Denise and I finished off our burgers and salad and, after chatting with our pleasant waitress, paid up and slid out of the booth at the Next Act. The buzz of patrons was happy but not overly boisterous, and there had been no lineup. That would all change in a few weeks, during Fringe season. Then, there would be a line curling around the alley, and the wait staff would be up to their elbows in action. Families and couples who for the rest of the year never made Old Strathcona part of their shopping circuit would descend on the area to see plays, eat interestingly fried foods, watch street performers, shop the craft tents, and lay out money for psychic readings. There were folks who would also spend their Fringe visits camped in the beer tent areas, after twenty-five years still tickled they could drink outside on an Edmonton street.
But tonight, it was relatively calm. The shopping hours for the boutiques along Whyte Avenue on a Saturday ended at 6:00 p.m., and the weekly Farmers’ Market, which would suspend action during the Fringe, had already closed up. The farmers who had driven in for a 5:00 a.m. set-up time were by now well on their way home.
Teatro la Quindicina, one of the theatres that shared the space known as the Varscona Theatre, named for a now razed art deco cinema near the university, ran its season counter to the regular September-to-May offerings of all the other theatres, presuming correctly that its audience was loyal and starving for theatre in the summer months when it was actually a delight to get out at night and line up for a show. They ran three shows prior to the Fringe, one show during the Fringe, and one show in the beginning of October, and that was their season. The artistic partners in the company were then free to take on roles in other theatres or venture to other cities for plum roles.
I loved Stewart’s shows. They were always witty, alternating bittersweet with kooky, and the language and erudite hypotheses always had the ability to tickle my funny bone. They were like meringues and I had a hard time describing the plots to anyone, even a week after I’d seen one, except to say, “Go, you’ll love it.” Teatro always did two classic Lemoines in their season as well as one of his new works and often a play by one of the associates, and had recently added a remount of a classic.
Tonight’s offering, Pith!, was a play I had seen twice previously, and it was one that actually stuck with me, though the sharper bon mots and structure had fled my memory. The plot entailed a drifter being invited into a wealthy widow’s home by her stalwart and plucky maid, who through the course of the evening helps her to overcome her debilitating grief through an elaborate game of parlour charades. Only in the Lemoine world would a drifter be psychologically astute and altruistic. Stewart’s universe was populated by troubled aristocrats, prescient teenagers, and Burt Lancaster as Bill Starbuck, the rainmaker. It was a world I wouldn’t mind inhabiting, come to that.
Denise and I bought eight red licorice whips each, and although it was general seating and there was plenty of choice, we made our way to our usual seats at the back right of the theatre. There was talk afoot that the whole theatre, which had once been a fire station, was going to be ripped out and a new theatre built in its place. No one was sure when this was going to happen, but every time I came into the cool darkness of this cheerful little space, I felt a tug of pre-nostalgia, already missing what was going to disappear.
The only other theatre in town that made me feel this much at ease yet close to the action was Chautauqua, Oren Gentry’s lovely theatre, at one time a cinema, which is what Edmontonians turned into theatres when they ran out of fire stations. The Roxy over in the gallery district was also a former cinema, but it had a longer and narrower audience area.
As far as intimate theatre went, the tiny experimental spaces that Taryn Creighton turned into theatres made for some of the coolest experiences in town. While you could have audiences of only 100 or fewer, it was the ticket to get for wildly inventive and thought-provoking theatre. You let your Black Box subscription lapse at your peril; I’d heard there was a 900-names-long waiting list to get season’s tickets.
One thing I loved about Edmonton theatre was that, except for the Shakespeare plays, which needed a chance in our long summer days of getting dark enough to use some lighting effects in the second act, most performances started at 7:00 or 7:30. That meant that on a given evening, you could see a show, stop for a drink with friends, and still make it home in time to catch the news and go to bed at a decent hour. It fit neatly into one’s schedule. And to my way of thinking, that was how it should be—part of the world as you knew it. After all, theatre was built to be disruptive enough on its own, without making it so uncomfortable that people shrank from adjusting their lives to take it in.
We spilled out on to 83 Avenue in time to see the western clouds showing glowing gold undersides in the still bright blue sky. Denise had parked in the lot past the funeral home, so we strolled there, reliving our favourite lines from the show we’d just seen and marvelling at Andrew MacDonald-Smith’s physical antics as he became a mute Inca canoist paddling the Amazon.
“When you consider it’s a play within a play within a play, it’s really quite marvellous.” Denise was marking the distinctions with her fingers. “We are watching Pith! In the play, he is a drifter. He pretends to be a counsellor, and they embark on the pretense of a voyage, where he is a fellow traveller. Within that context, as a fellow traveller, he becomes the native guide. And we continue to buy it, because he is thoroughly committed to his role, whatever it happens to be.”
“What gets me is that on top of all that, he can sing and dance.”
“Oh, he’s probably a reasonably good accountant, too,” Denise laughed. “From what I can tell, that Teatro crowd just muddles in and takes a turn at doing everything. Jeff runs the subscription base and Leona could probably give courses in period costuming, and then they all troop onto the stage and steal your hearts.”
We got into her little car and drove the zigzag pattern across the one-way streets of Old Strathcona toward my house. I got out by the fire hydrant, where Denise pulled up for a moment so that she could continue on track to her place instead getting tied up in my back alley. That was one trouble with the great location of my apartment building. There was never street parking available in front of it.
I let myself in the front door and walked the long, dim, carpet-runnered hallway toward my door near the back of the building. My new locks made for a jumble of keys, but having more than one deadbolt made me feel monumentally safer. I occasionally wondered whether I should alternate leaving one of the locks open, so that any lock pick would lock one as he or she unlocked the others, but I was worried it would screw me up into forgetting to lock any of them.
I flicked on my overhead light and snapped the bolts on the door behind me, then moved to close my blinds and open the air holes in the kitchen window to get a cross-draft going. The temperature was marginally cooler once the sun went down, and soon it would drop several degrees in the evenings, warning us of the months of ice to come. Tonight it was mild and dry, so even though the temperature hadn’t gone down much, I wasn’t turning into a sweaty, muggy mess. I would be able to sleep under my summer-weight duvet just fine.
I popped the kettle on for a cup of sleepy tea and moved toward my phone, which was blinking messages.
The first one was from Micheline, telling me that two of the parents of my camp kids had been at the show that night and were both raving to Kieran about how much their darlings were getting out of this year’s program. I made a mental note to thank Micheline for sharing that. Feedback was so sporadic in the teaching game; you had to feed your ego with scraps.
The second call was from my mother, who wanted to remind me to get a card in the mail for my Aunt Ruth’s birthday. I don’t think I had ever even known when Aunt Ruth’s birthday was, but my mother had taken it upon herself to be sure her sister-in-law was well cossetted by the family she still possessed since her recent widowhood. I made an actual note to myself to go get a card, since I knew I wouldn’t remember that task.
The third call was dead air. I had the phone tucked under my chin, writing myself card for Auntie Ruth on a pink sticky pad, waiting for the voice mail computer voice to come in and ask if I wanted to erase or reply, knowing that if I tried to erase before then it would just reset and start to play over again, some glitch in my personal voice mail box. Assuming someone had reached a wrong number and had inadvertently listened to my message too long, triggering the answer space, I waited for the program to run its course. It surprised me to hear the click of a phone receiver being set down. I hadn’t been listening to dead air.
I had been listening to someone listening. Creepy.