KAMLOOPS – TRU faculty member, playwright George Johnson has won top honours at the National Playwriting Competition sponsored by the Regina Little Theatre, for his one act comedy “Still Life With Nudes.”
Johnson, who teaches modern British drama and creative writing at Thompson Rivers University, says the play parodies contemporary installation art and upends stereotypes of the elderly.
“The characters are based on some very feisty local seniors I know at the Kamloops United Church,” Johnson said. “And the setting is inspired by the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London, which was a former power generating station.”
Johnson expressed his thanks to his creative writing students at TRU with whom he workshopped the play, and dedicated the work to his mother, an artist in Ontario.
Mary Blackstone, a professor at the University of Regina’s Theatre Department, and one of the adjudicators, said “Still Life with Nudes makes an important statement about how our perceptions of older people need to change-and it does this in a way that creates entertaining drama for all ages.”
Another adjudicator, well-known Canadian playwright Colleen Murphy, added, “This play is a winning combination of engaging characters, smart dialogue, witty interaction, very solid dramatic structure and, most importantly, a lot of heart. Congratulations to the author!”
In the play, when Betty Dilliwick’s Gauginesque still life with nudes paintings are rejected for hanging, she and fellow pensioners storm the offending bastion of contemporary art, the Blotchley Leisure Centre and Art Gallery; they install themselves until the decision is reversed.
Besides the award presented in Regina on June 16, the play won the Gladys Cameron Watt Award in the 67th Canadian One Act Playwriting Competition sponsored by the Ottawa Little Theatre earlier this year. It is also currently one of three finalists in the McLaren Memorial Comedy Play Writing Competition, sponsored by the Midland Community Theatre, Midland, Texas.
For more information contact:
George Johnson (250) 579-8655 or by email.
Regina Little Theatre Board member Blaine Lucyk, (306) 761-0164.
More details at: http://www.reginalittletheatre.com/season0607/playwright/default.htm
