Edmonton really is a theatre town, and has been for as long as I can remember, which is somewhere around the early 1980s. And when you consider the local situation, you can sort of see why it occurred.
First you take a city that grew as the capital of a province, even though it is twice as far north as any other major metropolis in North America. The closest city of comparable size is three hours away, if you drive on the naughty side of the speed limit and don’t stop for a doughnut halfway. The winters are long and dark, and while the summer is a glorious secret, it’s never long enough.
Since you cannot commute easily to another centre for fine art or culture, you have to grow it yourself. And boy, had we ever. The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, which was the first to record with rock bands, tour the north and embed members into schools, now resided in the amazing Winspear Centre and had recently celebrated their sixtieth anniversary. The Edmonton Public Library had been around for a century. The Opera was fifty. Alberta Ballet was more than sixty years old, the Citadel Theatre was closing in on fifty and the Walterdale Playhouse, home of amateur theatre at a high level, had celebrated their fifty-fifth birthday recently. Interspersed with all these stalwarts were smaller, edgier theatres, and even they were becoming august in their own right. The Shakespeare Festival in the Park Board had been mentioning their preliminary considerations for their thirtieth celebrations in a couple of years.
Both the University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan University had strong theatre departments, with separate focuses. While U of A’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program was considered one of the best in the country, and had turned out some phenomenal actors in its time, the Musical Theatre program at Grant MacEwan had its own roster of triple-threat folks who could act, sing, dance, and likely juggle on unicycles.
Every two years or so, a new theatre would spring up, with a base of new graduates and a shared dream. The older theatres had been started by MFA directing students wanting political, local, Canadian, or noon-hour platforms, but now it was actors, realizing they needed work to tide them over between Fringe seasons, who were pushing the envelope.
You’d think all this energy coming from the performing arts would make Edmonton an easy place for the arts to exist, but it still seemed like an uphill battle. I guess people just don’t take the long view on a day-to-day basis. Whereas I had spent much of my life immersed in literature and the study of the culture of civilizations, it didn’t strike most people that their time on this planet would be remembered by the songs they sang and the art they made, not the roads they paved or the wells they dug. Those might be essential activities, but they weren’t what defined us. If we wanted to consider our lives to be purposeful, surely it was to help create and sustain a civilization that questioned, enlightened, and illuminated the human story.
Tell that to the crowd in Oilers jerseys on the platform of the LRT on a Tuesday night.
I had been seeing more theatre this year than ever before, mostly because of my connection to Denise. Not only was she tied to the community through Sarah and Kieran, she had been tagged as a Sterling judge this year, which meant she had a responsibility to see everything on offer so that she could realistically vote on the best of the theatrical offerings for the year.
The Sterlings had been named for Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, the visionary woman who had been the driving force that began it all: Edmonton Little Theatre, The Banff School of Fine Arts, Studio Theatre at the U of A. Whenever Denise tired of going out to yet another play, usually with me in tow, she confided that she drew on thoughts of Mrs. Haynes, who had promoted theatre all over the province, riding trains and driving rutted roads, bringing her vision of a “theatre built not with bricks, but with people” to the prairies.
The big evening of awards was held at the end of June. It encapsulated two distinct seasons in its view, the regular September-to-May season of most theatres, and the June-through-August season of festivals and Teatro la Quindicina, which had several years ago determined that it was more fruitful to go against the grain and deliver evenings of entertainment to people who were looking for places to go that were air-conditioned and delightful on our long summer nights.
I wasn’t going to the awards dinner, of course. As far as I knew, Denise was planning to attend with Kieran, but perhaps all that had recently happened had changed that. A press conference was being held this week to announce the nominees, five in each category, broken down between musicals, dramas, and Fringe productions, which was only fair, given the relative amount of cash thrown at those three formats.
I was interested to know whether or not any of the plays and actors Denise and I had seen and discussed over post-performance cocktails would make the short list. I wasn’t quite sure how many Sterling judges there were, so the short list could be a completely different animal than the roster of plays Denise had submitted as being worthy of consideration. As she had explained to me, each judge submitted his or her list, and through some sort of crazy algorithm, a list of nominees was created, which the judges then met to vote on. Technically, a play one hadn’t nominated might be on the final list, but at least all the judges would have seen the works and so could have an informed vote.
One thing was for sure. Oren Gentry would likely be featured as the Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton Theatre, since he had died this year. I always thought it was such a shame that they didn’t smarten up and give lifetime achievements to people who were still around to receive them. If it were up to me, I would look around and celebrate a still-kicking member of the community. After all, Gentry would still be dead next year.
