The Roar of the Crowd

by Janice Macdonald

  “Really?”

  “It’s like English department politics, the knives are so sharp because the stakes are so small.”

  We had reached Denise’s convertible cream-coloured Bug by this time, and the sudden blasting of a Joel Plaskett in mid-song, the CD that had been playing when we’d pulled up, smothered my burst of pent-up laughter.

  3.

  Being even tangentially involved with theatre people sort of felt to me like coming home. Long before I decided to return to academe to do my master’s and teach freshmen, a dream that seemed to have fizzled out while I wasn’t looking, I was a freelance writer, working mostly in radio. And how I had got into radio was through a senior-level course in my undergrad days on writing and acting for radio.

  Back in the days when I first went to university, there wasn’t yet the unholy push to determine what career you would pursue the day after you stepped off the convocation stage. I had dabbled in writing for the student newspaper, acting in various MFA directors’ productions, and DJ-ing a late-night folk music program on the campus radio. In between, I had learned enough about geology and peak oil to be firmly on the side of David Suzuki, poked around in classics and philosophy classes with enthusiasm but little skill, polished up my rusty French in order to ascertain that Camus had been clinically depressed, and skimmed through a survey in psychology that helped with the aforementioned diagnosis. Radio was what had stuck.

  Some of the student actors I knew in those days were very talented and had gone the distance. I saw their names in the credits of CTV shows and in movies funded by Telefilm Canada. One or two of them were even in Hollywood movies and on the Disney Channel, living down in California. Sandra Foyle, who had shone like a diamond in every student production, now reigned in Stratford; I had seen a spread of her two-hundred-year-old house filled with beautiful antiques, Dora Awards, and pretty children in Canadian Living just a month or so ago.

  I wasn’t one of those success stories. There was something about the transience of theatre, or maybe the messy collaboration of it all, that never sat right with me. I was so much more at ease tackling my own work, moving to my own rhythms, and heading for my own deadlines. Factoring in the egos and vulnerabilities of five to twelve other people while at the same time remaining on good terms with the stage manager was just not my style.

  When I moved back to Edmonton to do my MA, I noted a few familiar names in the theatre scene here, probably drawn to the city for the Fringe and then charmed into staying, and met a few others. I doubted the old acquaintances would recall my name, unless they’d been insomniac folk music fans. Even then, I hadn’t used my real name on the campus airwaves. I’d been Miranda Lang, using my mother’s maiden name, for reasons I could no longer remember but seemed important at the time. I played about a bit, doing small roles in MFA directors’ works, and then hunkered down, got my thesis written, and drifted away from theatre entirely.

  Now here I was, sliding back into the orbit of the theatre crowd. Denise saw it as repayment for my doing her a favour, and of course I was very grateful she had put in a word to the Shakespeare folks, since the rent did have to be paid and all that. But something was waking up in me, the more time I spent with the actors and directors. It was as if deep inside, a little Mickey Rooney was conspiring with a miniature Judy Garland, whispering, “Mom can make the curtains—let’s put on a show!”

  I had met with Kieran Frayne, the artistic director of the Freewill Players, and Amanda Sparrow, one of the original artistic partners of the company, who was also in charge of the Camp Shakespeare arm of the festival. Amanda had dreams of expanding her successful two-week camp into a solid high school program as well. She had a tried-and-true week for Grades 4-6, and then another for the junior high kids, but had never completely cracked the Grades 10-12 set. High school was the time when they had to knuckle under and study Shakespeare in English classes, and various schools in the area had strong drama departments, producing some first-rate year-end plays. Of course, high school was also when kids wanted to be working summer jobs to fund any extras their parents weren’t going to provide. Amanda was sure that, with a bit of thoughtful planning and strong marketing, we could provide a useful fortnight of training in acting with classical scripts, stage fighting, repertory work, and dialects. I wasn’t so sure it would compete with a retail job in the mall, but I was willing to try.

