Zero Tolerance: A Performance on Safe Schools

On Thursday February 25, 2010, from 3-5 pm at Hart House (The Great Hall), a group of University of Toronto students will perform a rehearsed reading my play Zero Tolerance for their classmates and the general public. The students are from three different programs at the University: the Equity Studies program at New College, the Public Health program and the Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development program at OISE (the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education).

Zero Tolerance is a research-informed play about creating safe schools in Toronto. The play is an adaptation of a task-force report called The Road to Health which was commissioned by the Toronto District School Board in 2007 following the shooting of CW Jeffreys student Jordan Manners. The rehearsed reading will be followed by a brief talk given by OISE graduate student Dean Barnes who is a vice principal at the Halton District School Board. Dean's doctoral work focuses on the use of peacebuilding programs to create safer schools. A Question and Answer discussion will follow Dean's talk.

Please join us at Hart House tomorrow, Thursday February 25, 2010 for the reading of Zero Tolerance. Admission is free.

All the best,
Tara

Producing Harriet’s House Episode 7: Getting our audition call ready

Last week we had our second monthly production meeting of the year and focused on three main projects: the design of the image that will grace our poster and publicity materials, the writing up our audition call and our sponsorship/partnership fundraising campaign. Production and stage manager Gillian Lewis, intern Monica Nunes and I will meet later this month to finalize the wording of our call which will go out on March 1, 2010.

At the moment we're planning to post our audition call on the Canadian Actors' Equity Association website and with Theatre Ontario. We'll get in touch with Aluna theatre company and various local university and college theatre programs and ask them to post the call as well.

Plans for our sponsorship/partnership campaign will also be finalized at our next meeting. Details of this campaign will be described in a future blog entry.

All the best,
Tara

Producing Harriet’s House Episode 6: Arrangements with Hart House Theatre

Arranging to produce Harriet’s House at Hart House Theatre began with a visit to Doug Floyd, General Manager. Doug spent an hour and a half with me discussing the contract I was about to sign and explaining how things would work during our tech run and performance nights. Doug also reviewed how much different services would cost and helped me make good decisions about what I might need for the production and what I could do without.

Doug and I also spent a good deal of time talking about box office services, how Hart House Theatre charges the production company two dollars a ticket for selling their tickets, and what I could/be should be charging for our production of Harriet’s House. Here, Doug’s experience in theatre production at Hart House Theatre was very, very helpful. I settled on $18.00 a ticket (which would give us $16.00 a ticket) with a group rate of $15.00 for 10 or more tickets.

Tickets for Harriet’s House are now are sale and can be obtained at Hart House Theatre: uofttix.ca or 416-978-8849.

One of the advantages of producing Harriet’s House at Hart House Theatre is that information about our play is now up on the Hart House Theatre website. We will continue to update our information as it becomes available. For example, we plan to put out a casting call at the beginning of March and hold auditions at the end of March. Once we cast the production, the names and biographies of the cast will be added to Gailey Road’s own website as well as the Hart House Website.

The Gailey Road production for Harriet’s House is meeting later this week to discuss budget, publicity poster design and auditions. I’ll report on our meeting in my next blog.

All the best,
Tara