Concordia undergrad Jeanne Potvin wins Infinitheatre’s Write-On-Q competition

“I’ve always been a ravenous fan of games — video games, board games, all of it,” explains Jeanne Potvin, who recently won first place in Infinitheatre’s Write-On-Q playwriting competition.

“Gambling as a concept always appealed to me. I wanted to write a fun, cruel story where the game is the centre of everything: the search for the thrill, the love of the sport.”

A second-year creative writing student at Concordia, Potvin won for her script Playing Against the House, a sharp, playful drama that blends mythology, chance and the thrill of competition. The piece earned her $2000 in the annual Quebec-wide contest and a staged public reading at Infinitheatre’s Pipeline public reading series, which took place on December 6.

Inspired by Greek mythology — and video games

Playing Against the House is a tightly woven narrative set inside a casino’s game room, where the Fates — the trio of Greek mythological beings who weave and cut the threads of destiny — run the house. Three patrons wager slices of their own time, not to collect objects, but to buy knowledge. Each revelation reshapes a life outside the casino: while the players never meet, every choice ripples into one another’s stories.

The Fates deal in answers about the past, present and future, offering “impossible” information that lets characters confront what they’ve lost, or what might be coming. Consequences are revealed before causes, underlining how information can be as costly as any wager.

Potvin structured the play based on video game levels, a choice inspired by two Concordia classes: Videogames and The Middle Ages and Videogames and/as Literature (ENGL 255).

“We really dissected how games ‘work’ in these two classes, and I think it helped me polish my own work. They were probably the best, most helpful, classes I’ve ever taken. They helped me to develop my own personal writing style,” she says.

Though she wrote the script as a personal project, she says a first-year course, Introductory Creative Writing: Prose Fiction (ENGL 226), prepared her to stay focussed.

“I remember we only worked on one or two short stories over the course of an entire year. It absolutely killed me — I could not stand to read the same 500 words over and over again — but I think it really trained me to just sit down and tackle the work. It gave me a really strong working discipline that still helps me to ‘just do it’.”

Support from friends and mentors, including director Stéphane Zarov, helped refine the play’s rhythm and bring it to fruition.

“It was absolutely lifesaving,” Potvin says. “Without this group, the play would be vastly different.”

Once it was complete, she wasn’t entirely sure how the play would land with others. But the jury described the script as “entertaining and mischievous, with tight writing that asks us to contemplate the real value of our time.”

“When they called to tell me I’d won, I didn’t know what to say,” she recalls. “You spend so much time alone in your corner working on one project, and you lose sight of the whole thing."

With the competition win under her belt, Potvin plans to continue working on personal projects, and hopes to produce Playing Against the House next year.
 

Discover Concordia’s Creative Writing program.