Foundations Festival brings fresh voices, new works to Theatre Aurora

July 30, 2026 · 0 Comments

Theatre Aurora will be activated by new voices and new works in the month ahead as they host their inaugural Foundations Festival.

Set for August 22 from 7 – 10 p.m., the one-night-only festival will feature seven short plays and monologues in a presentation inspired by one-act-play events.

The Foundations Festival is the brainchild of Theatre Aurora veteran Chris Cluff, who had plenty of opportunities to sit in the director’s chair for the local theatre company last season, directing its production of Arsenic & Old Lace, as well as playing the director in the stage farce Noises Off.

As his work in the season got deeper, he says he began “thinking about access points for brand-new creatives to direct, write, and even act, for that matter.

His pitch to the Theatre Aurora board was inspired by a similar program out of South Simcoe Theatre that encouraged playwrights to submit new works. Going down this path, he said, he envisioned Theatre Aurora becoming an “incubator space” for new works and honing new talents.

“It was a quick turnaround time from pitch to ‘let’s see what this looks like,’ and it took a lot of trust for them to say, ‘Okay, Cluff and team, make this right,’” he explains. “I saw this was just a space to bring new people into Theatre Aurora in less formal roles. If you come in as a director for any community theatre, you’re coming in with a pitch, kind of like an inspiration board, and you have to give some vision of where you’re going to take it. I thought, well, is there something beneath that where we can kind of test-drive some of those spaces?”

The name of the Foundations Festival is twofold; not only was it inspired by Theatre Aurora’s current building on Henderson Drive starting off life as a cement factory, but a chance for theatre-lovers and creatives to develop a strong foundation in the craft.

Once they put out the call for new works and artists, the response was swift as well.

They received more than 30 scripts of varying lengths, ranging from short monologues to short plays that ran 70 to 80 script pages, from writers as young as high school students to dyed-in-the-wool community theatre vets.

The call for directors received a similarly enthusiastic response.

“It has been such a cool experience to go through and support both new directors and new writers,” says Cluff.

One such play, Pickles, was written by high school student Luna Gareri, which Cluff describes as “a farce between two individuals, where one of the characters is not having a great run at life” who may have met their match in an apparently unopenable jar of pickles.

Another, Acceptance, was written by first-year college student Riley Nepean. “It is a monologue written from the perspective of the main character, expressing remorse and expressing this idea of hope that they wish they could have been there for the person more. It’s a nice commentary on the woulda-coulda-shoulda.”

Ashlee Brewer’s Modern Convenience focuses on a happenstance meetup between strangers – a convenience store clerk and a young adult – “both of them with their own baggage to unpack at 3 a.m.”

Mire & Mud is a “western tragedy” by Christian Tribuzio. A revenge play, Cluff says “the protagonist is seeking clarity and comeuppance from an individual that has done something terrible to them and their family in the past.”

Also featuring in the Festival are Raccoon by Rick Butts, Charity Hot and Cold by Lynn Franklin, Vanessa’s Place and by Ron Fromstein.

There’s something for everyone and, as the Foundations Festival comes together, a key measure of success in Cluff’s eyes, will be discussions from the participants – what they felt, what they learned, and would they come back for more?

“It’s a little bit of that joy factor,” says Cluff, adding it’s also a prime opportunity to gauge which plays could be developed further in production. “One element I’ve started to ask going into rehearsals is asking the actors, Would you actually want to mount this? Would you want to go further and do this as a full play? So far, three of the six plays I’ve gone to, they would be willing to give it a go at a full production.

“I think it’s important work in community theatre to have this kind of open space for creatives to come and test-drive some theatre. Considering community theatres do maybe anywhere from three to five shows a year, they can feel pretty intimidating for first-timers to even access that.”

For more information on the upcoming Foundations Festival, including tickets, visit theatreaurora.com or call the box office at 905-727-3669.

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter