Norm Foster a force of festival inspiration
Norm Foster is widely considered Canada’s most produced playwright, whose works receive an average of 150 productions per year.
Some might say that Foster’s work doesn’t need more production incentives. But for Patricia Vanstone and Emily Oriold, it’s exactly Foster’s popularity that makes a festival of his work a good idea.
They’re the executive team behind the Foster Festival in St. Catharines, now in its second summer season.
Foster’s plays are character-driven comedies, most often treating romance, marriage, working relationships or friendship. But, as Vanstone argues, they go deeper too: audiences “leave feeling that they’ve had a great laugh but, if they so desire, they have something they can chew on,” themes such as mortality, responsibility, legacy and hope. The festival’s tag line is “humour with heart.”
Vanstone first met Foster in 1984, as an actor in his breakaway hit The Melville Boys at Theatre New Brunswick.
Since that time, “I’ve had great successes as an actor and director with Norm’s work,” Vanstone says. “I see how his plays affect everybody from oil workers in Fort McMurray to hoity-toits in Bermuda and Turks and Caicos. . . . We said it’s time to celebrate a Canadian playwright who’s still alive.”
Oriold, too, is a longtime enthusiast: “I first had the idea of a Foster Festival in 2004, as a young actor living in my bachelor apartment in Toronto, and even created a logo, which I kept for 10 years.”
While working as an actor out east in the summer of 2014, Oriold met Foster (who lives in Fredericton) and asked if she could start a festival of his work. He was interested and suggested she consider Vanstone as artistic director. The two women met and realized that the first Foster show Oriold ever saw — a 1997 Blyth Festival production of The Melville Boys — was directed by Vanstone.
“We just said, ‘Oh well, there’s our circle story,’ ” Vanstone remembers. “We were meant to be.”
That initial meeting was in October 2014. They got wind of a new performing arts centre being built in St. Catharines and met its executive director, Steve Solski, that December. “By January, we knew we would be making St. Catharines our home,” Vanstone says.
The festival launched last year with a world premiere, Halfway to the North Pole, and two productions of existing plays. Running on a budget of approximately $350,000, they ended 2016 with a $50,000 deficit.
This year, they’re keeping things a bit leaner, because running at a loss two years in a row “could scare people off,” Vanstone says. Thanks to doubled audience numbers, along with increased government and corporate support, the company has eliminated its debts to outside organizations.
“It was a little slow going getting people to buy in,” board chairperson Glen McCann says. “This year, there’s more excitement. It feels like we’ve turned the corner.”
The festival has multiple links with Brock University’s Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts (where, full disclosure, I am on the faculty of dramatic arts), from staffing to use of facilities, to internships and employment for students and recent grads. These connections to education and to St. Catharines’ existing theatre companies “are some of the things that excite me the most” about the enterprise, Vanstone says.
While theatres around the country produce Foster’s work, it’s rarely, if ever, seen in Toronto. Is this snobbism?
“Oh yes, in a word,” Vanstone says. “Because Norm is popular, there is a tendency among certain circles to dismiss his work. But often, the people who are most dismissive have never seen nor read a Norm Foster play.”
“When I was first starting out, I thought maybe I was not as good or valuable as other writers,” Foster says. “It’s the old cliché of comedy not getting its due.” But he’s at a point in his career where he’s “satisfied with the level I’ve reached.”
The festival is putting wind in his sails, the 68-year-old says. “It has given me a renewed vigour and desire to write more works, because I know they’re going to be produced.”
Plans for the festival’s coming years include a world-premiere musical, four-show seasons and adding a female playwright.
In the business for over four decades, Vanstone is now enjoying an unexpected “fourth act” in her career. During festival season, she and Oriold work 16- to 18-hour days, but it’s clear the experience is invigorating and a source of pride.
“People have talked about doing a Foster Festival for years,” Vanstone says. “It took two chicks to get ’er done.” The Foster Festival’s world-premiere production of Lunenburg runs through Aug. 18 at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, St. Catharines. See fosterfestival.com, call 905-688-0722 or 1-855-515-0722. Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga.
“It has given me a renewed vigour and desire to write more works.” NORM FOSTER PLAYWRIGHT