Len Falkenstein, U of New Brunswick
The NotaBle Acts Summer Theatre Festival: Growing Playwriting in and About New Brunswick

The NotaBle Acts Theatre Company was founded in Fredericton in 2001. The company's primary mandate has been to develop new voices in English-language New Brunswick drama. To this end, we organize playwriting contests, offer dramaturgy and the infrastructure to workshop contest-winning plays, and mount an annual festival of New Brunswick theatre. My paper will outline some of the challenges we have faced in our first two years of operation, focusing primarily on the difficulties that we have encountered in nurturing an indigenous playwriting culture. Despite the extensive promotion our festival has received, we have found playwrights and scripts of producable quality in short supply, and consequently have been forced to reinterpret our definition of what constitutes playwriting by and about New Brunswickers. While it was never our aim to produce solely "New Brunswick plays," our experiences have led us to question the premises on which our provincially-defined mandate is based. Is there such a thing as a "New Brunswick identity"? Should our mandate be rejected in favour of a broader Maritime or Atlantic mandate? And, as a larger question, is the developmental model of theatre even an effective method of nurturing a sense of place in our present day and age? In considering these questions, I will confront issues fundamental not only to our company, but to other Canadian regional theatre companies.