Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
A certain electric thrill
In a long-ago column, I confessed to having an addictive personality. Shunning cigarettes, alcohol or drugs (and unlike Tiger, playing around with only my wife), I said the only thing in life I was presently addicted to was the chili from the Meat Merchant.
My wife said that was not exactly accurate, and only a couple of hours before I write these words, I was reminded of what she was talking about.
I was sitting up in the sound and lighting booth in the balcony of the Music Hall, watching the final dress rehearsal of Onstage Uxbridge’s last play of the season, That Summer. Elsewhere in this issue, you can see a couple of photos from the show, and a story about its set designer, local sculptor Wynn Walters. In addition to producing and directing the production, I’m also running the lighting board.
We had invited a few people to the rehearsal, just so we could get an idea of where the laughs were. In professional theatre, such a show is called a preview, and in places like Stratford, they may go on for weeks. In community theatre, we seldom have time for them, but for this play, we thought it was important.
So there were a few bodies out there, and I was behind glass, a step removed from what they were watching. I had been with this show every step of the way anyhow, I wasn’t expecting any surprises.
But as the rehearsal went on, I got a sense that something special was happening down there, that the cast was coming all together at the same time. And then, in the final moments of the play, a chill went down my spine, and tears came to my eyes.
I’ve been involved in theatre a very long time, since I was in high school. I’ve played a part onstage or backstage in over 200 productions, and watched a few hundred more, from Broadway in New York to another Broadway in Skagway, Alaska. I’ve seen a lot of magical things happen in rehearsal and in performance, and I suppose that’s why you could say I’m addicted to this amazing art form.
In all those years, however, I’ve only felt the kind of electricity I felt tonight, maybe a couple of dozen times. But they’re what keep me coming back.
There was a production of Man of la Mancha back in 1980, the first community theatre show I mounted in Whitehorse, which was to be my home for another 15 years. Back then, the city had no real theatre space; as in many other small communities, the high school gym had to enact a role as well, that of a playhouse. In addition to the usual challenges any performance has in transporting the audience back to a particular place and time, we had to get the audience to ignore the lines on the floor, the basketball hoops, the bleachers that many of them were sitting on.
Rather than taking refuge on the stage, we put the orchestra up there and brought the cast right onto the gym floor. We laid down canvas drop cloths, constructed some basic wooden risers, hauled in straw (still flavoured with horse dung) from a local stable, and succeeded beyond our wildest dreams in taking the audience right into a 16th-century Spanish dungeon. After the finale, they rose with the most thunderous standing ovations I’ve ever seen. It was probably the most satisfaction I’ve ever had as a director.
As an actor, I recall a “wow” moment during a production of a courtroom drama called Nuts (Barbra Streisand was in the film version). We also did that one in Whitehorse, in a World War II vintage quonset hut that we’d converted into a 100-seat “black box” called the Guild Hall.
I played the defense attorney in that play, and suddenly one night, in the middle of a loud, fast-paced, highly emotional scene, I totally ceased being Conrad Boyce the performer, and transformed into Levinsky the lawyer.
Ordinarily I’m a bit of a technician as an actor; I’m usually very conscious of exactly what I’m doing with my voice, my face, my hands, and the effect they’re having on the audience. I’m totally in control of my performance.
But that night (and it’s only happened a handful of other times in my whole acting life), I lost it. The words and the actions were the same, but the character had taken over. It took me a while offstage to recover.
Those moments are scary, but they’re magic as well. And earlier tonight, the chill I felt during the last scene of That Summer was very similar. And the magic was created by a very dedicated team of actors, designers and crew members who were united in knowing the mood they wanted to create, and achieved it superbly.
Good theatre can happen here as well as it can in Stratford, Toronto or New York. We prove it all the time.
If you love good theatre, and the occasional magical chill down your spine, I urge you to see That Summer.
