacy Award-winner says she found inspiration to craft the play imagining it read by childhood friends “because it is a yearly reunion of three friends” and set it in the kitchen of an old farmhouse.

Chisholm adds that she is honoured to represent Halifax with A Kind Nest in the Eastern Box Set and hopes that the Plays2Perform@Home will help contribute in some way to keeping people interested in live theatre even as provinces head into a fourth wave of the pandemic.

“The other great thing about this was it connected all these playwrights across the country and Canada being the most far-flung country in the world, it’s so hard for artists to meet people in their other pods,” adds Chisholm. “I bought the set of all the plays across the country and the diversity is brilliant — it’s amazing.”

For more information on Plays2Perform@Home, visit EFT’s website.