Professor Bryan Wade (right) with BNPR 2018 MFA student producers Andrey Summers, Tommy Partl and Liesl Lafferty.
After two years of online pandemic performances, Brave New Play Rites is returning to the theatre for its 36th year!
From March 22 to March 27, catch seventeen new plays at the NEST on Granville Island. Ten plays will premiere as full productions and seven plays will be featured as part of the Staged Reading Series. Audiences will be treated to a range of voices and genres—comedies, dramas and one-person shows.
Brave New Play Rites is the longest-running new play festival in western Canada, and this year’s festival is dedicated to its founder, Professor Bryan Wade. Wade was actively overseeing the production of this year’s Festival when he passed away in early February. His loss has been felt heavily in the UBC Creative Writing community.
“When Bryan first landed in the Creative Writing program in 1986, he had a simple idea: get playwriting students to write short plays as part of their course. Bryan took those plays off the page and onto the stage. There is no better learning experience for an emerging playwright than to witness their work in production in front of a live audience. Bryan made that a possibility for many students,” says Lecturer Sara Graefe, the Festival’s new faculty advisor.
Brave New Play Rites has produced over 550 short plays; second and third productions of Brave scripts have been staged in New York, Toronto, and Scotland, and many of the festival’s alumni have gone on to become prominent members of Canada’s artistic community.
This year’s festival is filled with exciting new plays—a young autistic teen dreams of an alien world; two strangers meet on a plane and long for love, and Frankenstein’s monster journeys to the afterlife to try and earn a spot in heaven. Wade himself co-curated the festival line-up and was especially proud of the student plays the Festival is showcasing this year.
Tickets for the full productions and staged readings can be purchased on Brown Paper Tickets ($20 for general admission and $15 for students, entry by donation for the staged readings). The full productions run 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm from March 22 to March 27, 2022. The staged readings are both afternoon matinees on March 26 and 27 at 2:00 pm. Masks and vaccine passports are required for entry to all events.
For more information visit bravenew.ca.
