Simon says…

(March 20, 2021)

Simon says …

There is a war going on in my backyard.

One side has all the advantages … local knowledge, cunning, experience, and stealth. The other side has a Labrador. It needs to be mentioned at the outset that this is a horribly one-sided conflict, in fact, to dignify it with the designation of “conflict” is a gross misuse of the word.

The stakes? Well, the stakes are the very heart of springtime, the first cheerful glimpses of the season to come, the green quickening of the very earth as it shrugs off the mortal coils of winter … I am of course speaking of that happy harbinger of sunnier days, the crocus.

Our crocuses, with one or two hardy exceptions have been chewed to a nub. No flowers, no shoots, just the heart-breaking tiny glimpses of green, cut off level with the hard earth, all that is left after the hungry squirrel has had his fill. Yes, the squirrel! An old foe its true, as our previous house had so many red squirrels living in the attic that we tried to collect rent! In vain, I might add, for the larcenous squirrel has no interest in paying a fair price for accommodation, no, he just wants to destroy Spring by eating it!

Which brings us to the Labrador. As I may have previously mentioned, the Labrador is traditionally open to eating just about everything, and Ruby the wonder dog is no exception … except for squirrels. The one time her penchant for consumption could work in our favour and she is sadly missing in action. Oh, if a squirrel is caught in the act and Ruby happens to be in the vicinity, she will make a guilty half-hearted sortie in the appropriate direction, but her pace is such that the squirrel in question will die of old age long before she reaches it, and I could swear her bark speaks more of friendship than it does conflict. A gentle-hearted beast it would seem …

I would despair, but one thing I know, Spring will not be denied. Crocuses are hardy little things after all, they thrive in adversity. And as for the squirrels, I think they’ll move on, if only because they’re making their friend Ruby look bad … really bad.

Happy Spring everybody!

(February 28, 2021)

(February 9, 2021)

Simon says…

I’m assuming that everyone is familiar with the “good news, bad news” kind of situation. As in the good news is that my new laptop has much better camera definition, the bad news is that now everybody on ZOOM can see my jowls, or the good news is that in the current lockdown everyone can spend more time with their nearest and dearest in the security of their own home, the bad news is that everyone can spend time with their nearest and dearest … well, you get the picture.

Almost a year ago we made the hard choice to begin canceling programming here at the theatre, at first it was pre-season rental events, but eventually we had to pull the plug on the entire summer season. The good news was that we’d actually sold nearly $220,000 worth of tickets and that we were on track to break box office records, the bad news was that we had to reach out to each and everyone of those ticket holders and tell them about the season cancelation. Many patrons quite understandably needed a refund, some generous souls ($20,000 worth) donated the cost of their tickets to the theatre, and some deferred their tickets to the following year (2021) because they believed strongly that we would all get through this thing and our theatre would come back stronger than ever.

And … now we get back to that good news bad news thing. The good news is that we have a 2021 season planned, budgeted, and absolutely ready to go, the bad news is that it is a scaled down season, for all sort of reasons, that is very different from the season we had promised. Because of this, and because we are being forced to transition to a new box office software provider, we will be calling all of our deferred ticket patrons. We will be asking them to either accept a refund or make a donation of their ticket dollars, thus allowing us to make a clean transition to the coming season while feeling that we are staying true to all of you.

The good news? With any luck at all we’ll see you this summer as we welcome you back through our doors!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and scuff up the lens on that laptop camera …

(January 20, 2021)

It seems to me, that if January is good for anything, and I’m not sure that it is … I mean mostly its about realizing that the window you thought you’d fixed in the fall is still offering only a token resistance to the elements, that the well-earned “treats” you consumed in December are conspiring to make your jeans tight, your digestion uncertain, and your silhouette unflattering, and that the days while ostensibly staying lighter longer, are still undeniably grey, cold, and bleak, as they encourage nothing so much as hibernation … but, if it is good for anything, its good for rumination.

I have been ruminating on the powers of positive thought, which may come as a bit of a surprise having read the above. Nevertheless, positive thought and the vagaries therein have occupied me as I contemplate January from the comfort of my couch … or as my wife calls it, my “den”. Once again, it seems like we are in a “hurry up and wait” scenario, and once again it’s probably a good idea to find as much positive about that as we can. For instance … I’m getting very good at coming up with potential summer programs (three at last count) and corresponding budgets, and I’m learning a whole bunch about cashflow projections!

