Short Plays, Big Wins

The Short Play Festival ran from September 2-14, 2025 at the LSPU Hall

Reviewed by Rhea Rollmann

The lesson of a lifetime for any writer is to do more with less. Kill your adjectives, proclaims Mark Twain. Simpler words, yell Hemingway and Kerouac. No unnecessary words, no unnecessary sentences dictate Strunk & White from the pages of those writers’ manuals the robots want us to forget about. Strunk & White draw on analogies: too many words is akin to too many lines in a drawing, or redundant parts in a machine. 

Apply the same logic to theatre. The short play is the apotheosis of theatre. It must possess all the necessary parts—exposition, tension, climax—but condensed into a fraction of the usual time. Mastering the form requires more skill than a play drawn out into multiple acts, smoke breaks, and that interminable post-intermission stasis we doze off to. 

Year after year, the St. John’s Short Play Festival delivers some of the finest drama this province offers. Don’t let the term ‘short play’ fool you—the form requires technical mastery from playwrights and actors alike. The festival’s final night provided an exemplary sample of what local theatre can do. 

Four plays in under two hours—yet each one offered punch, drama, and an opportunity for actors to deliver remarkably versatile performances. 

Pieces of Resistance from Dream Haus Productions (written and directed by Dill March) opened the night—a queer play that wears its heart on its sleeve. To the surprise of some it was a musical carried mostly in song; a risky venture but the heartfelt performance of its two main actors pulled it off. A young gay man (Max Stringer) and his newish boyfriend (Andrew Starkey) gather for an unorthodox picnic in a graveyard, and take the viewer on a romp through the fraught politics of pride. Is Pride a protest? Are queer public displays of affection acts of resistance or simply gauche? Body dysmorphia, coming out stories; there’s a surprising lot packed into the short piece, and delivered in song just to make it both more gay (for the audience) and more challenging (for the playwright and actors). There’s an upbeat cheeriness to the piece that risks becoming too much at times, but both playwright and actors brought it to the fine edge of drama and gay camp and managed to hold it there without sliding too far into either. And besides, after all we’ve been through lately, don’t we deserve a bit of upbeat, singsong cheer? More queer drama like this please—bursting onto stage in song and diving right into queer politics without the tired, awkward build-up of tension that’s usually more for the comfort of straight cis audiences anyway. This was the night’s most ambitious piece, but everyone involved deserves credit for pulling it off with spirit and kicking off the night with an unremitting dose of queer joy. 

Next up, The Caregivers (Julia Moses and Francesca Handy) was also ambitious: two women—one a housewife with an ailing mother, the other a paid caregiver hired to look after her—swill wine on a Friday night while struggling to find common ground with each other. Here the drama dwells in what’s left unsaid, building suspense and uncertainty around the effort they both make to connect. At times this risks rendering the narrative confusing, but the actors take on their roles with such passion that their connection carries the piece even when the dialogue does not. There’s a lot packed in here; the hot-and-cold balance between friendship and friction flows as thick as the wine. There’s an unresolved Sapphic tension between the two women as well that may or may not have been deliberate, but adds to the overall uncertainty of the narrative’s direction. In a play like this uncertainty isn’t a bad thing; it’s what keeps the tension at that taut point necessary to keep the viewer engaged. 

Substitutes in Hiding (written and directed by Robert Flynn) swept away the deliciously foreboding tension of the previous piece with an unapologetic comedic offering. Two teachers (Christian Loomis and Sarah Saint-Claire) caught in the staff room during lockdown pass the time as teachers do: dissing the system, dissing their students, and engaging in a bit of over the top flirtation. Everyone involved in this one deserves credit but Saint-Claire truly shines, delivering a comedic performance that hit every button. From the final drawn-out whimper of a tuba to knocking over chairs in her effort to seduce the other teacher, the subtle and perfectly timed touches she brought to the piece carried it over the top. This piece is comedy at its finest, from finely scripted witticisms and double entendre to full body camp. 

Thoughts of Sex and Sadness (by Daniel Lanigan O’Hara) wrapped up the night in fitting fashion. A man and woman sit next to each other at a bar on Valentine’s Day, wrapped up in their respective forms of self-pity. Inevitably, clumsy efforts at conversation and flirtation lead them both to share their sexual histories. I spent the first five minutes of this piece cringing at what I expected to be cloying straight romance—Dawson Mercer did an exquisite job playing the quintessential cringy straight Newfoundland bar male, so much so he took me in for the first portion of the play—but ten minutes later I was in awe. Nicole Redmond brought a complex, textured vivaciousness to her role, and the two actors tore away from their barstools into an exquisite, impeccably choreographed song-and-dance exposition of their respective relationship histories. This was a remarkably ambitious effort yet the performance stayed tight and the narrative unfolds perfectly. In the scene, each character enacts the other’s former partners, alternating between suave hipster bro and skeezy misogynist; sweep-me-off-my-feet romantic and toxic abuser. This portion was the highlight of the piece, its jaw-dropping rapidity allowed both actors to display the full panoply of their acting skills. 

One of the tired tropes we hear from the ignorant tech bros is that theatre is dead. The packed house at this show proved otherwise. The wave of young actors taking to the stage and playwrights penning their prose is a reminder that in our approaching post-digital age, theatre remains as important as ever. These folks have no time to waste defending the theatrical form; they’re busy building and expanding what it can do.

For those doubting the importance of local theatre, it’s worth taking a moment to look behind the curtains. This year’s St. John’s Short Play Festival call for submissions netted about 70 entries for an available 18 slots (itself an ambitious growth over past festivals), Festival artistic director Allison Kelly explained to me. Picks were selected through a random draw, with additional weighting given to Indigenous and 2SLGBTQ+ entries. Kelly curated the final five slots, paying attention to any glaring omissions produced through the random draw. With tiered pricing to ensure accessibility and a paperless ethos (QR codes provided programming credits and other info), inclusivity was central to organizers’ efforts. 

“We wanted to create an environment where anybody could have access to the LSPU Hall,” Kelly explained. “This year there was a real energy around the whole thing, we were so happy. There was a lot of engagement.”

Kelly is also passionate about the future of the theatrical form. 

“The actual art form is so ancient in terms of a human being telling a story, and the barrier to entry is really low. Not everybody has the resources to put off a huge play with a massive set, but nobody can stop someone from getting up in front of a group of people and telling a story. We all know our brains and our mental health are being destroyed by our connection to our phones and our addiction to content, so I think people are really seeking out going to theatre.” 

In a world yearning for the authenticity and connection we feel we’ve all lost, theatre offers what social media and streaming television does not: a compressed dose of the complexity of real life unfolding right before our very eyes, in the same room with us, from live bodies mere feet from our own, smoking cigarettes we can smell, bleeding sweat we can see, embodying all the messy knottiness of life that eludes those cringily crafted avatars preaching at us in three-minute Tiktok clips. St. John’s Shorts delivers the finest in theatre, year after year. This packed house knew what was up; next year make sure that you do, too. 

Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer and audio producer based in St. John’s, NL, and is the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023).