  While I had the feeling she would rather have had a Drama department sessional roped in for the work, Denise had sung my praises to Kieran, who was predisposed to be interested in anything my beautiful friend said. And so it went. Amanda was stuck with me.

  I wasn’t sorry to get the gig. There is a touch of messianic zeal that is fostered by teaching freshman English, and the thought of bringing even younger teens to Shakespeare, self-selected teens who chose to come down to the park every day for two weeks instead of selling Orange Juliuses, sleeping in, or watching YouTube videos, was invigorating. With Amanda’s blessing, I had crafted the camp into four modules a day, with short breaks and lunch in between. The first section of each day involved exercise. The festival’s choreographer ran dance and movement classes that alternated daily with stage fighting run by the fight director on the stage itself, and both had a warm-up exercise component leading off. After the break, the kids would gather in the area up the hill equipped with picnic tables and box stools from a previous production to discuss aspects of Shakespeare’s works, world view, writing style, and history. If it rained, we would move into the tent set up nearby for pizza and barbecue dinners prior to the shows.

  We would set aside three-quarters of an hour for lunch, followed by vocal work. This would be a smorgasbord of activities, as we had access to a dialect coach, a singing coach, and the festival’s musical director, who enjoyed extemporizing on Shakespeare’s various lyrics with found instruments and student tunes. Each student would be responsible for a monologue to work on in this section. After the afternoon break, the kids would move into their assigned scene groups to rehearse their segment of a highly truncated version of one of the plays. This would eventually be put together and performed for an invited audience on the last afternoon of the camp. Everyone who came to the student production was given a ticket to that evening’s performance, which made for a guaranteed spike in the audience. The food trucks that trolled the park had been made aware of these dates, when hungry theatre patrons would be sitting ducks, and so it looked to be a win-win-win situation.

  So far, Amanda and Kieran were happy with my outlined plans. Now it was up to me to make it all happen. I was alternating my days with putting together lesson plans for the morning lectures, which I would be fielding, and cold calling high school drama and English teachers to see about promoting the camp. This was the worst bit, since I knew they were up to their armpits in getting their own classes wrapped up. But we had a cool poster that could be downloaded and printed on a piece of legal paper for their bulletin boards, and application forms right on the festival’s website. Very little extra effort was needed.

  According to the Farmers’ Almanac, something I rarely followed, summer this year was supposed to be mild and spectacularly dry. This might not be what farmers were hoping to hear, but I would take it. The last thing you wanted was damp, whiny teenagers swatting off mosquitoes while you were trying to extol the wonders of the Bard of Avon.

  I had plenty of time to get my work done, as well, since Steve Browning, one of Edmonton’s Finest, and certainly best in my books, had set off the day before Oren’s funeral with the officially titled delegation of Western Canadian Police Service and Peace Officers to Scandinavia, studying their process and safety procedures on their public transit. There had been a steady rise in attacks and minor crime on the public transit here, and the forward-thinking Chief had cast a net looking for places in the world similar to ours where people weren’t scared to ride the bus after dark. Several cities in Sweden and Norway with similar weather, demographics, and percentage of citizens relying on
public transit, didn’t have the problems we were facing. Steve and nine other representatives had gone to see if they could figure out what they were doing right that we had not yet tried.

  I wasn’t all that scared on the bus. Of course, I didn’t normally ride it through the shadier areas of town and rarely took the train or bus after dark, except, of course in winter, when to go out anywhere before 9:00 a.m. or after 4:00 p.m. was to go out in the dark. I was pleased for Steve, since this month-long junket was sort of a promotion for him; he was ostensibly leading it and would be the face of the group when they reported back to the chiefs and city councils of four or five major western cities. But I missed having him around.

  We had been really working on defining our relationship just before he’d left, too. My choice not to move in with him the year before, after my apartment had been ransacked, had been taken by him as some sort of lack of confidence in our future together. I hadn’t seen it that way. To me, it was just a matter of feeling strong enough to be on my own, unafraid. I had to test myself against that sense of violation, not just cower and fold the minute I was attacked.

