Post Productions Announces the Winner of the 2022 Windsor-Essex Playwriting Contest

Months of speculation can finally come to an end now that Post Productions has revealed the winner of the 2022 Windsor-Essex Playwriting Contest: Mirabella by Joey Ouellette. Of the script, the playwright says, “I think maybe it is the best thing I’ve ever done”. Ouellette is the only playwright to have won the Windsor-Essex Playwriting Contest multiple times. He previously won in 2018 and 2021.

“There was some discussion amongst those of us in the judging panel about whether or not Ouellette’s script should win this year,” says Post Productions Managing Director and contest coordinator Michael K. Potter. “Would it be bad form for Ouellette to win again? Should we exclude him from winning because we’d become friends and colleagues with him over the years? In the end, however, it was the script every member of the judging panel had at the top of their list in both rounds of the contest. We were all in awe of it. It was the best script we’d received – and if the best script doesn’t win, the contest lacks integrity.”

Ouellette – Artistic Director of Purple Theatre Company and a teacher in the Theatre Skills Education Program – describes Mirabella as “a police murder mystery drama romance thriller tragedy. Thriller romance mystery? It's a buffet! The theme to me has always been that the only thing strong than passion is obsession. So I guess it's about a group of passionate characters, each wrestling with a secret obsession that damages their lives.” The story of Mirabella centers around an aging ballet school that has long served as the artistic oasis in a blue-collar neighbourhood in which it would normally be out of place. When a ballerina is found murdered at the Mirabella, events are set in motion that reveal long kept secrets, hidden desires, and the longing for beauty and grace that exists in the hearts of all people.

The story of Mirabella has deep personal roots for Ouellette, who says “I wanted to write about a parent who repeatedly waterboarded their child as punishment, to exorcise it from my own childhood. But that became a very tiny part of the play. The story became about the suffering every person endures, that becomes part of them, and that they ultimately rise above. There are so many iconic images for me in the play -- a dead ballerina, a man obsessed with barbies, a woman waiting in a bar, an old man behind a locked door; all images of loneliness and broken hearts.”

Members of the judging panel were drawn instantly to the simple poetic beauty of the script, which is intended to be staged with just three actors and no sets, lighting effects, sound effects, or other forms of theatrical embellishment. According to Post Productions Artistic Director and contest judge Fay Lynn, “The simplicity of Mirabella makes it one of the most character-driven scripts I’ve ever read. The story haunted me, and the characters lingered in my head for weeks after I’d read it. Mirabella is everything a black-box play should be.”

“I want the play to be riveting,” Ouellette explains. “I imagine a crisp simple production -- and from that simplicity magic happens. The story swallows the audience and they are moved and changed. I know I'm getting old but I still cry when I read certain parts of it.  I want to share those feelings.”

Both Post Productions and the playwright believe Mirabella will be remembered by audiences long after its final performance. Says Ouellette, “The play is for everyone who has loved beyond what we tell ourselves is reasonable -- those foolish lovers of life who have already suffered and know that there is some tragic beauty there, in surviving, in carrying yourself through the things that destroy you.”

Ouellette says he’s both grateful and humbled to be the first playwright to win the Windsor-Essex Playwriting Contest multiple times. “It's more wonderful than I can say.  Not because I crave laurels, but because a playwright needs feedback and production. How can you understand the play until it becomes alive? And then when I see it move in front of me I am amazed, moved, bewildered (in the very best way). How can these things that I have felt be outside of me? How can they be real and be seen and experienced by others and how incredibly wonderful is that?  Writing is a lonely thing, but somehow a production is like turning a sock inside out -- all that lonely isolated thinking is now being experienced by everyone in the seats. It's exhilarating. If the purpose of life is to positively impact others -- and it is -- how can I ever stop trying?”
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Mirabella will premiere in June 2023 at The Shadowbox Theatre as the third production of Post Productions’ 2023 season.