How do I stay positive you ask? Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that it has to do with personal history, with challenges you’ve faced in the past and how you’ve overcome them. What lurks in my sketchy past? What sordid secret governs how I face adversity to this very day? It’s very simple. I am a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and not only that, I became a fan in 1968, the very year that they began their current run of ineptitude and failure. I have learned to find the positive in the bleakest of circumstances. I do it at the beginning of every season, I’m doing it even now! So, January in lockdown, do your worst! I have lived through losing a lead in the 7th game of the first round to the deservedly despised Boston Bruins and lived to tell the tale. We will overcome! After all, the Leafs just signed Joe Thornton and he comes from St Thomas. Synchronicity!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of positive thinking.

(December 22, 2020)

Simon says…

So, let’s get something out of the way at the get go. I am not always a “glass half full” kind of guy.

In fact, I’m more like a “where the heck is the glass? Is there anything even in the glass? Oh look, I dropped the glass and its broken into tiny little pieces on the ground, one of those pieces will probably stick in my foot!” kind of guy.

Let’s just say I’ve had a tough time walking on the sunny side of the street for the last little while, but on the bright side … Christmas is coming, and with Christmas comes good food, possibly a cocktail or 2, thoughts of family, and gifts, which in my case means new socks!

Now, I don’t know at what point in a person’s life gift socks are received with rejoicing instead of disappointment, but I have come to appreciate the simple pleasures of slipping into a pair of new socks. I’m going to hoard them, save them for a rainy day, and when it really seems that the planets are aligned against me, I’m going to fight back with a colourful foot-hugging wool blend. So, onwards and upwards! A brave new year! May all your glasses be half full …with socks.

Now if I could only figure out why all my new socks are kind of damp, and why they smell of dog …

(November 18, 2020)

Simon says…

(November 9, 2020)

Simon says…

Reflections on Programming

When I was a kid growing up in rural Halton County, I spent what felt like months in the act of haying. To those who have never hayed it looks like a benign enough past time. Fresh air, sunshine, the sweat of honest labour, it seems so refreshingly wholesome somehow, with clear progress and its associated satisfaction at the end of every day. The truth is somewhat different, of course, as many of us know, and can be defined by one word: “chaff”. Chaff is the fine barbed particles and dust-like bits that fill the air as soon as hay bales start to be tossed around. It is present ALL THE TIME when haying, in the breezy field and the stifling haymow alike, it sticks to that “honest sweat” we talked about and creates an intensity of itch that I have not experienced since.

As you can see, I have a clear relationship with haying, and so when playwright Dan Needles in last season’s “Ed’s Garage” allows his title character to weigh in on the effects of the “oversized round hay bale” on the rural status quo, I can immediately identify. The importance of this “identification”, this seeing an aspect of ourselves in a character portrayed on stage, gives us a “way in” to the play, to the story the playwright is trying to tell, and to the tribal experience of watching that play in the company of fellow audience members. It’s not that we can’t understand or enjoy a story that doesn’t reflect our experience in some way, it’s just that when it does, it allows us to see our own experiences from a slightly different perspective, and in the hands of a talented playwright that is a powerful tool indeed.

I’ve always felt that good programming should be a combination of stories that reflect our community in some way, and stories that may also challenge the way our community views the world. The aforementioned “Ed’s Garage”, “Buying the Farm” by Shelley Hoffman and Steven Sparks, and Norm Foster’s “Mending Fences” all reflect a comic rural perspective. The same could be said of Ken Cameron’s “Harvest” and Michael Healey’s award-winning play “The Drawer Boy”, and yet they push an audience a little further from their comfort zone. In “Harvest” the characters are dealing with the devastating destruction of their family home by its use as a “grow-op”, so although the piece is comedic, it has a darker side. “The Drawer Boy”, too, has its comic side, but ultimately draws us down a path that examines the effects of both violence and mental illness.

Laughter is a great medicine, and heaven knows it’s a medicine sorely needed in our current circumstance, but it’s good to think as well, and a good play often allows us both. As for haying? Well, I’m glad to say that the closest I’ve come to it of late is in watching “Ed’s Garage” at the Port Stanley Festival Theatre.

(October 8, 2020)

Simon says…

Fall update

This time last year we had just concluded the most successful season in our 42 year history, followed by a vibrant Playwrights’ Festival that saw public reading of both “Smarty Pants” by Shelley Hoffman and Steven Sparks and “Our House” by first time playwright Murray Furrow. We had managed to pay down most of the debt on our building and had managed to bolster both building and operations reserve funds as a hedge against possible “rainy days”. Well you know what they say: “Sometimes it never rains but it pours!”

