Clean Sheets 2009
August 6, 2009
Three years in the making and our first Clean Sheets comes to a close. As the last of the playwrights fly back to their corners of Canada and the Performance Centre at the Roundhouse is handed over to the next event at the Pride In Art Festival, we get to take a wee breather. Not too much of one though. Chris is back at Vancouver Queer Film Festival and I have a mountain of paperwork piling up at PiA and Screaming Weenie. But it is a mound well earned.
Monday morning came a little early for some, as the realisation that workshops started the morning after Pride in Vancouver. The moaning and groaning didn’t last too long though as the actors joined Jack and Brad and went to work with their groups.
On Tuesday, the reality of the festival set in for me as I was up at 5am and went right through to midnight with contracts, cheques, receipts, signings, discussions, renegotiations and, oh yeah, I was directing a workshop and had a live reading that night. It’s days like this that define “labour of love”.
Wednesday was by far the most eventful. Staples decided to implement a very bizarre policy that saw them refusing to hand a workshop script over to me until I proved that I had permission from the copyright holder of a script I had ordered copies of. The long and short of this very long and painful interaction with an over-caffeinated young man, is without proof that I was not running a pirating operation and abusing Staples in the process, I was not going to get these scripts. I explained to this young man that after using Staples for months to copy scripts for workshop operations for the theatre company, that this was very bad timing for him to get anxious and hold up a workshop that has a playwright who has traveled from Toronto. In order to get the new copies I had to kidnap Shelley from the Roundhouse and take her to Staples. In the end, we got our scripts and swore to never use this Staples again in fear of ever having to deal with Mr. Wonderfull. But we did get to the workshop on time. And their reading rocked, as did Tony Berto’s Downstream.
Big thanks to Chris, the playwrights, actors and directors for making Clean Sheets a big sucess.
