It's Never Just a Play

Made By Kawartha Lakes Museum and Legacy Learning Centre

First edition prepared for the 2026 Lindsay Exhibition

It started with an object and a question

This digital exhibit extends For Us, It’s Never Just an Object, a Made By: Kawartha Lakes exhibition first presented at the Lindsay Exhibition in 2026.

At the fair, five groups of objects opened five very different stories about the people who have made—and continue to make—Kawartha Lakes. Each painted panel offered only a few possible paths: people, places, skills, events and ideas connected by lines of inquiry.

The Lindsay Little Theatre panel began with some of the simplest objects a theatre leaves behind: programs and scripts.

A program may appear to be a record of one evening. Look again and it can preserve the name of an actor, director, designer, stage manager, sponsor or volunteer. A script may carry blocking notes, lighting cues, changes, stains and pencilled reminders. These objects tell us what appeared onstage, but they can also lead us toward everything the audience never saw.

Follow those clues and one production expands into a much larger story about creative work, technical knowledge, volunteer labour, friendship,  mentorship, community space and the determination required to keep a curtain rising for more than sixty years.

This digital exhibit follows those connections beyond what one panel—or one fair exhibit—could hold.

FOR US, IT’S NEVER JUST AN OBJECT.

An object is evidence. It carries the marks of the people who imagined it, made it, used it, valued it and chose to preserve it. When we ask the right questions, one object can open an entire
world.

Community theatre creates a particular challenge for the historical record. A performance disappears as soon as it ends. Sets are dismantled. Costumes are altered and worn again. Volunteers move away. Programs are tucked into drawers—or discarded. Much of the history remains dispersed among the people who made and witnessed it.

This exhibit is therefore a first act. It begins with what can be documented now and invites former participants,
audiences and supporters to help us identify what comes next.

Begin with the program.

See how many people it takes to make a play.