Carrying On...
In 2005 two major changes in Dave's life took place - his agent Patricia Ney retired, after a productive 15 year partnership that began with Midnight Madness. Dave is now represented by Pam Winter, of Gary Goddard Agency in Toronto. And, also after a 15 year association, Dave's position as script editor for radio drama at CBC disappeared into the ether, along with most of the radio drama programming on the network. Dave still does occasional script editing for the Mother Corp.
The Last Liberal was produced with great success at Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company in spring, 2006. Charles McFarland had been with the project from the beginning, as dramaturge and director.
Dave attended a lot of theatre that year; he was on the Dora jury in the General Category and saw over 80 plays and musicals. It turned out to be less of a chore than expected and, very often, proved a fairly pleasant duty. The beauty of being a juror is that you have to go and see shows that you might not normally plan to see - and often these are exactly the shows that surprise and delight. As expected, the work of Soulpepper and Tarragon theatres was of a consistently high quality, but there was an incredible array of other work of exceptional worth, with particularly strong offerings from the Obsidian and Fu-Gen companies.
In between the serial theatre-going and getting The Last Liberal to stage, Dave managed to continue his draining of the Canadian medical system in 2006 with two more sessions at St. Michael's - one to have a painful gallbladder removed and, later, an angioplasty to fix everything the 2003 bypass had missed.
Dave is currently working on a number of projects and, in fact, has never felt a greater rush of creativity than now; perhaps it's all that extra blood flowing unimpeded about his body. Some of it might even be reaching his brain. A political sex-farce, Conservatives in Love, has recently delighted Toronto Fringe audiences. A short opera entitled Piece of My Heart, based on Dave's time under the knife at St. Mike's, was produced by Tapestry New Opera at Harbourfront early in 2008, and received bad-reviews of coronary-inducing magnitude.
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And then Kaj Munk entered Dave's life. Dave is working on a new drama which focuses on the last hours of Munk's life. The Danish pastor-playwright was assassinated by the Nazis in early 1944; he had become an unbearable thorn in the side of the Third Reich and his play Niels Ebbesen was seen as giving moral sustenance to the Danish resistance. This new play, entitled simply Kaj Munk, is being written with the assistance of Munk's granddaughter, Arense Lund.
In 2009 Dave concluded a stint as playwright in residence at the London Public Library, where he lectured, ran a playwrights group with a bevy of talented London writers, and produced shows, including Library Shorts, a site-specific extravaganza penned by his writers group. He directed his first show – Taking Liberties at the Toronto Fringe – and had a short opera produced at Toronto’s Luminato Festival in June, 2009.
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In 2010, Dave returned to work at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as a producer with the Sirius department and his creative team, headed by Walter Rinaldi and including Sean Laughlin, won a bronze medal at the New York International Radio Festival, for a piece on the October Crisis. He taught a playwriting course at the University of Toronto, with Glenda MacFarlane, and contributed five episodes to the award-winning Wendy Lill radio series, Backbencher.
Dave has continued his various personal writing projects and, in 2011, a new drama, American Detour, was presented at the Columbus Museum of Art. A number of short works were produced that year at theatres across the United States, from Massachusetts to Alabama to California. In addition to new productions in 2012 of The Edible Woman, Midnight Madness and Into, Dave has written a piece to accompany a large painting by Herbert Jung, Scenes From Trevi Fountain. It will receive its Toronto premiere in May, 2012. And, in the winter of 2013, a new site specific work which Dave is writing and dramaturging, Library Shorts, plays at a variety of venues across the Greater Toronto Area.
Over the years, Dave's work has been presented in every Canadian province, two of the three territories, at least 25 states south of the border and a dozen countries on four continents. Dave's manuscripts and papers are the property of the Trent University Archives in Peterborough, Ontario.
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