Today, he’s Matchstick Theatre’s artistic director, but Jake Planinc didn’t always hold a love for theatre. While growing up in St. Catharines, Ont., he disliked attending shows with his father.

“He’s not a theatre person at all but he sort of forced me to do it,” said Planinc on the phone recently, “which I resented for a very long time.”

However, upon seeing a Chekhov play that “blew my little mind when I was eleven,” Planinc decided: “I like this now.” He got into theatre, playing the Baker in Into the Woods before getting involved with Sears Drama Festival.

“That let me act a bunch and also I got to direct,” Planinc said. “I also met many of my closest friends there.” Mount Allison eventually recruited him to play basketball, which hindered his ability to remain involved in theatre.

Then, halfway through his degree, Planinc said he had a sort of epiphany. He quit the basketball team and was cast in a production of Enemy of the People at the Windsor Theatre (now Motyer-Fancy). This Ibsen play “was the beginning of the change for me,” Planinc said.

Planinc was seen onstage in the Windsor/Motyer-Fancy Theatre’s Possible Worlds, Noises Off and The 4-H Club before deciding to try his hand at directing again. In his time at Mt. A, he helmed three productions: a student-written play and two Chekhov shorts, The Bear and The Proposal. Yet he said his greatest lesson came from the drama program’s broad-based nature.

“You come out of that program extremely well-rounded,” Planinc said. “You understand how important every single role is to the process.”

Before graduating, Planinc said he “could feel the bubble bursting,” and began to set up a post–Mt. A career. He produced a play – ‘Art’ by Yasmina Reza – in Ducky’s to better understand the practicalities of doing theatre outside of school. Following convocation, Planinc “moved to Halifax right during the Fringe that year and went to see everything [he] possibly could.”

After this, Planinc connected with Alex Mills and Chelsea Dickie, with whom he now runs Matchstick Theatre. He said the company allows him to “do the things that [he] want[s] to do,” which include directing shows and filling an untapped niche in the Halifax theatre world.

“I figured out that nobody here staged contemporary Canadian plays,” Planinc said. Matchstick has taken up that mantle since its creation in 2015.

The standout production in their history, according to Planinc, is Catherine Banks’s Bone Cage. The play was nominated for Outstanding Production by a New or Emerging Company at the 2018 Merritt Awards.

“We didn’t win the Merritt, which sucked, but the reception from the community was excellent,” Planinc said. “A lot of people came up to us that night and congratulated us and said they were watching us carefully.”

There’s plenty to watch for. Matchstick has a full year of contemporary Canadian theatre planned, including a production of The Woodcutter by Don Hannah and John Mighton’s The Little Years. They will also partner with Neptune Theatre’s Open Spaces program to produce Michael Melski’s Joyride.

“Once a year Neptune gives a free week of rental in their studio space to an independent company,” Planinc explained. This not only eases some financial strain, but will also “be a great chance to show what we’ve got to a huge, new pool of people.”

As Matchstick gears up for a full year, Planinc wants current drama students to know that “The real world is not like school.

“The social world of it is just as important as the quality of your work,” he said. He also advised graduating drama students to “Get your friends together and do something outside of school right now, as fast as possible. It’s much easier than you think it is.”

Since 1993, Decima Mitchell has been the resident designer for Motyer-Fancy Theatre. She’s designed sets and costumes for faculty shows, directed plays, taught theatre design basics to students and worked at various community theatre companies in Sackville.

After 124 productions, Mitchell has announced that she will retire at the end this semester. I sat down with her last week to learn more about her time here, as well as what sparked the decision to retire.

“I’m old!” she said. “This is a physical job. I’m lifting and toting; I’m running up and down a cement staircase.… It’s time.”

Although she’s found success as a designer and director, theatre was never Mitchell’s original plan. Upon earning a BA in psychology at Southern Connecticut State University, she moved to Vancouver to study art, something she “had always wanted to do.”

After graduation, she tried her hand at studio art while working odd jobs. She eventually found a position at a Vancouver community school teaching woodworking to children. Here she met a student’s mother, who opened a door for Mitchell.

“She told me she did set and costume design and I was immediately intrigued but had no clue what it was,” Mitchell said. Upon learning more, she realized, “Oh my goodness, that’s my next thing.”

“It was really that thing that you hear about and read about in novels. You turn a corner and there’s something there for you that you would not ever have known about,” Mitchell said. She worked in community theatre before completing an MFA in theatre design and production at the University of British Columbia. Shortly after, she was hired as the resident designer at Windsor Theatre (now Motyer-Fancy).

“It’s been a joy. She’s [Mitchell’s] a really hard worker,” said director of drama Dr. Glen Nichols.“I think of the Zastrozzi discussions when she brought the ideas of steampunk to the table, which I hadn’t even heard of. It was perfect in terms of the style and feel.”

Mitchell also referenced Zastrozzi, which was performed in Con Hall, as a standout design. “I was able to use the space in a way that it certainly wasn’t designed to be used,” she said. In terms of directorial projects, Mitchell highlighted Antigone, Beating Heart Cadaver and Noises Off as some of her favourites.

However, the most rewarding things to Mitchell are “the people I work with: the faculty, the staff, the students.”

“I’ve seen people progress from just an interest to doing their own designs,” she said. “That is a process that can be very enjoyable and rewarding.”

One of those students is fourth-year Sabrina Stace, who went from basic sewing skills to completing her own costume designs.

“I’ve been able to find my way in this degree because of her and I’m forever grateful for that,” she said. “She’s really taught me that no matter what happens, it will always work out.”

Drama alum Kendrick Haunt echoed these sentiments in an email. “Decima taught me there are no limits to what goes into a costume design,” Haunt wrote. “I learned how special and different costume design is in comparison to any other form of fashion because you get the opportunity to use anything and everything at your disposal.”

What’s next for Mitchell? She plans to “go south for longer than I have been going south” and move to a larger urban centre. She intends to remain involved with theatre, whether it be directing or working with set and costumes.

That said, she’d prefer to avoid “global decision-making processes. I just want to be the person who does the thing and goes home and sleeps well at night.”

That rest has been well-earned. After all, according to Haunt, “Her many years of experience have been invaluable to both Motyer-Fancy Theatre and to every student who has had the pleasure to call her teacher.”

“Her attention to detail and her wealth of knowledge about fashion through the ages made her an inspiration and an incredible mentor to me,” Haunt wrote. “I cannot imagine Mount Allison without her.”

On Monday, March 26, Mount Allison’s Year of Indigenous Action will come to life onstage in Theatre New Brunswick’s (TNB) touring production of Finding Wolastoq Voice. This show marks the first time TNB has staged work written by an Indigenous New Brunswicker, as well as Natalie Sappier’s debut as a playwright.

“The story is about healing, relationships, family and my experiences as a young girl,” Sappier said in a press release. Originally from Tobique First Nation, she is not only responsible for the script, but she also composed and recorded the music and created storyboard-like paintings to guide her collaborators.

One of the collaborators is Aria Evans, the show’s choreographer and solo performer. According to the press release, the mixed-race contemporary dance artist “interprets the flow and rhythm of Sappier’s words and music.” When she’s not onstage, Evans is based in Toronto where she serves as artistic director of the Go To Company.

Evans’ work onstage is supported by Andy Moro’s set and lighting design. A production designer with a mixed European and Omushkego Cree background, he is a core creative faculty member of Indigenous Dance Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

To complement Sappier’s stories, Evans’ movement and Moro’s set and lighting, Michael Doherty has created the show’s sound design. A Merritt Award-winning artist, Doherty is TNB’s resident sound designer.

These technical elements come together under director Thomas Morgan Jones, TNB’s departing artistic director. “There’s all these beautiful words and there’s all this soaring music,” Jones said in a press release. “What we’re trying to do is find the right theatre language and dance language to be able to bring all of that to life in a three-dimensional way.”

The tour stop in Sackville will allow audiences to see Sappier’s words brought to life while also exposing them to professional theatre. “It is such an educational experience,” Colton O’Shea, a fourth-year drama student, wrote in an email. According to Paul Brisk Jr., an Indigenous student in the drama studies program, this opportunity is “inspiring.”

“It shows us the relevancy and reality of all of the work we are putting into a degree,” he wrote in an email. He is also excited by the representation Finding Wolastoq Voice will bring to campus.

“Any step taken towards Indigenous awareness and representation is an important one, but this is massive,” Brisk wrote. “I just hope that seeing the play sparks an interest in people’s minds.”

Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Mt. A’s Indigenous affairs coordinator, expressed a similar sentiment.

“Historically, we were not always given the chance to tell it from our own point of view,” she wrote in an email. “Our art, songs, dance deserve the space to be shared and admired.” Hassencahl-Perley, who is also from Tobique First Nation, hopes that “the audience feels a connection to us and who we are as a people.”

As someone who has looked up to Sappier, Hassencahl-Perley is excited that Mt. A will be exposed to the artist’s work. “It means absolutely everything to me,” she wrote. “She took this plunge into theatre and I think it is just so telling of the amazing artist she is and what she is capable of. I’m so excited to have her story shown here.”

Students will also have the opportunity to learn more from Sappier on Tuesday, March 27 at 7 p.m. Students can learn about what she calls “the spiral effect” in a workshop facilitated by the Drama Studies Society. O’Shea, the society’s president, said that Sappier “will share her journey of exploring a new process of expressing storytelling through performance art.”

In a press release, Sappier explained why theatre was the next logical step: “I wanted to bring our stories onstage. I think it was time for us to bring our stories onstage, for them to be heard through dance and movement and song and this is what I always want to do.”   

See Finding Wolastoq Voice on Monday, March 26. Tickets are available through TNB’s website for $10 (student) and $20 (general admission).

“I was a very talkative, very attention-seeking child and eventually one of my cousins said to my mother, ‘Dear God, Diane, put her in theatre,’ ” Crosby told me over the phone. Her mother promptly enrolled her in Cape Breton’s Class Acts Drama School.

“I was taking acting classes, I was taking musical theatre classes even though I refused to sing, I was taking playwriting classes and stagecraft classes and just everything that they offered because I just could not get enough of it,” she said.

When it came time to pick a university to learn more, Crosby was torn between Acadia and St. Thomas. After an impromptu stop at the midpoint, Mount Allison, she changed her mind completely. “I could kind of make the program fit what I wanted to do,” she said. Crosby immediately got involved with Mt. A’s theatre scene.

“I went to Paul Del Motte and said, ‘I have experience with lights! Put me in with the lights!’ ” she said. “I realized I knew nothing about lights but Paul was super helpful. From there I just did every single show that Mt. A put on in my four years there.”

Crosby continued her early habit of learning as much as possible, branching out into acting, designing lights and stepping up as a stage manager. She also co-founded the “mini-theatre company” AXE Productions.

“I started it with Erik [Garf] and Xavier [Gould] and we put on Kat Sandler’s Punch Up,” she said, “I probably wouldn’t have done that at another school.” All of this work led to her final project as a drama student.

“I think the highlight for me is when I directed Little One by Hannah Moscovitch,” Crosby said. “Everything that I did at Mt. A kind of led to that show.” She found herself drawn to the play’s depiction of “a humanity that is kind of dirty and messy.” The rehearsal process reinforced Mt. A’s most important lesson: “Learn everything that you possibly can.”

“Nothing is ever irrelevant. You know? Your English class is going to help you direct your next show,” she said. “You have to obsessively learn.”

Since graduating, Crosby has been Ship’s Company Theatre’s apprentice stage manager and filled a multitude of roles and needs at Highland Arts Theatre. She’s apprenticed at Festival Antigonish’s Summer Theatre and is currently Matchstick Theatre’s resident lighting designer. She was also recently Matchstick’s first guest director, exploring more “messy humanity” in Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes. The play focuses on the true story of a teenage boy dying while trying to cross the Berlin Wall.

