It's Never Just a Play
Lindsay Little Theatre and the work behind the curtain
For more than sixty years, Lindsay Little Theatre has brought people together to tell stories in front of an audience. The performance is the visible part. Behind it is a temporary community built around a shared deadline: opening night.
A script has to become speech and movement. An empty stage has to become a room, a street, a memory or an imagined world. Costumes, props, light and sound have to support the story. Tickets must be sold, seats prepared and audiences welcomed. None of it happens by accident, and almost none of it happens alone.
This is the story we want to begin recovering—not only a list of productions, but the people, skills, spaces and relationships that made them possible.
A Program is Evidence
Theatre programs are easy to underestimate. They are usually small, inexpensive and created to serve an immediate purpose. They tell an audience what it is about to see and identify at least some of the people involved.
Once the performance ends, the program’s purpose changes.
A cast list becomes evidence of participation. A director’s note preserves how a production was understood at that moment. Advertisements reveal the businesses willing to support local performance. A venue, date and ticket price help place the production within the community’s economic and cultural life.
Even omissions tell us something. Programs may name the actors while compressing dozens of backstage jobs into a short technical list—or leaving them out entirely. The object can preserve a history and expose where that history remains incomplete.
Placed together, programs can help reconstruct:
· the sequence and range of productions presented over time
· the people who returned across many seasons and roles
· changes in directors, designers, venues and audiences
· connections with local businesses, schools and community organizations
· the introduction of new technologies, skills and forms of performance
· the growth, interruption and renewal of the organization itself
One program is a souvenir. A run of programs can become an archive.
Playbill photo courtesy of Colette Schroter.
Before the Curtain Rises
The audience sees a finished performance. The people making it experience a long series of unfinished versions.
There is the first read-through, when voices meet the text. There are auditions and casting decisions, rehearsals where movement is tested, and design conversations about what the production should look and sound like. Sets must be imagined, measured, built, painted and made safe. Costumes may be sewn, borrowed, altered or assembled from what can be found. Props must be convincing, usable and in the correct place at the correct moment.
Lighting changes what an audience sees. Sound changes what it feels. Stage management holds the moving parts together, tracking entrances, cues, changes and problems. Front-of-house volunteers turn a production into a public event by selling tickets, preparing the space and welcoming the audience.
Community theatre brings together people with different amounts and kinds of experience. Someone may arrive wanting to act and discover a talent for painting scenery. A carpenter may become a set builder. A sewer may become a costumer. A student
may learn lighting by assisting someone who has done it for years. An audience member may volunteer, then audition, direct or join the board.
The play is the reason they gather. The knowledge and relationships created while making it can last much longer.
The visible and invisible company
A production may involve actors, a director and a playwright, but its full company can also include:
· producers and production managers
· stage managers, assistant stage managers and prompts
· set designers, carpenters, painters and crews
· costume designers, sewers, dressers and wardrobe coordinators
· props, hair and makeup teams
· lighting and sound designers and operators
· musicians, choreographers and movement coaches
· publicity, ticketing and front-of-house volunteers
· board members, fundraisers, sponsors and donors
· the audience whose presence completes the event
Not every role appears in a photograph. Not every name appears in a review. Recovering theatre history means looking deliberately beyond centre stage.
The First Act
Lindsay Little Theatre describes its history as extending back more than sixty years. A public organizational account places its beginnings in the early 1960s within Lindsay’s Academy Theatre.
The surviving newspaper record allows us to make that broad statement more concrete. By September 1961, the Lindsay Little Theatre group was active enough to enter a regional drama festival at Orono. Reports in The Lindsay Daily Post discussed its planned participation, named the play She Married Well by John Kirkpatrick and then recorded that illness in the cast forced the group to withdraw.
It is a small episode, but a revealing one. The group already belonged to a wider circuit of amateur drama. Its members were preparing work for adjudication alongside theatre groups from communities including Pickering, Whitby, Peterborough, Woodville, Oshawa, Bowmanville and Orono.
The newspaper also reminds us that live theatre is vulnerable in a very human way. Weeks of work can be altered by illness, weather, access to a venue or the availability of volunteers. A cancelled performance does not mean nothing happened. The preparation, collaboration and disappointment are also part of the organization’s history.
Who began the story
A later local-history account identifies Lindsay photographer Fulton Stewart as a founder of the Lindsay Little Theatre group. That is an important lead, but the founding story is not yet complete.
We still want to establish the precise date of organization, identify the full founding group, locate any original constitution or minutes, and determine the first production presented under the Lindsay Little Theatre name.
Those are not footnotes. Founding stories often narrow over time until one familiar name stands in for a much larger group. Recovering the first act means asking who else was in the room—and what work each person contributed.
One Night and Many Hands
A February 1966 newspaper report gives us a unusually detailed view of one Lindsay Little Theatre event: an evening of three one-act plays presented at the Academy Theatre on February 11 and 12.
The program included Pen of My Aunt by Gordon Daviot, directed by Helen Humphries; The Marriage Proposal by Anton Chekhov, directed by Penny Arrill; and The Weak Spot by George Kelly, directed by Al Kirk.
The article named actors, but it did not stop there. Lloyd McMullen was identified as stage manager, Elizabeth McMullen as production manager and Rosemary Dignam as the designer of the stage sets. The report also described Barney Stanley’s work with lighting and noted that LCVI students Susan Graham, Steve Blasco and Jim Kennedy would assist while observing lighting and staging techniques.
That one notice captures several of the rabbit holes at the centre of this exhibit.
Performance
Harriet Bate, Jean Junkin, Ed Waterhouse, Wally Feschuk, John Arrill, Pat Clark, Gary Botting, Helen Humphries and Don Blakely were among the performers named. Some participants also moved between acting and directing. Community theatre did not require people to remain in one lane.
Design and production
The newspaper recognized stage management, production management and set design as distinct kinds of work. The finished evening depended upon organization and visual planning as much as performance.
Learning and mentorship
The participation of LCVI students is especially significant. They were not merely an audience for theatre. They were being invited into its technical practice, learning through observation and assistance.
Festivals and adjudication
Pen of My Aunt had been presented at the Orono Drama Festival, where Humphries received a directing award and the production was nominated among the leading plays. The Marriage Proposal had also been taken to a festival in Cobourg and received favourable adjudication.
The Lindsay performance therefore brought work home after it had travelled, been assessed and placed in conversation with other community theatre groups.
Supporting the Academy
The proceeds were intended to help purchase draperies and furnishings for the Academy Theatre’s upstairs reception room. Lindsay Little Theatre was not simply using the Academy’s stage. Its work was contributing to the life and improvement of the larger venue.
One evening of plays connected performers, technicians, students, festivals, audiences and two theatre organizations. It was never just a show.
Learning By Doing
Community theatre is both a cultural organization and an informal school.
Its classrooms are rehearsal rooms, costume racks, worktables, ladders, lighting positions and the stage itself. Knowledge moves through demonstration: how to project without straining, mark a script, build a stable flat, hang a costume for a quick change, focus a light, call a cue or recover when something goes wrong in front of an audience.
Some participants arrive with professional or specialized knowledge. Others arrive with curiosity. The production gives them a shared problem to solve and a deadline by which to solve it.
LLT’s current mission continues to emphasize opportunities for local people to develop their abilities onstage, behind the scenes and in leadership. Its membership structure also gives participants a voice in organizational decisions and a path toward executive responsibility.
That matters because the legacy of a theatre is not limited to the plays it presents. It also lives in the confidence, friendships, technical abilities and community leadership developed while making them.