  But maybe I had made too much of buying new furniture and replacing ruined CDs. Maybe it was true that I needed my own space and autonomy. What I didn’t understand from Steve’s argument was how my requiring autonomy in any way infringed on our future together. Still, it had been a bit prickly for a while. This break was probably a good thing for both of us. We could shake out and reboot ourselves without having to worry about the other for an entire month. Then, when he got back, we could explore the ways we naturally came back together.

  That is what I thought in the daytime, when I had my mature businesslike face on. At night, when I was alone with the television and a bowl of ice cream, I just missed him.

  This was one of those nights, though I hadn’t bothered with the ice cream and my choice of escape was a mystery novel. Eventually I pulled myself away from Laurie R. King’s glorious revisioning of Sherlock Holmes, uncurled myself from the contortions I had to undergo in order to lie on my loveseat, and tried to reassemble myself into a functionally upright human being. Denise had urged me to buy the loveseat rather than replace the lovely overstuffed chesterfield that had ruled the room until it was slashed to pieces last autumn in an attempt to frighten me away from a research job. The loveseat admittedly did make the room seem more spacious and balanced. However, I had not yet shifted my habits, and my attempts to get maximum relaxation out of my new furniture was probably akin to a Great Dane trying to get comfortable on a pillow bed designed for a terrier. I would snuggle down so my head was propped on a pillow against the padded armrest and bend my knees so that my ankles were grazing my butt. Eventually my legs would end up hanging over the other armrest, negotiating space with the side table. I was going to have to learn to take my books to bed earlier in the evening.

  I set about to do just that, taking time to tidy up the living room and brush my teeth and hair before crawling into bed. I splashed water on my face and then leaned toward the mirror, examining the crow’s feet near my eyes and the slight laxness of the skin at my neck. Being around actors these days was making me far more self-conscious about my looks and body. While I had never been particularly athletic, I was quietly pleased that my body was navigating middle age without letting me down too severely. I walked pretty much everywhere and tried to be mindful of what I ate. My biggest vice, other than books, was coffee, and the general swing these days seemed to be back toward its being a natural booster. I have always worn sunglasses to keep from squinting and sunscreen to keep from burning, so my skin tended to make people peg me about ten years younger than my chronological age. Either that or they just thought I was immature.

  It didn’t bother me one way or the other. I was perfectly fine with being in my forties, and had no qualms about turning fifty up ahead. I knew from past decade-shifting experience, though, that forty-nine might prove to be a problem.

  It had happened in my late thirties, too. When I hit thirty-nine and realized I had only one year left to fulfill all the dreams of that decade, I found myself fretting about my lack of career, dearth of anything but some magazine articles and a paltry MA to show for my efforts to that point, my being so slow to get around to doing my MA, my lack of an abiding relationship. It was a hell of a year. By then I was forty, and I calmed down to be once more on the cusp of possibilities. Calendars of any kind are so good for that. Of course, it was also around that time that I met Steve, which made things doubly cheerful.

  So, I had been sailing through my forties, feeling fulfilled and gypsy-like, moving from one academic morsel to another. While my dreams of teaching English literature and puttering about researching and writing for academic periodicals while wearing tweed jumper dresses and fashionable footwear had never really materialized, I had managed to pretty much stay on campus. I had been a sessional lecturer, delivered distance courses via the Internet, worked for the Centre of Ethnomusicology, helped create a virtual museum site for Rutherford House at the edge of the university, and spotted for overworked profs as a marker from time to time.

  This job setting up the high school camp sessions for the Shakespeare festival was tangentially connected to the university, too. The festival board had applied for various grants, and the one under which I had been hired specified that the work should be done by a post-graduate degree holder from the U of A. I am sure the granting officials had been thinking of someone in the performing or fine arts, given that it was so specifically geared to summer festivals and had funded several Fringe plays in the past. However, Kieran checked and I did fit the qualifications, so he had his grant, Amanda had her high school program, and I had a job till August. At which point I could begin to worry about turning old with no pension.

