Notable Performances
The Crucible
The College’s first play, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, was staged in 1970 with the help of the Surrey Arts Society, as the program itself only had a handful of students. Calls were made through The Mad Hatter, the College’s employee newsletter, for people willing to join in and rehearse. The play made use of an open thrust stage and used minimal props, leaving much of the setting up to the imagination of the audience.
Opening night, December 9th, 1970, was “performed exclusively for the faculty and their wives, the press and other invited guests”, with tickets being free of charge (The Mad Hatter No. 7, November 18, 1970). While the play was cited as being a “fine production”, comments were made on the unfairness of faculty being the ones to receive the free tickets. A suggestion to the Mad Hatter described as being “read and endorsed” by fifteen faculty members states, “we must guard against unfortunate precedents slipping into our institution undetected … the provision of free tickets for faculty to The Crucible does not seem consistent with the kind of community we are attempting to create at Douglas. Far better that all should pay equally than to single out a faction for preferential treatment. If someone must pay, let it be those who are paid by the institution and not the students” (The Mad Hatter No. 13, December 22, 1970).
Miller’s play is inspired by the historical Salem witch trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts, from 1692 to 1693. He wrote it as an allegory for the McCarthy era of American politics, which sought to repress and persecute left-wing individuals in a political “witch hunt” during the Cold War. In the play, the myriad issues simmering under the surface of seemingly peaceful Puritanical settlement life boil over when false accusations of witchcraft are leveraged at several members of the community. The whole town is thrown into disarray as common sense is overridden by fear and claims of Satanic possession, and choices must be made between speaking truth or preserving reputation.
Anne of Green Gables
Though not the first time the musical adaptation of L. M. Montgomery’s beloved story of Anne of Green Gables was performed in Western Canada, the Surrey Arts Society and Douglas College’s performance in March, 1974, staged for the “Arts Alive” festival in Surrey, was the first amateur West Coast production of it.
Produced by instructor Dorothy Jones, and musically directed by fellow Douglas instructors Henry Waack and Wally Robertson, the cast of 40 actors and 20-piece orchestra played to sold out houses. Jones and Waack were both part of the Surrey Arts Society, with Waack having been the former president of the Society, connecting the two communities for years to come.
The play was revived by the Theatre and Music departments in January 1990, once again directed by Jones and Waack. It was feared, however, that the play wouldn’t take place at all, due to the strike at the College that lasted up until the end of the Fall 1989 semester, and a handful of late cast changes. A nearly sold-out benefit performance of the musical raised over a thousand dollars for the CKNW Orphan’s Fund, a long-time supporter of Douglas College which to this day awards a bursary to single parents registered in any Douglas College program. That year, CKNW donated $4000 “to an emergency bursary fund to assist Douglas College students who faced severe financial hardships due to the November, 1989 strike” (Inside Douglas College, February 27, 1990).
The story of the musical Anne of Green Gables begins with the arrival of Anne Shirley, a cheerful, red-haired, freckle-faced orphan, to Avonlea, Prince Edward Island, where she is to be adopted by the elderly sibling duo Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. The problem? The child they were expecting from the orphanage was meant to be a boy. Though initially devastated by this revelation, misadventure follows as a determined Anne, with her hot temper and joyful nature, wins over the town and finds the home she has always longed for.
The Drunkard
The Theatre Program performed this play in December of 1983 as their inaugural performance in the Performing Arts Theatre of Douglas College’s new campus on Royal Avenue, and as the successful return of the program to the College, having been put on hiatus in 1982. None of the new facilities were quite finished, but as Dorothy Jones, head of the department, said in The Other Press, “we are limited, but we are” (The Other Press, November 23, 1983).
In the book Douglas College: The First 40 Years, Henry Waack, College instructor and musical director for the performance, reminisced:
"[t]he next show was the melodrama The Drunkard. One evening, a part of the scenery representing a door fell down on stage. In her next line, the heroine on stage said to the villain, ‘You really are very evil,’ and the villain replied, ‘That may be, but at least I don’t go around destroying the scenery’."
