Short Tales

Many of the cast and crew of Short Tales 2024 in the Green Room

When we set out to create an incubator programme for Shakespeare in Paradise, we had no idea how much it would take off. We had no idea either how important the programme would become not only for SiP, but more broadly for theatre in Nassau and for the wider performing arts community in Nassau. All we wanted to do was to provide a space to inspire new writers and generate new plays for The Bahamas.

We soon realized that Short Tales was not only going to serve new writers. It also needed to train new directors. After all, what’s the point of having new short plays if we didn’t take that opportunity also to give people who wanted more experience or confidence in directing for stage the chance to get it? And so we decided that Short Tales would be an evening of new writing put on by early-stage directors.

And then we had our first audition … and we quickly realized that it was also a place to develop new actors as well. There’s a whole lot less pressure learning lines for a ten-minute play than learning lines for a whole Shakespeare tragedy (and that’s what a lot of new actors seem to worry about—learning the lines, though that’s not all there is to it). And so the Short Tales Company was born.

A Tale of Two Robbers by Deon Simms, directed by Terneille "TADA" Burrows, featuring BahaMian Trae, Nicole Musgrove, Alex, Nirico Musgrove, Ejay Francis, and Seantia Thompson.

Out of the Short Tales company have come directors, producers, actors, stage crew, and community. That’s why the first image of this post about Short Tales 2024 is a photo of the company backstage, rather than images of the plays we put on, because it’s the company which is transforming our theatre and transforming individual lives. It’s through Short Tales that people can act on their dreams of going on stage—the risk is low, the standard high, the company supportive. It’s also through Short Tales that writers can play with the ideas in their heads. We’ve seen things on our Short Tales stage from vampires to time-travellers, from murderers to idealistic talk show hosts out to change their little corners of their worlds. We’ve seen monologues, histories, rollicking farces. We’ve had Bahamian dialect and standard English poetry. We’ve gone to the gates of heaven and peeked at the depths of hell (burn, baby, burn). We’ve heard from swimming pigs and Shakespeare-quoting gangsters: we’ve had Death and Light and Reason and Doubt on our stage; there’ve been elephants in the front room and funeral repasts in the back yard. Women have been battered and have battered back. We’ve lived through lotteries and hurricanes.

We’re telling Bahamians’ tales.

Antonio Thompson and River S. in La Tormenta by Inderia Green, directed by Julie Ritchie-Bingham

This year’s Short Tales was no exception. For the first time, we had ten more or less new directors at the helms of our plays, and we have had the work of ten writers featured as well. It’s not always like this; sometimes people direct more than one piece, and sometimes writers have more than one play accepted, but this year the pool of talent was deep enough for us to realize the dream we had from the start. We also had a new crop of actors, some of them performing for the first time, others making the sidestep from singing in church to speaking before a crowd. We are also training new crews, technicians, and a new production team. This year’s Short Tales was overseen and managed not by me (Nicolette Bethel) but by a production team of veterans from earlier Short Tales, who ran rehearsals and performances and showed me that Short Tales is in good hands.

Poster image by Madison Cartwright. Art direction by Julia Ames

Short Tales Curtain Call