“What [playwright] Jordan Tannahill did is he took that last hour of Peter’s life and conceptualized what would go through an 18-year-old’s head after you’ve been shot,” Crosby said. “What do you think about for an hour while you die?”

Though she’s found success in Halifax as a director and designer, Crosby admits she misses the Motyer-Fancy theatre’s technical tools and flexibility as a space. This is reflected in her two-pronged advice to current students.

“Number one: appreciate the amazing and unique space you have to work with. Not everyone has that at their fingertips,” she said. “Number two: try everything you possibly can. If you’re serious about doing theatre after university, you should be doing as many shows as you can in as many capacities as you can.”

Unsurprisingly, this mindset is seen in Crosby’s current and upcoming work. She is currently writing a play to be performed at Halifax’s Atlantic Fringe Festival. In the coming months she will be working as a stage manager at Eastern Front Theatre and Ship’s Company Theatre, and continuing as Matchstick Theatre’s resident lighting designer.

In the opening scene of Paul Downs Colaizzo’s Really Really, the audience meets two girls returning from the party of the year. Grace giggles as she deals with a bleeding hand. Leigh distantly checks her texts, calls her voicemail four times, begins to hyperventilate and finally utters a quiet, mysterious: “Ow.”

This moment, this contrast between total happiness and utter pain, this mystery, is perhaps the best sampling of the show as a whole, which runs until Saturday at the Motyer-Fancy Theatre.

“It’s a very cutthroat play about a group of university students and the lengths to which they will go to achieve the life that they’ve been told they want,” said Kennedy Longaphie, who plays Grace, roommate to the main character Leigh. Without giving too much away, the play also tackles topics of privilege, sexual assault and nepotism.

“It’s quite controversial,” said Kylie Fox, a fourth-year drama and music student who plays Haley, Leigh’s sister. “I think it will create a lot of discussion, dialogue, with the audience members.”

This discussion is important to director Samantha Wilson-Tyrell. “When I read it, a lot of conflicting thoughts and ideas and feelings came up and it made me uncomfortable and it made me want to talk about it,” she said. “When I go to see a show and I want to talk about it afterwards, that’s a good thing, whether I like it or I don’t like it.”

Longaphie, a second-year English and drama student, agreed. “I think it’s more of a discussion,” she said. “We can’t control what people take away from it but I hope they take away some perspective.”

To aid in this dialogue, Really Really will include “an interactive installation,” which, according to Wilson-Tyrell, will allow audience members to “take whatever they’ve just experienced and do something with it immediately after the show.”

Audience discussion is important, but student growth has been the key component to the rehearsal process. Wilson-Tyrell ultimately selected this script so “students could play their own age” and work on a play that would “test them as actors.”

“They have to be people that don’t have a lot of redeeming qualities,” she said. “That’s a big thing as an actor to do that and to fully commit to something that is not you at all.”

Longaphie echoed this sentiment. “It’s been hard to get into the mindset of a young woman who probably made a ‘Make America Great Again’ speech at one point,” she said. Despite that, “It’s been a great growing experience as an actor.”

Even though the characters can be difficult to portray and they spend much of the play in direct conflict, Fox said the cast is “like a team.”

“Because it’s such an ensemble piece, everyone has to be really supportive of each other,” she said. “That’s also a good feeling, knowing that we’ve all got each other’s backs.”

For Wilson-Tyrell, the growth of the actors has been the most exciting part of Really Really.

“There’s some talent on this stage and it is exciting when they meet the bar and then go even higher,” she said. “That is thrilling to watch.”

Really Really runs from March 7 to 10. Tickets are $5 for students and seniors, $10 for non-students. Thursday’s performance is pay-what-you-can. Tickets can be reserved by emailing motyerfancytheatre@mta.ca.

“Frustration is a kind of tension, isn’t it?” Thomas Morgan Jones asked at one point during his workshop last weekend. “It’s a tension in your mind. Let it go because it’s really not useful.” He then gave a cue by whacking a thick bamboo stick against the ground; the students moved into the next position.