A temperance play written by William Henry Smith in the 1840’s, The Drunkard’s message was meant as a sincere desire to turn people away from the wicked wiles of alcohol—which it succeeded at, being a huge force behind the American Prohibition in the 1920’s. However, this became the means for the play’s newfound life as a parody of itself once the 1930’s hit, its melodramatic prose making it easy to turn its delivery from drama to comedy.
In The Drunkard, the manipulative and greedy Lawyer Cribbs seeks to take over ownership of a cottage that the tenants, Mrs. Wilson and her daughter Mary, can no longer make the payments for, knowing that if he sells it, he will come out with a hefty sum. Thwarted initially as the landlord, Edward Middleton, falls in love with Mary and marries her, Cribbs finds a way to exploit Edward’s weakness for alcohol, convincing him he is nothing but a no-good drunk and using him as a pawn in other money-making schemes. Edward, believing himself worthless, runs away to the city, and it takes his family to find him and pull him from his alcoholism and self-loathing, and find justice against the deceitful Cribbs.
My Name is Lisbeth
Douglas College's first commissioned play, My Name is Lisbeth, was performed in 1976 at the Surrey Arts Centre, as the College as of yet had no permanent space for the Theatre and Stagecraft program. Written by local playwright and member of the Surrey Arts Society Sharon Pollock, who was also the lead actor for Lysistrata the previous season, Sharon would again take the lead role for My Name is Lisbeth. Many of the parts were played by theatre people from the local acting community, with the sole role played by a Douglas student being Lizzie’s maid Bridget, performed by Wendy Mutch.
Afterwards, Pollock rewrote My Name is Lisbeth, renaming it Blood Relations and winning the Canadian Governor General's Award for the script in 1981.
My Name is Lisbeth is based off the Lizzie Borden axe murders of 1892. Allegedly, Lizzie Borden murdered both her father and stepmother with an axe, and yet with so much evidence pointing her way, was acquitted of the crime. The play capitalizes on the tense relationships of all the members of the household, particularly incidents such as Andrew Borden, Lizzie’s father, supposedly slaughtering her pigeons, and despite his usual frugality, gifting members of her stepmother’s family real estate. Relations had deteriorated so much that Lizzie and her sister, Emma, ended up taking extended vacations after a particularly bad family argument. According to the play, there’s little room for doubt as to whether or not Lizzie actually killed her parents; Douglas Pinion student staff writer, John Butcher, comments, “Ms. Pollock’s interpretation deals with the incidents and personal relationships that drive Lizzie to commit the gruesome crimes, with the murders bringing the end of the play to a terrifying climax” (The Douglas Pinion, Thursday, April 8, 1976).
Curse of the Werewolf
Curse of the Werewolf was the play of collaboration in the Fall of 1985. Publicity of the show was boosted by two separate sources: the Horror Show Art Exhibition coordinated by Sandra Jane Shaw, which included works by secondary school students from all over the college region, and students from the College Marketing Department under Walter Pickering, with the purpose of promoting ticket sales for the show, working for class credit and a cash prize donated by the Theatre Department for most tickets sold.
While there isn’t much written on the play itself (except that it went very well!), the Archives holds a number of photographic negatives that show off the fantastic costumes and set, along with a series dedicated to the Stagecraft department’s work on the creation of the set.
This musical comedy written by Ken Hill is based off the Hammer Film Productions horror film of the same name from 1961, which itself was based off Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris. The opening scene in the village of Walpurgisdorf, Germany, 1890, reveals that the burial of the local Baroness has desecrated the holy ground of the village’s church. The brunt of the story, however, takes place in the very same village in 1922, as a family of British tourists led by Dr. Hugo Bancroft go to stay with an old medical school friend of his, Dr. Konrad Steiner, a psychoanalyst doing research on people believing themselves to be lycanthropes. A blossoming romance between the Bancroft’s daughter, Kitty, and the local Baron, Martin von Heilman, begins. A village woman whose hand has been severed by a wolf trap is herself accused of being a werewolf, but nothing can be proven conclusively as she is murdered in jail. When another body is found mutilated, the Bancrofts decide it time to leave, but their daughter Kitty is kidnapped by the very real werewolf when she sneaks away to meet once more with Martin. Though she is rescued at the cost of another’s life, the family and the villagers must discover who the werewolf is before anyone else dies.
