Curtain closes on provincial One Act festival

By Steffanie Costigan - Lethbridge Herald Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on May 30, 2023.

Herald photo by Steffanie Costigan Andy Toms and Anita Gainer perform in "Canker Sores and Other Distractions" by Christopher Durang, during the provincial One Act Festival over the weekend at the Yates Memorial Theatre.

The provincial One Act Festival announced its winners over the weekend at the Yates Memorial Theatre.

The adjudicator at the festival, Deborah Deans, holds an A.R.C.T. in Speech and Drama from the Royal Conservatory of Toronto and maintains her private studio in Medicine Hat. Deans noted the technical aspects which contributed to her decision in deciding the winners.

“There’s a lot that goes into it. There’re so many aspects to look at, there’s the technical aspects, the directorial, the acting, the characterizations, the timing, all kinds of things to look at.

“So it’s a one-act. It’s such a sliver of time within a play. It’s not like a great big long play where we get to see the background of characters, so there’s a shorter period of time,” said Deans.

The award at the festival were as follows: outstanding performance, male and female, outstanding direction, outstanding new work, outstanding production, and outstanding technical merit.

“Wrestling with Andy Kaufman” by AJ Pearce and Safia Elder was one of the acts announced as not only the winner for outstanding production but also won the award for outstanding new work.

The play was written, directed, and performed by Pearce and Elder who won at the Calgary regionals.

Pearce shared the inspiration behind the creation of his and Elder’s work.

“I’ve always loved Andy Kaufman. And I’ve always wanted to do something about him. But I knew it had to be different. So that’s where Safia came in, working with me on creating this piece where we look at why we want to be these people. Why we want to perform and so that sort of came out of the both of us,” said Pearce.

The audience applauded, especially enthusiastic at the Saturday afternoon performance of the act “Madly Off in All Directions,” written, directed, and performed by Richard Grafton. Grafton later in the night received the award for outstanding performance. He said Stephen Leacock was the inspiration behind his performance.

“As a one-man show, I based on the writings of Stephen Leacock. He was one of Canada’s most famous writers back in the 1920s. And it’s kind of when he was more popular. He was kind of Canada’s Mark Twain; I would compare him to that… I just took a bunch of his stories and work them in and thought reimagined it kind of as a train trip across Canada,” Grafton said.

Jocelyn Steinborn, president of Taber players, was rewarded for outstanding actress performance for her act in “Alternative Accommodation” by Pam Valentine, playing the character Anne. Steinborn expressed how honoured she was and how talented the other acts were.

“I’m on a cloud right now it’s a real honour, and I’m really humbled. There was a lot of, a lot of really excellent talent in the last couple of days, and we rehearsed stuff. So, we had a chance to perform and then relax and just watch all the shows. And so that was really cool, but it was also really scary, because it’s like, oh, they’re good, they’re good,” said Steinborn.

The outstanding direction honour was awarded to Rick Kiebiech, who co-wrote with Janice Thompson, directed, and acted in” Syster och Bror Bygga IKEA” and the last award of the night for outstanding technical merit was received by Bruce MacDonald who performed in “Captain Everything” by Pete Malicki. The festival committee, Mary-Lynn Muhly, shared the special awards in this year’s festival of paintings done by Fran Hutton.

“Something that’s kind of interesting, these awards. We decided as the awards; we would have Fran Hutton, who’s a local artist. So, these are all originals of the coolies So rather than a trophy,” said Hutton.