After a successful inaugural year, “10 Minute Sunday” is making its return to the stage at the Peterborough Theatre Guild on Sunday, August 9.
For $10, audiences will be able to see 10 original plays that are each 10 minutes long and staged back to back, with a matinee show at 2 p.m. and an evening show at 7 p.m.
“When you put 10 of these on in quick succession, the audience never knows what’s going to happen next or what they’re going to see next,” says founding producer D’Arcy Jenish. “It comes as a really big element of surprise.”
“The basis of a good festival is good scripts,” Jenish adds. “We have 10 very good scripts coming from a mix of professional and community theatre veterans.”
Jenish was inspired to produce the series in Peterborough for the first time in 2025 after writing works for the 10-Minute Play Series held during the Port Hope Arts Festival for several summers before. Hosted by the Municipality of Port Hope, the series and festival will be held in downtown Port Hope on Saturday, August 8 this year.
“There are actually ten-minute play festivals all over Canada and the United States, so it’s just an addition to the theatre scene here (in Peterborough) that I think we should have,” Jenish says. “It’s the most affordable ticket in town.”
With last year’s success, which included a sold-out matinée show, Jenish saw the potential in bringing the series back to the Peterborough Theatre Guild and is hoping to expand it in the years to come.
“I don’t think anybody knew what to expect last year and everybody came out (of the theatre) thinking, ‘Wow, this is great!’ because the plays are good, the acting is good, the stories are good,” says Jenish.
“It’s an opportunity to bring new audiences to the Guild and make sure we’re always refreshing our audience by attracting new people, and then making sure the (Peterborough Theatre Guild’s) season is also available to them. It gives people a reason to look at the upcoming season and, I must say, we’re going to have a great ’26-27 season.”
Gathered through a call-out for submissions, this year’s lineup of 10-minute plays consists of work by first-time playwrights as well as playwrights who will be familiar to Peterborough Theatre Guild audiences.
Jenish will stage Ten Minute Jitters, which is about two desperate-for-work actors who agree not to respond to notifications on their cell phones for 10 minutes. If they succeed, they will get an audition.
Jenish, who wrote the full-length historical play The Tilco Strike staged at 4th Line Theatre in 2023, says writing a play in a 10-minute format can be a “challenge.”
“You have to be able to tell a complete story and introduce it really fast, so the audience knows immediately in the first couple of lines what’s going on,” he explains. “Then you develop it with the middle of the story and bang, you have to quickly bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. I find it very rewarding to write in a short piece.”
Peterborough-born playwright Dave Carley, whose full-length play Midnight Madness was performed at the Guild during the 2025-26 season, will be staging Passion in Peterborough, about two would-be lovers who meet at Rogers Cove but are separated by centuries when an unexpected stranger changes everything.
Also returning as emcee and playwright, Toronto-based playwright Marcia Johnson is staging A Fairy’s Request, about a young actor trying to persuade her theatre-allergic former nanny to see a play.
“There’s a really good mix of plays,” Jenish notes. “We’ve got some humour, we’ve got some issues-oriented plays, and we’ve got these life stories.”
The latter is apparent in the two-part 10-minute plays written by the Guild’s own Bea Quarrie for this year’s series. Audiences will recognize her as a local actor, director, and producer, though Quarrie is donning her playwriting hat for the first time.
Leave Now! follows her own family making a fateful decision in 1956 when Russia invades Hungary, while Fifty-Sixer takes place in 2026 and follows Quarrie’s granddaughter becoming curious and asking questions about her grandmother’s escape 70 years earlier.
11-year-old Skye Beaton will be playing the role of Quarrie in the first play, and the role of her granddaughter in the second.
The other five plays being staged are A Flicker by Guy Newsham, about an irate man who tries to smash a streetlamp that prevents him from sleeping until a widower begs him to stop, Blaze McSizzle: Man on Fire by Cooper Bilton, about a famous old daredevil who insists on yet another life-risking stunt against the better judgment of his assistant, Photographic Memory by Ron Davies, about a man who finds that photos can be as hard as memories to erase after his ex asks him to delete some photos she sent him, Second First Date by Wyatt Lamoureux, about a couple who are matched on a dating app years after they met and broke up as teenagers, and The Future Looks Bleak by Jean Parker, about a bickering couple who consult a mystic with hilarious results.
“A ten-minute play is a really great training ground because you have to get a lot done in ten minutes in under 2,000 words with two or three characters,” Jenish says. “It’s good training for writers, good training for directors, good training for actors who want to have feature roles. It really can be a benefit to all parts of the theatre community.”
While this year’s 10 Minute Sunday festival accepted submissions from outside the region, Jenish hopes to include more work from Peterborough playwrights and performers in the years to come.
“My long-term goal is to develop some young writers here in Peterborough, because I feel that Peterborough is a great place for performance and for people to act and to perform on stage,” Jenish says.
“I think it would be something to add to the cultural mix here.”
Tickets for 10 Minute Sunday are priced at $10 plus fees and can be purchased at https://ci.ovationtix.com/35868/production/1279438.