  Ah heck, I would worry about that when the calendar told me to. I turned the bathroom light off and went to bed.

  4.

  The drama department had a longtime understanding with the Shakespeare Festival, given that so many of their artistic partners on the board were graduates of either the BFA or MFA programs. The theatre lab was offered as rehearsal space, and Kieran and the actors were there for the full Equity-allotted time each day. He also seemed to be constantly online, keeping in touch with the managing director of the festival in the office upstairs in the downtown library, and cc’ing everyone including me on every email. I had never felt so popular, with my notification pinging at least three times on the hour all day long.

  I was alternating time between my dining room office, which was my desk wedged under the window next to my smallish kitchen table, and an equally tight and measurably more claustrophobic setting in the corner of the downtown office. I wasn’t sure how they’d managed to fit three desks into this space, along with boxes of promotional materials, banners, old scripts, framed posters from previous runs, and a huge grey exercise ball which Kieran insisted on using as an office chair. I had the use of the back desk and could look up and out the long slit of a window to a southern view of the Westin Hotel across the small, under-utilized square behind the library. This city was full of spaces like this, ideas that had been given full throttle only to somehow run out of gas.

  If I craned my eyes to the left, I could glimpse a corner of glass and orange metal: the Citadel Theatre, where we’d recently gathered for Oren Gentry’s funeral. I wondered if Denise had heard anything about who was going to fill the gap Gentry had left as the head of Chautauqua Theatre. While it didn’t do to rush in and declare a new artistic director the minute the obituary ink was dry, theatre was such a precarious profession that not to have someone strong at the helm for any length of time could capsize a company. I was pretty sure there would be one or two bright sparks vying for the position, and their board might be thinking about casting further afield, bringing in someone from Vancouver or Toronto. Several theatres across the country had gone dark in recent times; it would be easy to attract big-name talent.

  If Kieran knew anything a
bout it, he wasn’t divulging it in any of his myriad emails. While he was very free with every idea for production enhancements or top-of-the-hill refreshment tent improvements or the camp program, he didn’t gossip or speculate on anything outside his own immediate purview. I had to admire that, but it was a grudging admiration. Here I was, for once on the inside of a professional theatre of sorts, and I wasn’t getting any of the dirt.

  Micheline, the managing director, responsible for the running of the festival and cleaning up after Kieran, was far less discreet. I couldn’t help listening in on her end of her phone calls, piecing together the gist of the conversations speculating about who would take over Chautauqua, whether Kieran would throw his hat in the ring for the job, whether the City was going to spray for mosquitoes early or only for the weekend of the triathlon, whether the printer we’d always worked with was ripping us off for the cost of the programmes, whether the bathrooms down at the amphitheatre would be cleaned daily or only every second day, who had the bigger ass—Georgia Dranchuk or Cara Sampson, who had the bigger ego—Christian Norgaard or Mervyn Forrest. I eventually brought my noise-cancelling headphones to work and plugged in a playlist of Alison Brown and Tony Trischka, interspersed with a little Oscar Peterson, to get me through the day.

  When I need to concentrate, I require instrumental music. Anything with words will yank me out of my thoughts and take me along another path entirely. So, if I was trying to escape “Days of Our Edmonton Theatre Lives” at the next desk, sinking into Ian Thomas or Hawksley Workman wasn’t going to do much good.

  Not that I wasn’t curious, of course. If Kieran were to jump ship, I wasn’t sure what that would do to this summer’s festival. While it probably wouldn’t have an impact on my work for the high school camp, it might put the kibosh on my netting a return engagement the following summer. If Kieran left, the whole focus of the festival might shift with the new artistic director. After all, though it was run by a board with artistic partners who had a say in the way things operated, there was no doubt that the vision of the artistic director in any theatre or festival would steer things a certain way.