Hitting the Road with Heart

There are many ways a play can begin. A line of dialogue. A character voice that won’t leave you alone. A question that nags until it becomes a story. In the case of The Beaver Club, the journey began, fittingly enough, with a long stretch of being stuck in one place.

For Canadian playwright Barb Scheffler, the spark came during the early days of the pandemic. Like so many artists, she suddenly found herself grounded, her touring schedule halted mid-stride. “I was about to start a tour with Menopause the Musical when everything shut down,” she recalls. “We had to go home… and after staring at the walls for a while, I needed something to do.”

That “something” turned into everything.

Scheffler joined an online collective of women writers, an aptly named group called Act Three, and began flexing her creative muscles again. Around the same time, she participated in a Zoom reading of an American play featuring four women from across the United States. It was, perhaps, the final nudge she needed.

“I remember thinking out loud, ‘Why aren’t we doing Canadian plays about Canadian women?’” she says. “And then I made the mistake, or maybe the promise, of saying I could probably write something funnier.”

Her fellow writers called her bluff.

“So I did.”

Click HERE for further details.