by Heather Debling
@sparrow_5_2
@StillWatersProd
There's a lot of things you don't think of when writing a play. The practicalities of it. When I was writing The Maple Leaves, it seemed important to not get bogged down in the details, to hold back something necessary to the story because of uncertainty of how it could be staged. It would be up to someone else to (in the now infamous words of Tim Gunn) "make it work."
But now, as a first-time producing playwright, I'm faced daily - often hourly - with a new challenge entirely of my own making.
Based on real-life WWI concert party groups like The Dumbells, The Y Emmas, and The Maple Leafs, The Maple Leaves tells the little known story of soldiers who performed shows near the front lines to entertain their comrades and boost morale. These performers, as Jason Wilson writes in his book Soldiers of Song: The Dumbells and Other Canadian Concert Parties of the First World War, "sought to reach the individual soldier, in the interest of helping him survive the war" (p.1).
