Each year, Bard on the Beach welcomes almost a hundred new and returning Company members to our rehearsal halls and stages. Last week, we introduced our New to Bard series, which highlights some of the artists who are making their Bard debuts this Season. If you missed last week’s post, you can read more about the Acting Company here.

This week, we’re thrilled to be turning the spotlight onto our talented creative team. Learn more about some of the new faces in our creative team who are helping to bring our productions to life!

“You’ve come to the right place. Exactly where you are…. So c’mon.” – Episode 0, Would You Wander

Yesterday I went on a stroll by the river. And there was a friendly voice in my ear.

The Blue Hour, SkirtsAfire’s main stage production for 2020, is notable for bringing an emerging job description to a theatre stage in Edmonton.

The job is that of intimacy director (also known as intimacy coordinator, particularly in film and television). The position — which has gained prominence since the #MeToo movement — sees trained professionals ensuring that scenes involving nudity or sex, or other forms of touching, are done following rules of communication and conduct to ensure the safety and comfort of performers.

As cliché as it is to say, you will never experience another performance like StoneMarrow Theatre’s interpretation of Crave. This play will make you question your own understanding of memory, depression, desire, love, failure—there aren’t enough nouns in the human language. This play is all dialogue and physical movement and watching it is like playing a game of emotional squash—with all the screaming, sweating, and bodily contortions you can imagine. 

“It’s a disorienting, visceral and immersive stream of consciousness experience, made even more powerful by this quartet of performers. They’ve mastered the script…”

When Samantha Jeffery and Perry Gratton decided to form StoneMarrow Theatre, it was because they spoke the same theatre language.

After working together to produce and direct a 2017 Fringe show called A Beautiful View by Canadian playwright Daniel McIvor, they discovered a joint taste for risky, often heartbreaking material produced in a way that has meaning for both the artists and the audience.

Like all art, theatre is made to be entertaining, somewhat relatable, and most importantly, challenging. Late British playwright Sarah Kane took that last point to heart and became something of an outcast in the 1990s for her practice of ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre—a form that broke away from conventional drama and was often criticized by the upper British middle class for being extremely violent and vulgar. Kane has three plays, Blasted, Cleansed, and Phaedra’s Love, that fall under the In-Yer-Face umbrella, but her 1998 play Crave—while still touching on darker themes such as suicide, loss, and assault—is much more subtle and poetic. Perhaps this is why it caught the eye of Perry Gratton and Samantha Jeffery’s little Edmonton theatre company, StoneMarrow Theatre. 

It’s 1888, and that Swedish rascal August Strindberg has done it again. In his best naturalistic style, he’s written a play about a bored aristocratic young lady named Miss Julie, who goes searching for sexual adventure below stairs, and finds a ready accomplice with the well-travelled, cultured Jean, her father’s valet. Scandalous!

In 2003, English playwright Patrick Marber updated the tale and set it in 1945 just as Churchill’s Tory Party was defeated. It may be six decades even later but, apparently, little has changed in the effects social structures have on relationships.

The balance in this excellent Max Rubin production shifts back and forth while challenging our own perceptions of who these people are, and what they represent.

A chat with After the House Lights about the Edmonton International Fringe Festival.

An interview with Samantha Jeffery.

An interview with Kory Mathewson about the creation of Dirt City.