Beyond Lindsay

Lindsay Little Theatre has never existed in isolation. Its early festival participation connected local theatre-makers with a wider network of amateur and community companies across eastern and central Ontario.

Festivals gave groups a reason to travel, see one another’s work and receive structured feedback from adjudicators. They also created professional relationships and friendships beyond a single town.

Penny and John Arril

The Eastern Ontario Drama League preserves one important example of that connection. Penny and John Arril were both active with Lindsay Little Theatre and were devoted festival participants. Penny served first as Lindsay’s EODL representative and later as the league’s treasurer during the 1970s and 1980s. She received an EODL award for outstanding service. John became known as a director with LLT.

The league later named an adjudicator’s award for Penny. The award turns one volunteer’s years of service into an enduring part of the festival tradition.

Her story also widens our understanding of what it means to make theatre. Administration, representation, record-keeping and dependable service may never receive applause at curtain call, but organizations cannot endure without them.

The Candidate in 2022

Festival connections continued into the twenty-first century. At the Eastern Ontario Drama League’s 2022 One Act Festival, LLT’s production of The Candidate received nominations in several adjudicator’s-award categories, including ensemble and physical theatre.

The names of awards, nominees and productions matter, but so does the continuing pattern: local work travelled, met other theatre communities and returned with new experiences.

Imagining a Cultural Home

Community cultural organizations often spend years imagining the spaces they need before those spaces become possible.

In 1988, representatives of Lindsay Little Theatre joined the Lindsay Gallery and Victoria County Museum on a Cultural Committee considering a shared arts, culture and heritage centre in the former Shaft Machine Building beside the Scugog River.

The proposal imagined a 150-seat theatre alongside an art gallery and museum. It asked the Town of Lindsay to consider making the building available if a feasibility study found the plan workable.

The centre was never realized, and the industrial building was demolished around 2000. Yet the proposal deserves to be remembered. It shows local theatre, visual art and heritage organizations thinking collectively about public cultural space decades before current conversations about cultural hubs and shared facilities.

An unrealized plan is still part of history. It reveals what people believed their community needed—and what they were prepared to work toward.

A Theatre Of Its Own

Today, Lindsay Little Theatre operates from an intimate black-box studio at 55 George Street West.

A black-box theatre is deliberately flexible. Rather than fixing every production within a permanent picture-frame stage, the room can be reconfigured through seating, scenery, entrances, light and proximity. Its modest scale places performers and audiences close together.

Owning or maintaining a performance space also changes the work of a theatre organization. The company becomes responsible not only for productions but for utilities, repairs, accessibility, safety, equipment, fundraising and the constant physical care of the building.

The complete history of LLT’s move to George Street remains to be documented. We want to know when the building was acquired, what it had been before, how it was adapted, who contributed labour and materials, and how the space changed over time.

The building is therefore both a venue and an object of research. Its walls hold evidence of the community that repeatedly remade it for performance.

Keeping the Curtain Up

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how vulnerable live performance can be. Theatre depends upon people gathering—in rehearsals, workshops, dressing rooms, seats and shared public space. Those were precisely the conditions the pandemic interrupted.

By October 2020, LLT had gone months without normal box-office revenue while remaining responsible for the mortgage and operating costs of its George Street building. Board members and volunteers responded with a series of small fundraising efforts, many undertaken with local businesses and charities.

There were bottle and clothing drives. A Knit a Square campaign raised pledges for LLT while turning the knitted squares into blankets for animals at the Humane Society of Kawartha Lakes. La Mantia’s Country Market and Aberdeen’s Wool Company were among the businesses that supported fundraising efforts.

The theatre also experimented with what performance could look like under restrictions. Take a Break offered short programs of poems, prose, monologues and music for very small, physically distanced audiences, with cleaning time between performances. Rehearsal and dinner-theatre partnerships with the Pie Eyed Monk helped create other possibilities beyond the usual room and format.

This was not simply a pause between productions. It was another kind of theatre work: adapting, fundraising, partnering, scheduling, communicating and preserving the organization’s ability to return.

The audience could not gather in the usual way, so the theatre found other ways to remain connected to its community.

Another Opening Night

In 2025, Lindsay Little Theatre announced that its George Street space had been renovated and expanded with support from the Lindsay Legacy C.H.E.S.T. Fund. The work added twenty seats and prepared the theatre to welcome audiences back with A Night on Broadway and Beyond.

A reopening can look like a single event. In reality, it represents another long sequence of work: applications, planning, construction, fundraising, communications, rehearsals and the rebuilding of audience habits.

The theatre also launched a new visual identity and website. In 2025 it announced collaboration with the Lindsay and District Chamber of Commerce, and later acknowledged support from the Kawartha Lakes Community Futures Development Corporation for new audience chairs.

These details bring the story into the present. Community theatre is not only something people made in the 1960s. It is still being made—with new volunteers, new audiences, new partnerships and new demands upon an organization that must continually adapt.

When Programmes Become Archives

Theatre creates an abundance of records, but many were designed to be temporary.

Programs, posters and tickets advertise or explain an event. Rehearsal schedules and cue sheets organize work. Set drawings solve a construction problem. Costume plots keep track of clothing. Photographs promote a production or preserve a cast. Minutes and financial records keep the organization functioning.

Once their immediate purpose ends, these materials are vulnerable. They may be kept by different volunteers, stored in changing locations or discarded because no one realizes that the only surviving copy is being lost.

A theatre archive should not preserve only finished publicity photographs. To understand how a production was made, we also need the working traces:

·   annotated scripts and prompt books

·   rehearsal schedules and production notes

·   set, lighting and costume designs

·   photographs of construction, rehearsals and backstage work

·   programs, posters, tickets and reviews

·   minutes, correspondence and fundraising records

·   oral histories with performers, crews, volunteers and audiences

·   records of productions that were cancelled, changed or never completed

These materials do more than document plays. They reveal volunteer culture, changing technology, community networks, aesthetic choices and the many ways people learned from one another.

Preservation does not necessarily mean removing every item from the organization or the families who hold it. It can begin with identification, careful scanning, recorded ownership, descriptive information and a plan for responsible long-term care.

Playbill photo courtesy of Colette Schroter.

Help Us Find the Next Act

A community made this theatre. Now, a community can help preserve its story.

Were you part of Lindsay Little Theatre—onstage, backstage, in the audience or behind the scenes?

Made By is looking for:

·   programs, posters, scripts and photographs

·   names and dates connected with early productions

·   stories of rehearsals, performances and touring

·   memories of sets, costumes, lighting, sound and stagecraft

·   information about LLT’s different venues and its home on George Street

·   the people whose work may never have appeared in the spotlight

·   records of festivals, awards, workshops and community partnerships

Your contribution will not simply fill a space on a webpage. It can help identify people, preserve evidence, correct the historical record and shape a larger future exhibition about community theatre in Kawartha Lakes.

Made By will review, document and attribute contributed information and material as this history grows.

Because it never takes just one person to make a play—and it should not take just one voice to tell its story.

The First Act Continues

This digital exhibit is a beginning, not a substitute for the larger history Lindsay Little Theatre deserves.

Its next acts could include oral-history interviews, a digitized production timeline, an exhibition of theatre design and backstage work, public conversations with former participants, and perhaps a new performance built from the stories that
survive.

The first act begins with a handful of objects and the questions they allow us to ask.

The next one belongs to the community.

First published September 2026

This exhibit will be updated as additional records and community contributions are documented.