This Fall is obviously a little different, but we have been able to cling to some normalcy. There was no summer season for us this year, but we were able to invite 45 patrons into the theatre for a live reading of Jamie Williams’ “Pinkerton Comes to Prospect” in a socially-distanced and somewhat reduced Playwrights’ Festival. It was great to have something live back on the stage again! Thanks to government wage subsidy programs we have been able to keep our core group of employees at work as we make plans for the future.

In other years we would be announcing next year’s playbill at about this time and we would have approved a budget for next year as we start to assess this year’s financial year end. Well that process has certainly been “interesting”, but I’m happy to say that we have struck a budget for next year and we have a season in mind. We’re going to delay the announcement of that season for a while yet as we see what the next few months bring, but be assured that we’ll be actively planning for that season launch, and it will only be a matter of time until we invite patrons back through our doors. When we do, we are confident that our patrons will be safe and comfortable, and that safety protocols put in place will ensure the safety of all.

Huge “thank yous” to our hard-working staff, a dedicated Board of Governors, and to all our supporters out there in the community of Port Stanley. We couldn’t do it without you.

(September 30)

Simon says…

Where do new plays come from?

In the 15 years that I’ve been the Artistic Director at the Port Stanley Festival Theatre we have produced 72 plays within the structure of our summer programming. OK, they have not all been plays, strictly speaking. 16 of them were concert- based productions with only loose connecting material that linked the musical content, but that still leaves 56 plays. Any way you look at it, 56 plays is a lot of characters, a lot of words, and an almost inconceivable amount of work. And here’s the kicker … you only get paid for that work if the play you write actually gets produced. If it doesn’t hit the stage, all you get for your trouble is a pile of paper that sits in a drawer somewhere. Most playwrights have a few of these “desk drawer masterpieces’ tucked away … I have three of them myself. So, this playwrighting thing is a bit of a gamble, and really it’s kind of a minor miracle that we get any new plays at all.

Of the 56 plays I spoke of, 12 were premiere productions that went through our new play development process. In this process, we first of all identify likely plays that we think will fit into our programming, we then assist the playwright with dramaturgical advice during the re-write phase (most plays come to the stage through a progression of multiple “versions”), and finally we workshop the piece with actors and present a public reading. The public reading provides the final piece of the puzzle … you, the audience. Without an audience, there is no play.

Any play is a partnership between the playwright, the actors, and the audience, and its vital for the playwright to participate in this partnership before he finalizes what hopefully will go into rehearsals for a full production. I think a few of the “regulars”, patrons who have faithfully attended multiple Playwrights’ Festival readings, might feel that it is the audience feedback session that is the crucial component for the play’s development, but truth be told, the playwright gets most of the information he needs from simply sitting in an audience and gauging responses moment to moment as his play unfolds.

We hope to produce at least two plays next season that will have come through our new play development program, and if we do, you’ll now know a little more about where they came from. Its not an easy gig, this playwright thing, and just remember next time you enjoy an actor’s work onstage … without the playwright’s work that actor wouldn’t have a whole lot to say.

(September 8, 2020)

Simon says…

Planning for the Future

So … you’re standing backstage in a theatre, you’re not sure which theatre, you just know it’s a theatre. It’s dark, you can hear the sounds of an audience, maybe they sound friendly, maybe they don’t. There is somebody, perhaps an assistant stage manager, pushing you towards the stage insisting that you are late. A play is about to begin and apparently you are in it, but you don’t know the play, you don’t know your lines, you don’t even know what role you are playing. But it’s so ingrained, “the show must go on”! You are in a blind panic, but you step into the lights regardless, as the lights hit you, you glance down and … you are naked.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a description of the classic “actor’s nightmare”, and it often occurs during tech week or at a particularly stressful time in the rehearsal period as your subconscious tries to deal with the stress and nerves that can surround the phenomena of live performance. And aside from the “naked” part it describes pretty well the way many of us have been feeling as we try to plan for the future. Here at the Port Stanley Festival Theatre, we spent the early days of the pandemic reacting to the situation. We focussed on following health guidelines, we started working from home, Zoom became our new friend, and reluctantly we began the process of dismantling our off-season programing and the wonderful season we had planned for the summer of 2020. We were in damage control mode as we contacted ticket holders, subscribers, sponsors, and renters, and tried to come to terms with the fact that our revenue stream had been reduced to a trickle, and that our fiscal situation had gone from “record breaking” to “dire” in a few short weeks.