Despite the winter weather, Jones, Theatre New Brunswick’s artistic director, travelled to Sackville to share his training. To three current students and two alumni, he taught a five-hour workshop on the Suzuki Method of Actor Training and the Viewpoints methodology.

Before starting on exercises, Jones provided the history of the method, developed by Tadashi Suzuki and his actors in Toga, Japan. Suzuki “seeks to heighten the actors’ emotional and physical power and their commitment to every moment onstage,” Jones explained.

This is done by “returning the wholeness, or the totality, of the human body back into the theatre” through intense focus on energy creation, breath control and controlling one’s centre of gravity. This method provides alternative to typical post-20th century acting techniques that focus primarily on internal thought and text. Alison Crosby, an alumna who travelled from Halifax, said in an email that she was excited to learn more about Suzuki, which she’s “been curious about for a long time.”

“It’s rare to find workshops that are intensives in such specific forms of theatre training, so travelling two hours to and back from Sackville was more than worthwhile,” she wrote.

For most of the workshop, Jones led the attendees through several precise and demanding Suzuki moves, which required each actor to create a “fiction” or mental image to build focus. He would first perform and explain the exercise, allow everyone to try it together, provide notes and corrections, and finally give students the chance to watch and perform for each other.

These exercises were taxing, both physically and mentally. One of the most demanding required sustained focus while moving at a measured pace from standing straight to a squatting position, coming to complete stillness, then back up again. Notes were given while legs wobbled from the burn. The amount of time to move shortened between each set of moves before Jones moved to cuing a change in position with a sharp sound from the bamboo stick.

“It was perhaps more challenging than I had initially expected,” Crosby wrote, “but this kind of intense and immersive introduction is, in my experience, the most effective way to learn.”

Between beats and notes, Jones challenged students to embrace the obstacles presented by Suzuki.

“Move toward the difficulty, master it, and then, because you’re an artist, immediately identify the next difficulty and move towards that,” he said. “That’s how we grow.”

After a break, Jones and the attendees returned to explore theatrical Viewpoints, a methodology based on Mary Overlie’s original Viewpoints, which are used in dance. This training focuses on an actor’s relationship with time through tempo, duration, kinesthetic response and repetition. There is also a focus on space through shape, gesture, architecture, spatial relationship and topography.

“A lot of Viewpoints is really noticing,” Jones explained. “It’s noticing what’s already there and how that can be a part of your work and how you can make it a part of your work.”

The attendees observed the Motyer-Fancy Theatre as a group, naming everything they could see that drew their attention. This included elements such as orange extension cords, symmetry in metal bars, shadows and salt stains on the theatre floor.

Students then explored the space as different genres of instrumental music played. To strings, they worked together to both find harmony and create discord while playing with speed. To a polka, one explored solitude and repetition, squatting and moving in straight lines. Two worked together in floorwork while a piano melody played; two others chased each other in circles, playing with distance to techno beats.

“Surprise yourself,” Jones said about these improvisations. Some moments were predictable, and he challenged students to “amp it up and then keep going past what you think you know as opposed to what’s safe.”

This wisdom is one of the reasons Crosby viewed the workshop as worthwhile. She wrote, “The chance to learn from him for a few hours was like a small glimpse into the work he uses to create the theatre he does, which is endlessly fascinating to hear about and witness.”

Anna Shepard has come a long way from nativity plays and high school musicals. The Mt. A alumna will travel to New York City this year with Halifax’s 2B Theatre Company to stage Old Stock off-Broadway.

I spoke to Shepard on the phone last week to learn more about her journey and current position.

“I always wanted to be Mary in Christmas pageants at church,” said Shepard on her beginnings in theatre. Her opportunity arose when her church staged a play about troublemakers performing a Christmas pageant. “I got to play the girl who plays Mary,” Shepard said, who, apart from church performances, didn’t consider theatre as a career option.