Of course, next year they might be celebrating Eleanor Durant, though she was only nominally an Edmonton actress. She had moved to Toronto as soon as the ink was dry on her BFA, or even sooner, according to some apocryphal stories.
First Oren, now Eleanor. It really wasn’t a great year to be in the arts in Edmonton. I wondered if there was going to be a hat trick any time soon. After all, this was such a hockey town.
Denise had asked me along to the new Stewart Lemoine play, which had opened earlier in the week, and I had been looking forward to it. His plays, performed as usual by the Teatro la Quindicina, the theatre he had founded years ago, were a complex layering of froth, arch observations of human frailty, and devastatingly funny pronouncements given at a breakneck pace. It was as if Noel Coward had met up with Woody Allan and decided to collaborate on a parody of George Bernard Shaw. I loved them all and looked forward to the annual remounting of a classic along with a brand new offering and, on occasion, a musical written in tandem with some of the other members of the collective.
Denise and I were standing in line outside along the front of the former fire hall. Steve had once joked that, in an Edmonton twist, you shouldn’t yell “theatre” in a crowded fire hall, since in Old Strathcona, two fire halls had been converted to theatres. The theatre itself in the Varscona was quite a nice space, but the lobby was the size of a shoebox and twice as claustrophobic, even with the windows. On pleasant days, it was easier to create a facsimile of the Fringe lines, with ropes designating where to wait.
Denise flashed her Sterling pass discreetly to the woman at the door, who nodded as the two of us passed through. I was secretly delighted to be part of this inner circle, and to try to be worthy of the free shows, I made a point of taking Denise for a drink or a coffee after each show to discuss our reactions. I hoped in some small way to be making the process of deciding who to nominate and who to vote for easier in her mind.
Later, after the show had whirled its way into a dizzying conclusion, Denise and I perched on high chairs in Naanolicious, helping ourselves to amazing concoctions of garlic and tamarind-flavoured naan bread and sipping mango lasses. We were agreeing on the sublime casting of Kendra Connor in the role of Daisy when several of the cast members entered the restaurant, burbling with post-show energy.
Jeff Haslam, the star of the show and artistic director of the theatre, spotted Denise and waved. After the group had divested itself of scarves and bags and settled in to order food, Jeff slipped off his stool and popped over to talk to us.
“It was a great show, Jeff, we were there this evening,” said Denise with a smile, proffering our basket of naan. Jeff waved it off.
“I have more than enough coming, I won’t gobble yours. I thought I spotted you; did you really enjoy it? I’m so glad.”
“The part where you were attempting to translate the Rubaiyat into Esperanto was hysterical. Was all of that authentic?”
“As much as possible. I think Stewart put that section in there just to get back at me for beating him in a board game marathon. I am the king of Ticket to Ride. Ha!”
Jeff was as charming off stage as on, and having him speak directly to me made me laugh with him, even if I wasn’t sure what the heck he was talking about.
He seemed to be intent on speaking to Denise, though, so I excused myself to use the washroom, just to give them a moment or two. When I got back to the table, she was drinking water from the pounded brass cup and looking weary.
“You okay?”
She didn’t look it, frankly. What to anyone else would be a vision of serenity was to my experienced eye a very untranquil Denise.
“Jeff wanted me to know that there is a story circulating that I caught Kieran and Eleanor in flagrante, and murdered her as a result.”
“Really? Among the theatre community? That’s not going to bode well for when Detective Gladue goes asking questions. Does he have any idea where that rumour started?”
“He doesn’t, but I do.” Denise sucked up the last of her Indian version of a fruit smoothie and plunked it down on the table. “Would it be okay with you if we left now?”
I had half a lasse to go, but I quickly drank three big gulps of it, causing a minor brain freeze of mangoey goodness. She shoved two twenties in the puffy leatherette folder, even though I had planned on picking up the cheque, and we made our way out of the long, narrow restaurant.
Night life on Whyte Avenue was beginning to pick up, and we passed gaggles of smokers congregated on the sidewalks near nightclub, pub, and restaurant doors on the way to the small parkade where Denise had left her car. This spilling out into the street of partying humanity had a tendency to make Whyte a bit louder and edgier than it had been in my grad school days, and most people who came down here on a Saturday morning to avail themselves of the Farmers’ Market wouldn’t recognize it on a Thursday evening after 10:00 p.m.
I felt safe enough walking in tandem, though, and we were soon at the car. Denise hadn’t said another thing since the restaurant, and while we were navigating the sidewalk crowds, I hadn’t particularly wanted to ask her anything more. Once we were in her Bug, though, I turned and picked up the thread of the dropped conversation.
“Who do you think has started the gossip?”
Denise looked grim as she turned the ignition key.
“I’m pretty certain it’s Sarah.”