BACKYARD SHAKESPEARE SAVED
But compromise means play will move
A backyard Shakespeare production shut down by a City of Ottawa bylaw officer will be staged in Old Ottawa South this weekend thanks to a hasty compromise hammered out at city hall.
The city has told the student troupe it will be able to stage its play, The Comedy of Errors, before family members only on Sunday, provided they do not offend the noise bylaw.
Following a brief and furious backlash to the play’s closure, Mayor Jim Watson announced a deal Friday on Twitter that would allow the production to take place in Windsor Park. But the play’s directors ultimately decided the venue wouldn’t work since it was a big park without a set.
The Ottawa Tennis and Lawn Bowling Club also offered its facilities to the troupe, and more performances may be staged there.
“We haven’t decided yet, but it might be a workable solution,” Paul Keen, the play’s co-director, said late Friday afternoon. “The whole thing is just so disappointing, though. I feel like it’s such a small-minded and petty way of dealing with things.
“If Ottawa can’t get behind and support a young people’s volunteer Shakespeare company doing things in the neighbourhood, then what do we stand for? Those are the kinds of things that make neighbourhoods work.”
Roger Chapman, director of bylaw and regulatory services for the city, said Keen’s 57 Glen Avenue property was zoned for residential use, “which does not permit the activity of a theatre or a place of assembly.”
A troupe of 13 students has been rehearsing the play three times a week since early July. They’ve been practising their lines in a backyard while wearing masks and social distancing.
The troupe, known as The Company of Adventurers, is directed by Keen and his wife, Cynthia Sugars, both university English professors. They’ve staged summer Shakespeare productions in their Glen Avenue yard for the past 10 years with the help of their three children
The productions raise money for charity, this year for the Ottawa Food Bank.
Early Thursday, however, the couple received an email from a city bylaw officer, who told them they had to bring down the curtain on the tradition. The bylaw officer said he was acting on a complaint.
“We’ve decorated our back deck as a stage set and the kids have all rehearsed based on this layout,” Sugars said Friday. “We’d really like to be able to keep doing it here.”
The actors — cast members range in age from 11 to 17 — had their last rehearsal Wednesday night and celebrated with a pizza party in preparation for Sunday’s opening night. An email from city bylaw arrived the next morning demanding that the performance be moved.
Keen called the bylaw officer, believing he must have been under some misapprehension.
“I thought maybe he thought this was a business, that we were doing this for money,” Keen said.
“I said, ‘This is a neighbourhood thing. We do not make money at all.’”
But discussing the situation with the bylaw officer, Keen said, was “like talking to a brick wall.”
“He said, ‘You’re trying to circumvent the law’,” Keen recounted. “I explained, ‘No, I’m really not. I phoned you to try to work together to find some kind of solution here given the reality of the situation.’”
Keen explained the audience would be small: about 20 people arranged into socially distanced clusters. Everyone would have to book a seat in advance. The bylaw officer refused to budge.
“We all know how hard it has been for kids these days,” Keen said.
“This was a lifeline for a lot of kids this summer during COVID.”
Jennifer Small said her daughter, Elizabeth Van Oorschot, 16, was devastated by news that the production had been shut down.
“My daughter was so happy to have something productive to do this summer after a disappointing winter and spring at school and all of her regular summer activities cancelled.”
Sugars said she initially thought she would have to cancel this year’s production because of COVID-19, but decided to forge ahead based on pleas from some of the children involved: “We offered to do an online play of some kind and resoundingly they all said, ‘Please, no, not anything that involves computers.’ They desperately wanted some kind of in-person activity.”
The actors wear masks during rehearsals and in the play itself.
One of Shakespeare’s earliest, The Comedy of Errors tells the story of two sets of identical twins who find themselves in the same city, Ephesus, after years apart.
In the play, Ephesus has locked down its borders because of a trade war. In the Glen Avenue version, the borders have been locked because of COVID-19.
“We’ve worked it into the play in quite a wonderful way so that the masks onstage make sense,” Sugars said.
Keen and Sugars launched the Company of Adventurers one decade ago with a performance of Macbeth.
“We’ve been doing it ever since and it has just become this wonderful tradition in the community,” she said.