Photo by Stoo Metz.
The Theatre Nova Scotia Robert Merritt Awards are tonight and it’s World Theatre Day.One thing that has always stressed me out about going to the Merritt Awards is that I never know where to sit. The tables there are largely organized by theatre company, so if you are affiliated with one, or you were hired by one for a show that was nominated, you have a group of ten friends to sit with. But where do you sit when you don’t belong to any one company specifically but arguably belong in the community of audience members for all of them? It’s been a strange journey for me, over the last fifteen years, to get to a place where I feel very comfortable with the fact that my place in the theatre community is largely in the audience. And I struggle with undervaluing my own creative talents: certainly I’m a writer of fiction along with nonfiction, and who knows, maybe some day I will come back to performing in front of an audience again in some capacity, but today I want to focus on being in the audience.
I started out, as most of us did, in the audience. My Aunt Carol swears she took me to see Alice in Wonderland at Neptune Theatre in 1987, but if she did I would have only been two years old. I was tall though, I bet I could have passed for four. Regardless, I have to take her word for it, as I have no memory of being there. I know I saw the High School Choir at Sacred Heart School of Halifax perform You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown when I was eight, and around the same time, I remember a touring show came to the school with puppets (likely either from Mermaid or the Neptune Young Company). I remember at recess one of my classmates complained that watching the play was boring and I had a visceral reaction to this criticism. I had been utterly transfixed. I wanted plays to come to school every day. From the very beginning I was the theatre’s rapt and enthusiastic audience. Insults to the theatre felt personal. They still do.I was eight when I performed in my very first musical, The Kitchen Clock, at Sacred Heart School. I was in the musical at school every year between grade three and grade twelve, and I also played everything from “Adverb” (in a play about Parts of Speech) to MacBeth in hilarious classroom productions and scenes. I started taking classes at Neptune Theatre School in 1996, when I was eleven, and I was in YPCo in 2000-2001 when I was in Grade 11. I was proudly one of Halifax’s biggest Rentheads, and an early fan of Stephen Sondheim, Bernadette Peters, Concept Musicals, Marla McLean, and Raquel Duffy. I loved Neptune Theatre, the building, the institution, ardently. As enraptured as I was with Broadway and New York, I also would fight anyone who suggested Neptune was inferior, and somehow even as a teenager I think I knew that my life and Neptune would always deeply intersect. Especially in University I became more and more interested in the history of Nova Scotian theatre, the history of theatre in Canada, and the more I became interested in history, the less interested I became in wanting to be an actor myself. Even as a child, I was interested in piecing together people’s own theatre histories, in the audience, by reading their bios. I memorized performers’ bios and flagged certain theatres in my head: Orangeville, Shaw, The Grand, Stratford, as places I wanted to know more about. I started to make connections between actors who had worked at the same theatres. Slowly I started to have some sense of how theatre in Canada worked.
I Assistant Directed a production of Urinetown: The Musical with Dr. David Overton in my last year at Dalhousie as part of my Honours Degree in Theatre Studies. One of my most vivid memories is of Dr.O and I being the only two people in the audience during the initial full run-throughs of the show. One of the cast members told me that she was so grateful to have me there because she could feel my energy while she was performing, and being able to sense the audience response in rehearsal was so valuable. So much of what makes theatre magical, and what sets it apart from film and television, is the relationship that exists between the performer and the audience in the sacred shared space. It is an experience that is always new, but also always familiar, of sitting in the dark with strangers, and entering together into an imaginary world with the humans who are playing right in front of you. Between 2007 and 2019 I sat in hundreds of different audiences in theatres all over this country, and in New York City. I sat in chairs, on the floor, inside, outside, on an old tree stump that had been moved inside, I have lied down and watched a performance happen over my head, I have crawled into nooks and crannies, climbed up to balconies, and even sat on the stage myself. I’ve seen ten minute Fringe plays and 24 hour Stand Up. I have spent years competing with myself (and Steve Fisher and Derrick Chua) to see how many shows it’s humanly possible to see in one day. I went to the theatre and sat in the audience so much that I took the experience entirely for granted. Most of the time, I think, I was an enthusiastic audience member, but at times I definitely grew more jaded and tired, as much as I tried to always find my way back to the love and the care I felt for the theatre in general and the theatre community I belonged to more specifically. I assumed that when I needed to take a break from the theatre, for whatever reason, it would be on my terms. And when I felt ready to come back, the theatre would be there waiting for me.
You see where I’m going with this.
On March 6, 2020 I was at Neptune Theatre for the Opening Night of Calendar Girls. Everyone was buzzing about the news of the impending Coronavirus Pandemic. No one knew what to expect, but everyone knew something strange was happening, something substantial was coming, something in our lives was about to be profoundly changed. I remember having a quiet moment upstairs at Fountain Hall where I thought to myself, “You should hold onto this moment. You might not be back here for a long time.” I relished the last hug I gave to Martha Irving, and the conversations we had in what was otherwise a fairly ordinary Opening Night Party, but I also relished just being in the space, being in the building, being in the audience. I returned to Neptune the next morning, Saturday March 7th, to see the YPCo Production of The Hobbit in the Studio Theatre. Again, I tried to soak everything in. I wanted to draw the experience out. I wanted to be able to remember it if and when the theatres were completely closed.
It was exactly two years later, March 6, 2022, that I would sit in the audience again for a theatre production- or for anything for that matter- and once again I was home at Neptune Theatre. I saw Jeremiah Sparks in Beneath Springhill: The Maurice Ruddick Story created by Beau Dixon. I wore the same outfit I had worn to the Opening Night of Calendar Girls, with the addition, of course, of my classy face mask, I think my fashion choice was an attempt to pretend that nothing had changed, that the narrative had been uninterrupted, which of course was a fantasy. Everything had changed. And yet, I found a precious gift in that production, in the audience at Neptune Theatre last year. I was given the opportunity to remember what it was like to experience being in that room, having that experience, if not for the very first time, in a very pure and fresh way. I was able to fall in love with the theatre all over again, and I did. I fell in love with it in the way you can only do after a profound loss. I didn’t fall in love with the coughing, and the Anxiety that the close proximity to everybody else gave me, especially initially, or with the cell phones people forgot to turn off, and whatever the Hell people crinkle for way longer than anything ever needs to be crinkled, but even that makes me laugh. How human we all are when we are together.
The visceral rage I felt during Fall On Your Knees when the theatre wasn’t as quiet as I felt the actors deserved. What a roller-coaster. I care so much. SO MUCH. About this. About this experience. About these people on stage, whether I know them or I don’t. About these characters. About this process. About this tradition. About this community here in this city. And in this province. And the theatre community of the entire country. And of all of us theatre folks in the entire world. About this building. All the buildings that we have fought over decades time and again to keep and save. And the theatres without permanent buildings. I love it all so much. And I always have, even when I was crankier. Even when I thought maybe I didn’t as much. I always did. And all of you. YOU. I love you for being here in the magic. For helping to create the magic whether you’re in the audience, on the stage, or behind the scenes. We’re all in this one together. And Thank God, right? So, today, on World Theatre Day, I celebrate loving the theatre from the audience and not taking it for granted- at least not yet. Oh, you ephemeral wonder: “one peculiar passing moment” that you can try to hold in your heart forever, but that you can never truly experience over again exactly the same way. So, we keep coming back, again, and again, year after year, to enter into that special space where we never know what will happen, who we will meet, or even who we will become by the end of it. We gather together, even when it feels dangerous, even when it IS dangerous, we gather together, and we build a community, and we share an experience and it helps us to understand and appreciate what it means to be alive.
