Summerfest Daily Report - Thursday, August 2

By Jon Kaplan

SummerWorks is an example of how a growing discontent combined with the drive to self-produce can bear a rich August harvest.

The 11th annual theatre festival begins tonight (Thursday, August 2) and continues through August 11 in five venues located in the Bathurst/Spadina/King/Queen area.

Back in 1991, six Toronto companies tried yet another time to get into the Fringe of Toronto, but again they weren’t picked in the lottery.

Hey, they said, we’ll just start our own festival.

And they did, focusing on Toronto-based theatre groups and working from a grassroots level to implement the event. SummerWorks was born..

Over the years it’s developed – after the Fringe – into the second-largest festival of its kind. Not surprisingly, SummerWorks has become an important contributor to the development of new artists, new works and new skills for theatre people.

None of the original producers is involved in the festival, but when Franco Boni took over last year as artistic producer, he kept a lot of the elements that the founders had put in place – localizing the event in a small area of town, concentrating on local artists and keeping the productions down to such a number that an avid theatre-goer could see pretty much all of them during the festival.

Not surprisingly, he’s also added his own twist to the festival. A director who was nurtured at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Boni helmed shows there and also worked as a freelance director. Importantly, he ran the Rhubarb! series of developmental works at Buddies and also led its queer youth summer programs, promoting the writing and performing skills of gay and lesbian teens.

So last year, when he took over SummerWorks, Boni invited some 10 companies into the festival, instead of relying simply on the lottery draw that had been in place. The rest of the productions in the 2000 season were lotteried.

This year he’s added something new, with 50 companies selected by a jury before their names went into the lottery bin. Twenty-eight were chosen for the 2001 festival, and another 10 were again invited to participate by Boni. An 11th invitee, Mike McPhaden’s Flight 198, is included as winner of the SummerWorks 2000 prize, which McPhaden copped for his excellent piece Poochwater.

The Buddies connection is a useful one for Boni. Both last year and this, several pieces which first saw life in Rhubarb! are part of SummerWorks, including Morwyn Brebner’s Matador Love and Laurie Fyffe’s The Malaysia Hotel. Even the occasional lotteried piece, like Kevin Rees-Cummings’ skinhead fable Rabid, had an earlier outing at Rhubarb!

And Boni’s connection to youth theatre continues in SummerWorks. Last year he invited a finalist from the long-running Ontario high-school drama festival to participate, and he’s followed up this year with David A. Brand’s Travis The Carpet Cleaner Helps Fill The Bad Patches, a student production that received 11 awards including best new script, directing, acting and stage design at the annual drama festival.

So carry a water bottle – theatrical and atmospheric heat are synonymous with SummerWorks – and get down to the Bathurst/Queen area to catch some exciting experimental theatre.

See NOW’s Stage section for complete listings and previews of some of the festival’s sizzling shows.