After a week of MainStage performances, NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival continues through until August 3 with readings, street theatre, a site-specific play and a pair of fully produced one-acts.
The 18th annual NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival is in full swing. After starting things off last week with two physical theatre productions at the Black Box Theatre – Solo Chicken Productions’s Fruit Machine and Satellite Theatre’s OVERLAP – the remaining festival programming will take place between the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and Memorial Hall on the UNB campus.
The festival’s popular Play Out Loud series kicked the week off with two nights of readings at the BAG. Reading new work before an audience is an important part of a play’s development process and readings have been a part of each NotaBle Festival since the beginning.
There are still eight plays being performed this week between four branches of the festival’s regular programming. With the exception of the two one-act plays being performed at Memorial Hall, the remaining performances (five different plays PLUS a reading of artist in residence Rob Kempson’s new play Queen James) are all admission by donation. If you’re not already a fan of live theatre, may this be the week you see what you’ve been missing. #notableacts
Taking It To The Streets:
The Hoard by Brandon Hicks
You know your closet, your attic, and your basement are all filled with junk, but did you know that junk doesn’t like to be thrown away? Marie Kondo it at your own risk!
Ghostwriter by Sophie Tremblay-Pitre
What does a caffeine-addled second year Creating Writing student need to do for a good idea? Commune with long-dead relatives of course! A ghost can be a great teacher, about your past and your present.
The Year Where No One Dies by McKenna Boekner
For a single year no one can die, but invulnerability brings its own dangers. Just because you can ignore death, does that mean you should ignore life too?
Ribbit, Ribbit by Robert Lynn
The Coleman Frog, the Coleman Frog, have you ever seen the Coleman Frog? Paper-maché or bigger than a dog? There’s always a lesson to be learned from the Coleman Frog.
July 30-31 at Cafe Beaverbrook | 7:30-8:30 p.m. | August 1 and 2 at Cafe Beaverbrook | 12-1 p.m.
Site Specific:
A Coward-Bird’s Song by Carlee Calver
In a twilit fantasy about lost love and forlorn desire, taking flight amid the century old trees of downtown Fredericton, a ghost bird reflects on a life spent regretting the life she never lived.
July 30-31 | Willow Tree near the Beaverbrook Art Gallery | 8:30 p.m.
Admission by donation.
Acting Out: Two One-Act Plays
Gullywhump by Greg Everett
In a lonely forest where spirits sift through the meaning of their memories, grief and fear take on a monstrous form of their own, ready to devour the living who refuse to resist its pull. Thump, thump, thump, here comes the Gullywump.
With Love, Josephine by Sophie Tremblay-Pitre
In a story touching on generational rifts and Canada’s divisions across class and language, a young woman learns that society and the heart rarely see eye-to-eye. Through a long-forgotten diary, she finds that her grandmother lived a parallel life, and though decades apart, takes heart from the knowledge that she is not alone.
August 1-3 | 7:30 p.m. | Memorial Hall, UNB – 9 Bailey Drive. Tickets at the door or reserve by emailing nbacts@unb.ca; $15 regular, $10 student/senior/underemployed.
Play Out Loud
Queen James (or All the King’s Men) by Rob Kempson (2019 NB Acts Playwright/Dramaturge in Residence)
King James I of England is perhaps best known for the commissioning of the King James Bible. Son of Mary Queen of Scots, he was an avid reader and writer, known for being able to translate the Greek and Hebrew versions of the Bible into English by the time he was eight years old. Among scholars, however, he is also best known as an invert. A homosexual. A queenly king. Queen James (or All The King’s Men) is an imaging of this queer history–history which defined the Renaissance in England.
Aug. 3 | RBC Room, Beaverbrook Art Gallery | 2:00 p.m. Admission: Pay-What-You-Will