“Throughout my life, I wanted to do something artistic,” she said. “I was far more interested in fine arts and visual arts until my last year of high school.” However, her drama teacher inspired her to give the art form a try. She decided to follow in his footsteps, hoping to inspire others.

Mt. A would be the school where she would gain the skills necessary to become a drama teacher. Shepard said this decision came about because she “really just wanted something different.”

In her first year alone, the drama major performed in four productions with two societies. The highlight of these was Psyche, a devised piece (original theatre created by the group) led by Mike Griffin, a former Crake Fellow in drama.

“It was one of the most eye-opening experiences of what theatre could be,” Shepard said. “I just want to keep making theatre as weird as that and as fun as that.”

Shepard continued to act but later branched out to stage management and lighting design. Some Mt. A credits include She Stoops to Conquer, 4-H Club, Punch-Up! and “about a thousand shows I worked on the lighting crew for.”

In her fourth year, she returned to more abstract theatre by directing This is For You, Anna, a play exploring the grief of Marianne Bachmeier, who shot her daughter Anna’s alleged murderer in court in 1981.

“I think I just needed to do that show,” Shepard said. “It was just so interesting to me and confusing and horrifying and intriguing.” This project helped her realize one of the most important things she learned at Mt. A: “Literally nothing is the end of the world.”

This lesson was important in the process of applying to 2B. Shepard explained this process as “just getting out of my own brain” and battling impostor syndrome, the feeling of being a fraud deep down. She eventually got the job and realized “how excited [she] was.”

Shepard’s current position includes working as an assistant-director and co-lighting designer on One Discordant Violin. Adapted from a Yann Martel short story, Shepard said the play is “about failure and also about reaching and grasping for perfection and beauty.”

Come April, Shepard will also work as a production assistant on the New York City production of Old Stock, a job she describes as “very open-ended.”

“I think I’m going to be doing a lot of laundry for costumes,” she said. “Who knows what I’ll really be doing.”

In her time at 2B, Shepard says her most important lesson has been that “Everyone in theatre is just a human person.”

“Every single person working in this industry is just doing their job,” she said. “They have empathy and they are approachable.”

Shepard has also learned how to manage her time, between squeezing sleep into busy days, working a second job at Starbucks and the key task of networking. Balance is part of the advice she offered to current drama students: “It’s important to take care of yourself, especially if you’re going into an industry that is this demanding of your time and your attention and your passion,” she said.

Above all else? “Remember that you’re creating art,” Shepard said. “Find the joy and keep thinking and keep making.”

Though the Motyer-Fancy Theatre has been transformed into a pastel paradise for Tintamarre’s production of REX!, the titular character is anything but innocent.

I sat down last week with Alex Fancy, the director of the bilingual theatre troupe, to learn more about the collaborative production. He said the show follows “the trajectory of a baby bully who grows up to be a big-time bully.”

Rex, the titular character, might inhabit another world, but he seems like he’s been plucked from our own. The character is shown to be spoiled and pampered from an early age and displays Machiavellian tendencies. Rex also owns a chain of world-class hotels and “tweets at night.” Early in the show he informs two Internet trolls, “I don’t want friends. I want fans.”

Sound familiar? He should. By using the template of a real-world figure with a major platform – though Fancy spoke of a pact “where we don’t name a certain bully” – Tintamarre hopes to spark dialogue.

“Rather than talking about a specific person or persons, we are looking at a social pattern, a social problem and a kind of behaviour that is quite prevalent nowadays,” said Fancy, explaining that “People become devoid of empathy and passion.”

“Tintamarre productions always touch upon issues that are important in our society today,” said Caitlin O’Connor, who plays Rex, in an email. “From critiques on capitalism to cyberbullying, this play has it all,” she added.

This play likely brings in such varied elements due to the collaborative creation process. The theme of bullying was proposed last March and the troupe’s volunteers brainstormed and experimented during the fall semester. From these rehearsals, Fancy took his inspiration for the French and English script.

“We don’t believe in boundaries or hierarchies in cast and crew,” Fancy said. Once the script was completed, the cast nominated each other for roles and indicated which characters they would like to play.

