Many would-be playwrights go years before they ever realize the achievement of having their work presented on the public stage, and some never reach that goal.
In three short years however, playwright and Innisfail resident Laurie Hodges Humble has achieved that accomplishment with not only one play, but two.
This fall, The Dickson Store Museum Society will be producing her play The Poplar Grove Ladies Club, for the second year in a row. The society staged the play last year to rave reviews and thrilled audiences, and received so many requests to revive it that its membership took a vote and decided to oblige. This year's performances will be held at the Spruce View Hall on November 29 and 30. The event will be the museum's major fundraiser for 2013.
This past June, Central Alberta Theatre in Red Deer also featured one of Hodges Humble's works, a one-act paranormal murder-mystery comedy called Murder by the Book, as part of its annual one-act play festival.
Having attended performances of each play, Hodges Humble was surprised and pleased with not only the audience reaction, but the actors' interpretations. "It is interesting to see what plays as comedy to the audience," she said. "And in live theatre, each show can be different each time you see it, depending on the audience reactions and the actors' responses to that."
The experience of having her works produced was a bit surreal, she admitted. "I think the expectation was that I would be uncomfortable with watching other people interpret my work," she said, "but I personally enjoyed giving the plays over to the respective companies and letting them just run with it."
That hands-off approach led to some surprises in the final product. "Poplar Grove has a children's Christmas pageant as part of the plot," said Hodges Humble. "Originally I made the decision to write the pageant as taking place offstage to keep the cast smaller. When the Dickson group produced it they included a full pageant, kids and all. It was really neat to see."
Hodges Humble's casual approach to theatrical production may stem from the fact that she never originally aspired to be a playwright.
"I love writing fiction," she said. "In my heart, I'm really a novelist, but I write plays because it was something I was fortunate enough to fall into."
She discovered playwriting when she moved to Innisfail and couldn't find a writers' circle to work with. She participated in a playwriting group and discovered Scripts at Work, a program sponsored in part by Central Alberta Theatre and The Alberta Playwright Network. Through her involvement with the group, Hodges Humble created and fine-tuned her first two plays and has already begun working on her third. That one may have to take a back seat for a while, however.
"When I found out that Dickson wanted to do Poplar Grove again, I started thinking about turning the play into a novel," she said. After taking some time to determine the voice from which the story should be told, she has now begun the process of converting the script into prose.
Hodges Humble hopes to remain involved with Scripts at Work next season, and will try to find a writers' circle in the fall geared towards her fiction writing aspirations as well. In September she plans on attending a two-day workshop at the Alexandra Writers' Centre Society in Calgary on how to teach writing. Recently she participated in the same organization's online learning pilot project, which she hopes will ultimately spark more online learning and teaching opportunities for both aspiring and accomplished writers in the future.
"I don't think of myself as very accomplished yet, which is kind of funny, since I've had two plays produced now," she laughed. "I do want to keep learning and perhaps take things to the next level. Online learning is a great way to do that."
In the meantime she looks forward to seeing the reprise of The Poplar Grove Ladies' Club and hopes it will find a new audience.
"It's a multi-generational story performed by a very talented cast. The play examines the challenges of preserving cultural traditions in a changing society, within the context of a small-town community," she said. "There are elements in it that everyone can relate to, especially residents of small towns and rural communities."