Fortunately, we have a determined group made up of staff, volunteers, community partners, and Board members, and we have now moved beyond simple damage control. We have spoken to all our ticket holders (well nearly all), many of whom either donated the price of their tickets or deferred them until next season. We have leaned on the financial reserves prudently accumulated from a series of successful summer seasons, we’ve tried to keep in contact with our community through increased website development, and heightened use of social media, and we have begun actively planning for the future. We’ve been active in reaching out to other theatres, in looking at how we can share resources, how we can become stronger as a cultural community, and how we can try to minimize the devastating effects of this pandemic on artists everywhere. As a sector, we were one of the first to be locked down and will probably be one of the last to be fully reopened.

As we contemplate the days to come, as we conduct intensive strategic planning, and a reassessment of what it means to be a small-town summer theatre, one thing has always been certain: we will find a way. It won’t be easy and we’ll need your help. We don’t know everything we need to know, we don’t know when social distancing will no longer be needed, we don’t know when a vaccine will be available, but we do know that we’ll figure it out. We will have actors on our stage again and audiences in our seats, and we will do it in such a way that everyone will be safe. In fact, that will be happening sooner rather than later, as we’ll be staging a “socially distanced” live reading of a brand new play on Saturday September 19th as part of a reduced annual Playwrights’ Festival, and as we plan for some limited “special” programming over the winter. It will allow us to figure out safety protocols and social distancing, and to invite you back into your theatre.

So, there it is. We’re moving forward, we’re planning for a re-vitalized future. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still have that dream, but it’s a dream now not a nightmare. I’m still not quite sure what play I’m in, but thankfully, for everyone involved … I’m fully clothed.

(August 4, 2020)

Simon says

It seems a long time ago now, but last summer we had six opening nights, six first nights, six beginnings all of them followed by stories. They were all Canadian stories, and at least one of them was brand new. On each of those opening nights I would stand up onstage before things got underway and I would thank our sponsors … corporate sponsors, season sponsors, show sponsors, media sponsors, community partners … and you would always applaud their generosity, as is only right and proper.

But here’s the thing, when I made a point of thanking the Ontario Government as represented by the Ontario Arts Council the applause would be only lukewarm at best. When last I put pen to paper, I spoke about how hard it can be sometimes to ask for help, and upon reflection it seems that perhaps its also hard to appreciate that help when it’s given. It’s easy to criticize government … municipal, regional, provincial or federal, we’re pretty much equal opportunity when it comes to finding fault with those we have elected to look after our best interests. I do it all the time. In fact, I’d say I’ve almost elevated it to a full-time hobby!

The Ontario Arts Council is an arms length provincial body funded but not operated by the Ontario Government. Depending on the political stripe of that government the coffers of the Ontario Arts Council have ebbed and flowed over the years, but the talented group of people who operate the organization have always managed to keep it alive, and over the years have channeled much needed funds to many companies just like the Port Stanley Festival Theatre, and by connection, to communities like ours.

So, a heartfelt thank you to the Ontario Arts Council, thank you for over ten years of annual funding, thank you for the understanding and the moral support, and thank for helping us support the wonderful community that we are a part of here in Port Stanley, Ontario.

May our applause be long and loud!

(July 14, 2020)

Simon says…

It’s not always easy to ask for help.
I’ve never been very good at it to tell the truth. As a kid, I’d always rather muddle through on my own, hope for the best, and then be smugly pleased with myself if, against all odds, things worked out alright in the end. Maybe it was misplaced pride, childish male arrogance, or perhaps some weird post-immigration British upper lip thing but asking for help always made me feel like I was lacking something as a person. So, 9 times out of 10, I’d try to tough it out.

(June 30, 2020)

Simon says …

In the spring of 1968, my life changed. I stepped off the “Empress of England” in the port of old Montreal and I learned a whole lot of things in a very short period of time.

I learned that cars could be the size of a small country, that people said, “you’re welcome” when you said, “thank you”, and that hockey was very, very important.

I learned that hockey was played on ice, that it was a game that contained a certain amount of violence, and that the Montreal Canadiens were the best hockey team in the world, ever, without exception, bar none … I learned about BBQ’s, peanut butter, and maple syrup.