Okotoks' MacDaDa Theatre to represent the Foothills at Provincial One Act Play Festival

An Okotoks short play will represent the Foothills region in the Alberta Drama Festival Association’s (ADFA) 2024 Provincial Festival.

MacDaDa Theatre’s production of Ken Jenkin’s ‘Chug’ was awarded Outstanding Production at the recent Foothills Regional One Act Plays Festival, meaning it will be performed at the provincial festival along with the other regional winners in May.

Okotokian Bruce MacDonald, who founded MacDaDa Theatre, directs and stars in the production.

He explains the premise of the show, which centres around the title character, Chug.

“He lives on a frog farm and the whole play is a look at how he got to this point, which is basically meeting his partner and the adventure she took him on to end up running a frog farm in southern Indiana. Now he’s stuck with tens of thousands of frogs that he can’t get rid of.”

Chug is a one-act monologue, with MacDonald being the sole actor on stage, though he had help with production from his wife Karon Friesen, and son Zakk MacDonald.

Before founding MacDaDa Theatre, MacDonald taught drama for nearly 30 years, mainly in Athabasca before spending the last few years teaching in Okotoks.

He describes the creation of MacDaDa as a retirement project.

“I always liked acting, but I hadn’t had an opportunity to do any acting because I’d always been directing, so I thought I’d try creating a little theatre company where I could do a one-person show, and that way, all the rehearsing all that is still on me.”

The one-person show lent itself well to the pandemic restrictions that were in place at the time.

“The first one was the first festival out of the pandemic, so it made sense to do a  one-person show because you weren’t allowed to rehearse with people before that.”

MacDaDa has seen success in every regional festival they’ve been featured in so far, also having been awarded Outstanding Production in 2022 and 2023.

MacDonald was awarded Outstanding Performance at the 2022 provincial festival for The Descent of Man, and MacDaDa won Outstanding Technical Merit for Captain Everything in 2023.

He says his productions have gradually grown more complex, giving the example of a complicated set piece he had to build for Chug.

“It needed to have a refrigerator that could have hundreds or thousands of frog legs come pouring out of it that the character deals with at the beginning of the play. He goes to put beer in the fridge, and it comes out with all of these frog legs, covering the stage. There were a lot of things in the script that were problems I had to solve. I didn’t want to carry around a real fridge, so we had to build one. It had different challenges, more complicated challenges.”

He credits his mother Barb for helping with the set piece, particularly the creation of the frog legs making use of modeling clay.

Having performed at the provincial festival before, MacDonald already has an idea of what he’s in for.

“You definitely feel like you have to step up because everyone is representing the zone that they were in. It’s not like there’s more competition, it just feels like if you were good here, you want to be better there.”

He’s planning a few tweaks and changes to put in place over the next few weeks.

“I want to play with the ending and some other things and listen to what the adjudicator said. Tweak some things, he gave me some good advice on things I can clean up and make it that much better. Go back to work on it and then get to do it again. Then that’s it, you put it to bed and go to the next year.”

The ADFA’s 2024 Provincial Festival is being held in Grande Prairie on May 19 and 20.