Theatre rebirth
Reinvented Varscona will be an intimate, single-purpose venue.
A drama of dreaming, suspense and funding: The Varscona Story, Act III.
For the first time in a decade, this theatre town is poised to build a new theatre from an old one, in the heart of Edmonton’s alternative theatre stronghold of Old Strathcona. Moreover, it will be a theatre in the noble tradition of classic little New York and London theatres. The reinvented Varscona Theatre will be intimate and — radically, in these multi-tasking times — it will be a theatre designed for, and devoted exclusively to, theatre. That hasn’t happened here in nearly two decades, arguably since the University of Alberta’s Timms Centre for the Arts opened in 1995.
Thursday’s announcement from Alberta Culture minister Heather Klimchuk, just before curtain-time at the Varscona on the opening night of Teatro La Quindicina’s Cause and Effect, secures a long-awaited, much-delayed $2 million in provincial funding (in two $1-million instalments). This will be added to the $2 million promised by the City of Edmonton five years ago, and the hoped-for $1.9 from the federal Heritage department.
The moment is at hand to reveal the plans for a 229-seat landmark Old Strathcona theatre envisaged by architect Allan Partridge of Edmonton’s Group2 and his challenging, opinionated clients, the artists of the Varscona Theatre Alliance.
Not every architect has a starting point like the highly specific definition of intimate theatre the affable Partridge describes, with a smile: “Just four feet, no more, from the front row to the stage. And the feeling, when you’re on the stage, that you could reach out and touch the balcony.” He adds, “that’s been our focus, from the start. The theatre. Get the theatre right, and the architecture would fall into place.” He thinks of the Varscona crowd as “dream clients” since “they’re passionate. They know what they want and what they don’t want. They don’t change their minds, and I don’t change them either!”
The city-owned ex-firehall is already a little theatre, of course, and a busy one too — one of the busiest venues in the country, run, unusually, by an official consortium of the companies who are its principal occupants, currently Shadow Theatre, Teatro La Quindicina, Oh Susanna and Die-Nasty. In this they are materially assisted by “the Varscona family” of indie companies, including the Plain Janes, Trunk, The VIP Kids’ Show, The Maggie Tree, Grindstone Theatre and others.
CEO John Hudson, Shadow’s artistic director, counts a schedule of 300-plus performances a year, and estimates about 35,000 people come through the doors. So renovating the leaky, increasingly patched-together theatre, says alliance president Davina Stewart, was “never a matter of ‘build it and see who comes’ (on spec). Au contraire. It’s ‘they’ve come already; let’s build it!’ We’re building a community theatre, and the community is already here.”
The new Varscona has been eight years in the dreaming. “The journey started with the idea of the lobby,” says Hudson. “It holds 50 max, and for a 176-seat house that is frequently sold out” — well, you do those rib-to-elbow calculations. The 1950s firehall was transformed into a theatre in 1982 by putting a shallow, curvilinear stage into one corner, adding theatre seats, and changing not one pipe in the firefighters’ bathrooms. Increasingly, it has been coming apart at the seams.
“The electrical, the plumbing …” sighs program director Jeff Haslam, Teatro’s artistic director. “We’ve patched the roof twice, and it still leaks.” The staff shivers through hypothermic indoor conditions in winter; “we try not to use too many space heaters at the same time,” says Stewart. In the last dozen years, Varscona artists, supplemented by the indie troupes who use the theatre, have themselves raised more than $300,000, often by putting on shows, and they’ve spent it, too, patching things together.
Mayor Stephen Mandel, a frequent audience member at the Varscona (and occasional improv actor upon its stage), has long and vigorously supported the city contribution to a reno budget — especially after he saw the bathrooms. “It’s playing theatre WhacA-Mole,” says Hudson. “You fix one thing, and another pops up.”
With the Varscona, born in a particularly depressing decade for functionality, the ’50s, Partridge wasn’t exactly confronted with a heritage building, in contrast to the Edwardian charms of another ex-firehall, the Walterdale, across the avenue. Nonetheless, like any theatre with a history, it has its own traditions, in addition to the red licorice stir sticks for the wine.
As Stewart says, “we learned how to celebrate its oddities. … We wanted to keep the things we love about it.” Those lovable things mostly have to do with the audience’s feeling of a shared space with the actors onstage; it’s only eight rows to the back. As Haslam says, “we’re lovers of theatre; our models are those wonderful little theatres, like the Lyceum in New York. It’s an 800-seat house that feels like 200, as opposed to the 200-seat theatres that feel like Epidaurus,” which seats 15,000. “We didn’t want 20,000 miles of air” over the audience.
The infelicities of the neighbouring Westbury Theatre, a non-intimate 300-seat house in the Arts Barns, were cautionary. The Varscona people also didn’t want “another black box theatre,” says Stewart of theatre designs with no fixed configuration. “This town doesn’t need another one.”
Partridge took that vision to heart, in designing a classic theatre whose 229 seats are divided between the 169 on the main floor, in only eight rows to the back, and a two-row balcony of 60, less than five metres from the stage. And, a particular point of pride, “it’s completely barrier-free at every level,” so that theatregoers with physical challenges can have a variety of viewing points.
As it turned out, there are a couple of iconic features in the existing building which Partridge’s design incorporates — notably the firehall tower where the hoses hung half a century ago, and the real brick back wall, full of mysterious nicks and holes. The outside world will notice instantly that the glass-walled lobby will extend to the street. Other new features — a green room, a wardrobe and stage management office, two proper dressing rooms, a lower floor rehearsal hall (and possible performance space) with its own entrance — are less obvious. So is Partridge’s mission, on behalf of the Varscona alliance, to keep running costs the same as they are, through efficiencies in air circulation and heating. “We have to be accessible,” says Haslam, who notes that there isn’t a ticket to be had at the Varscona for more than $30. “We’re not raising prices. And there will always be a pay-what-you-can option.”
Come March of 2014, the operation begins. Construction, under the PCL flag, will take about a year, taking the Varscona out of the mix for the 2014 Fringe. Meanwhile the Varscona alliance is going shopping for a space in Old Strathcona, their natural turf — “150-seat-ish,” says Stewart — to rent, or better yet, be given, for that displacement period. “We all want the same thing,” declares Haslam. “We didn’t have to convince each other of anything.”