GORE BAY—The Gore Bay Theatre co-directing team of Andrea Emmerton and Walter Maskel are pretty excited about the company’s QUONTA entry this year. The Gore Bay Theatre company has already been hard at it for months in preparation, and the fruits of those efforts promise to be remarkable as the Kevin Barker play ‘This is how we got here’ takes shape.
“This is a very strong play,” said Mr. Maskel, who along with Ms. Emmerton put in plenty of research effort to come up with a challenging Canadian production. “The play won the 2018 Governor General Literary Award for Drama,” said Mr. Maskel.
Ms. Emmerton, who is the president of QUONTA this year, was invited to this year’s Theatre Ontario Adjudication Symposium and she and Mr. Maskel dug deep into the scripts available through Playwrights Canada. “I had read the reviews and thought to myself ‘that’s interesting’,” she said. “We decided to go with it. It is not only really interesting, but also very challenging. It has a lot of scenes, with a lot of them outside.”
“We also knew we could cast it,” said Ms. Emmerton. When it comes to taking on a challenging play, having a roster of players that you know are up to it helps in making the decision.
Gore Bay Theatre Company veterans Tara Bernatchez and Shannon McMullan are on board, as is John Robertson (who now has a couple of productions under his belt) and relative new kid on the boards, Will Smith, rounds out the fourth hand.
“These are four really strong actors,” said Mr. Maskel. “They are all off book (have their lines memorized) and that allows us to concentrate on what is going on onstage—we can focus on the acting.”
The script is simply written, noted Ms. Emmerton, “but the complications are in how the people in the play deal with the issues.”
The settings of the play provided some challenges in set design. “Walter put his set design hat on and he has really come up with something special,” she said. But Mr. Maskel said that there are relatively few props. “It’s very visual,” he said.
When it comes to sound the company has lucked out large with the services of Vern Dorge. “He has played with some very big bands,” said Mr. Maskel. “He has created an original score for us. Some of it is truly haunting.”
Both Mr. Maskel and Ms. Emmerton stress that Gore Bay Theatre focussed on “strong theatre” and by all accounts this production will continue that tradition. But although it is a drama, there are lighter moments to leaven the action as well. In the end it brings a strong message of hope shining through adversity.
At QUONTA, the Gore Bay Theatre production will perform on Thursday, March 14 in the S. C. Theatre Centre. They will be going up against the Norm Foster play ‘Mending Fences’ presented on Wednesday, March 13 by the Sault Theatre Workshop and directed by Harry Houston; the Thorton Wilder play ‘Our Town,’ presented Friday, March 15 by North Bay’s Gateway Theatre Guild, directed by Scott Fitzgerald; and Michael Grant’s ‘Shorthanded,’ presented on Saturday, March 16 by Elliot Lake’s ELATE Theatre Company directed by Murray Finn. This year’s adjudicator will be Bea Quarrie.
The Gore Bay production will take to the stage in the Gore Bay Community Centre for a shakedown cruise on March 8, 9 and 10.
