Theatre NorthWest will be presenting “Swollen Tongues” in a new way.
The Theatre will be putting on a play reading for the play, as a part of their Theatre NorthWest Pride Play Reading Series.
“For the second year in a row, we’ve got two live, on-stage readings by actors of plays by Canadian queer playwrights,” said Julian Legere, Artist in Residence.
“After I first moved to Prince George in 2020, I got involved doing a reading of a play called ‘Botticelli and the Fire’, which was a favourite play of mine that I brought as a reading, which is by Jordan Tannahill, who’s a very award winning, renowned queer Canadian playwright.”
Legere said Theatre NorthWest Artistic Producer Marnie Hamagami had the idea of expanding to do a series and doing several readings all by queer playwrights.
According to Anna Russell, who will be reading the part of Catherine, the play is about a brother and sister who are being mentored by a poet, with aspirations of becoming poets themselves.
“So she loves poetry, she’s working on it, but she lacks sort of the life experience or emotional depth to put anything exciting into her poetry, and ideas into her poetry,” Russell explains.
“Whereas her brother is perhaps not the strongest writer, but does have sort of a deeper emotional well, and it’s kind of about that relationship.”
Russell said doing play readings gives the theatre the opportunity to do things they normally wouldn’t do on the stage.
“That would include maybe pieces that are a little more controversial, things that are maybe more classical in nature as opposed to some of the contemporary works that hit the stage.
Theatre NorthWest will be presenting ‘Swollen Tongues’ on June 25th, as well as ‘Dragonfly’ on July 9th.