Posted December 15, 2025

Behind the Scenes – 10-Minute Play Series

Dave, can you give us an overview of the Port Hope Arts Festival? What happens in town when the festival is on?

Well, just about everything happens in town when the festival is on. It’s a multi-faceted event—everything from people on stilts to art displays to a farmers’ market, an artisans’ market. And then there’s the 10-Minute Play Series…

You’ve been the curator of the 10-Minute Play Series for the past five years, is that right?

Yes. Our first festival was in 2021. There was a brief moment when Covid lifted that summer, and we were scheduled on the most perfect day in the middle of the one or two weeks before the second wave suddenly hit us. People were just worshipping the actors and the plays and the whole event because they’d been cooped up so long. That was pretty wonderful.

Tell us more about how plays are selected and produced.

Unlike the fringe festivals, we don’t do a script call. We don’t have a lottery. It really boils down to me, and whenever I stumble over a playwright, I ask them if they can give me a ten-minute play. That’s about it. It’s very random.

It’s a good thing you know a lot of playwrights.

The best news is—they’re everywhere! PHAF is a local festival, so about half of the shows are usually by area writers, and the rest are mostly Toronto playwrights.

Nice. And how do they get from page to stage?

After the plays are selected, this is where we poach the fringe model, because each show comes as a complete production to the venue that they’ve been assigned.

So you choose a playwright, then that playwright gets the personnel together and produces the show?

Yeah, pretty much. Another thing that’s unique about it is that it’s completely playwright-driven. I’m all about empowering writers. We have traditionally paid an honorarium per show, and that goes straight to the playwright so the playwright can dish it out. You know, if the playwright feels nice. Or they can just all go to the bar.

This not a fair question, but could you tell us about a couple of your favourite plays from the festival?

You might think there’s only so much you can do in ten minutes—but actually, you can do an awful lot. What I’ve been finding is that the comedies, as you might expect, work very well. But more and more, I’ve been realizing that the serious plays work, too. Last summer, for example, we had a number of fairly serious-themed plays. One was by Marcia Johnson, titled Another Word for Single. It’s a lovely little ten-minute play, very touching, about a man who is caught in a romance scam, and he refuses to listen to the warnings of his best friend. There’s a little kick in the gut at the end of it, and the audience really, really felt it. You know, they all talked about it afterwards.

We had another show by a Guelph playwright named Tom Slater called New Beginnings, and it was also super-touching. We staged it on a little park bench with two young actors; it might have been the first professional job for both of them. One of the characters in the play is transitioning to male and the play is about the process of his friend accepting that this change is happening. There were tears in people’s eyes at the end of it. Wonderfully acted.

Another memorable show was by Sean Carthew, a local writer who is very supportive of the efforts to conserve the salmon population on the Ganaraska River. He wrote a play—Go Fish—about the salmon run. In a masterpiece of non-traditional casting, two humans played salmons, and it was performed by the edge of the river. So it all kind of worked, you know.

Sean is a festival stalwart. So is Mark Brownell, who is always guaranteed to write us a good comedy. This summer he brought a play called The Enfolded Hamlet that was very funny. So yes, we’re even doing Shakespeare. Watch out, Stratford!

Next summer we’ll have fourteen different shows with five performances each. So that’s what, 70 performances? All in the afternoon and all outdoors. All in site-specific places. I try to persuade the writers to use the space their play is using. I don’t want people doing kitchen sink plays in the middle of a parking lot or out behind a bush. It works much better if the play does sort of speak to the venue. But luckily, we have some fun venues to work with —there’s a little old railway station, there are parks and parking lots, and we use the front patio of a popular bar.

Do you ever run into any challenges with it being site-specific? Is traffic ever a problem, for example?

Oh, yeah, there’s traffic. The Toronto–Montreal train basically runs right through one venue. Every now and then you just have to stop and let the train go through, and they’re hellishly long! One venue has notoriously had a barking dog in an adjacent lawn, but the dog disappeared this year. Oh, and the town clock. Half of the shows start on the hour, and half of them start on the half-hour so you can beetle around the town. Initially I would tell the shows: “The town clock will ring and then you start.” Except the Port Hope town clock rings whenever it feels like ringing, so we would have shows starting ten minutes late. They’ve fixed the clock now, but it took them five years; it wasn’t high priority. Clearly, I was the only one complaining. Everybody else was happy. Oh, and then there was the baby. During one performance of Sean’s Carthew’s salmon play, there was an infant who saw two people flopping around on the lawn and thought that looked like fun. So suddenly the baby scooted out and started flopping around with them!

What are the benefits of an art festival for a town like Port Hope?

I think it has huge benefits. It draws an incredibly broad range of people. The Town of Port Hope has a cultural team headed by Jeannie Maidens, who’s developed the festival as a way to showcase all the arts that are in the town. It’s not just theatre. There are artists there, there are craftspeople there, there are theatre people, and they’re all coming together at the same time. It’s not just one discipline. So the Arts Festival draws a lot of attention to the fact that this is a town with a lot going for it. It’s also in such a relaxed setting and format that you can’t help but enjoy yourself.

Let us know the date for next summer so we can put it in our calendars.

Saturday, August 8th. The farmers’ and the artisans’ markets start about 9 a.m. We start at 11 a.m. and run till 4 p.m. We had 3,000 in attendance last summer, so that’s great. And everyone’s smiling.