Press Release – Saskatoon-born Playwright’s Show Coming To Persephone’s Stage For The First Time

Saskatoon-born Playwright’s Show Coming To Persephone’s Stage For The First Time

Saskatoon, SK – Saskatoon-born playwright, Trina Davies, will be seeing one of her plays grace the Persephone stage this February.

The Romeo Initiative by Trina Davies will be on stage at Persephone Theatre February 4-15. This is the first time Persephone has produced one of her plays.

“Having a show on the Persephone stage in Saskatoon has always been on the list of things that I hoped would happen someday,” Davies explained. “It’s personal to me to be able to return and share stories with Saskatoon audiences. I grew up walking in the Meewasin valley with my family and visiting the Nutana Bakery for long johns on Broadway on Saturdays. I’m so happy to share The Romeo Initiative with Saskatoon audiences, some of whom will be friends and family. It is a real homecoming to a beautiful theatre in a beautiful province.”

Davies, who still has a lot of extended family in Saskatchewan, will be joining Saskatoon audiences on opening weekend of the play. She called the play a “wonderful excuse to visit and celebrate” with her family.

As a youth, Davies was always interested in theatre and arts. She went to Aden Bowman and took creative writing classes, where she learned more about not only writing fiction, but discovered a talent for poetry.

“There are incredible Saskatchewan writers, and they sometimes visited our class and greatly inspired me,” Davies said. “I was always interested in theatre. I was acting in productions at Castle Theatre in Aden Bowman before we moved provinces. In fact, I was quite upset at the time because I was acting in a one-act play that had just made it to provincials and they would have to replace me because we were moving.”

When they moved to Edmonton half-way through her high school experience, Davies started to act semi-professionally. She worked with many of Canada’s preeminent professional theatre artists at the Citadel Teen Festival of the Arts. She also continued to write poetry and was encouraged by professional artists to get into directing or playwriting.

“I resisted for about a decade until I felt that I had something that I wanted to write about for the theatre,” Davies explained. “Writing plays comes with limitations that other genres don’t have, namely that you are only working with dialogue and stage directions/stage pictures.”

Her first play, Multi User Dungeon, won the Alberta Playwrights Network Discovery Award in 2000, which she found encouraging.

“For me, the best part of writing a new play is when I can get into the room with other artists and explore the piece,” she said. “The hardest part is being by myself writing a first draft. I love the collaborative nature of theatre and the immediate experience of sharing the results with an audience.”

Davies describes The Romeo Initiative as half rom-com and half spy thriller and said it leaves the audience questioning what happened. She is proud of the play, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Drama when it premiered in 2012.

She explained one theatre critic said, “The Romeo Initiative is for people who like love stories. This one happens to be humourous and a little dark. But at its base the story revolves around love and how it can live in the strangest of situations. If you like a good love story with a dark underbelly, go see The Romeo Initiative.” 

When Davies was living in Edmonton, the idea for The Romeo Initiative blossomed one day when her father was visiting and they caught a part of a documentary on TV about a woman who was part of the real Romeo Initiative.

“My father thought the woman was delusional while I felt that I understood where she was coming from,” Davies said. “Like a lot of my plays, this started me on a multi-year process of research and writing. I was fascinated by the idea of the manufacturing of emotion.”

She started to ask herself the questions around what is the human experience of being in love, especially if there’s a “playbook” which can manipulate people into different feelings.

“As part of this process, a journalist at the BBC put me in contact with a German journalist who could answer my questions directly,” she said. “You never know who will help you until you ask, and you can never be certain what amazing things you will discover in the process.”

Davies has written a wide range of plays, from the spy intrigue of The Romeo Initiative, to a prairie ghost story with West of the 3rd Meridian, to seeing the world from a different perspective with Silence and many others.

Playwriting is an interesting process for Davies, who said she enjoys the process of diving deep into a fascinating topic, then making it interesting on stage in collaboration with other artists, but inspiration can come from a variety of areas.

“There is always an impulse to start, and I can never be certain where it will come from,” Davies said. “For instance, with Waxworks, it was a random visit to a (bad) wax museum and a small plaque about Madame Tussaud.

“For what I consider my ‘Saskatchewan play’ West of the 3rd Meridian, it was a family story about my great-grandparents. It can come from anywhere but has to reflect enough about our current world to sustain several years of effort.”

She encourages Saskatoon audiences to head to Persephone to see The Romeo Initiative.

“A night sitting in a space where you can laugh and gasp with other people while you share a story is never wasted,” Davies said. “This play continues to live on and have multiple productions because audiences love it. When theatre is done right, it is way better than sitting at home watching another show on a streaming service, and this production will be done right.”

Davies will also be joining Persephone’s Theatre Club for a free event, “From Page to Stage” on February 7 at 2 p.m. During the event, she will be sharing readings from a couple of her plays, including Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell, which opened the 50th anniversary season of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 2019, and West of the 3rd Meridian, which is set in Saskatchewan.

“I’m really looking forward to being able to share bits of these stories with Saskatoon audiences and to get to meet and talk directly with people from my home province,” Davies said. “Please come and say hi!”

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For more information or to book an interview, please contact:

Jodi Schellenberg, Director of Marketing & Communications
306-384-2126 ext. 237
[email protected]