“People are playing roles that they helped to create,” said Fancy. “It helps to create a real sense of ownership.” It also fosters Tintamarre’s tight-knit “community within the community.”

This aspect of Tintamarre is what initially drew Madison Fairweather to the troupe. “It just sounded like an amazing opportunity to get to know this whole pre-made group of friends,” said Fairweather, an actor and REX!’s assistant director. “It was a really welcoming atmosphere.” O’Connor agreed, saying, “I felt like it was a community that was made for me.”

Tintamarre’s main goals as a theatre company have helped contribute to this community atmosphere.

“Our first goal is to celebrate our differences and our second goal is to show how theatre can play a role in the world in helping us to ask questions,” Fancy said. REX! has gender-blind casting, which is encompassed in Tintamarre’s goal “to break down stereotypes and make it hard for people to assign labels to people and characters.”

“We want to encourage people to ask questions, like what it is in our environment that causes people to become bullies,” said Fancy, something that is also important to Fairweather.

“This play makes accessible to everyone a lot of the deeper political issues that we have going on in the world right now,” she said. “We’re not setting out to poke fun at the situation, we’re more just trying to make people think a little more about what’s going on and what you can do to maybe change it for the better.”

Tintamarre’s production of REX! runs from Jan. 31 to Feb. 3. Tickets are $5 for students/seniors, $10 for non-students. Thursday’s performance is pay-what-you-can. Tickets can be reserved by emailing motyerfancytheatre@mta.ca.

If you were to stop in at Convocation Hall before Jan. 27, you’d be greeted by a looming two-storey purple set, a torture rack and a crossbow. You’d also meet the death-loving Addams clan and their ancestors, including a dead bride, a hippie and a saloon girl.

However, these torture instruments and ghosts are no cause for alarm. They’re integral parts of Garnet and Gold Musical Theatre Society’s current production of The Addams Family. The musical, which runs from Jan. 25 to 27, follows the iconic family from the original New Yorker cartoons and the 1990s films. In this adaptation, the family must contend with a new issue: daughter Wednesday has changed. She’s fallen in love with the straight-laced Ohioan Lucas.

“There’s something wrong with Wednesday,” says matriarch Morticia Addams early in the show. “She’s in the kitchen smiling.”

Last weekend I sat in on rehearsal as the cast, directed by Karen Valanne, worked through the show to fine-tune stage pictures, correct lines and drill harmonies. At one point, specific attention was given to a crossbow trick shot, causing Michael McCracken, who plays Lucas Beineke, to exclaim, “That’s the magic of theatre!”

According to Emma Hudson, the society’s secretary/treasurer and a member of the ensemble of ancestors, this macabre magic is what initially attracted the society’s executive team to the show.

“We wanted to do something completely different,” she said. Recent G&G productions have included Anything Goes, Tarzan and, most recently, Legally Blonde. Though last year’s fashionably pink romp showed the society’s more mature side, Addams is a darker departure. Still, there are classic themes buried under torture, potions and monsters under the bed.

“It’s a show about family and about love,” said Emily O’Leary, who plays Wednesday Addams, “even underneath all of the spooky ridiculousness.”

This sentiment was echoed by Kaye Klapman, the society’s VP External and show’s assistant vocal director.

“It tells the kinds of stories that everybody knows or has experienced in this really interesting, funny, kind of cartoony context, so it takes the sting out of them,” she said. “You can really relate but also enjoy the funny elements and the drama and the big blowout numbers.”

The show’s core focus on the importance of family and friendship can be found amongst the cast themselves.

“The cast is great. Everyone’s fun to work with,” said Grayson Kenny, who plays Gomez.

O’Leary echoed this sentiment. “It’s really nice to make a whole new theatre family away from home,” she said. “[Garnet and Gold] definitely made the social aspect of coming to a new place easier because immediately I just had a whole new group of friends, and that was great.”

Perhaps this tight-knit energy has led to McCracken’s favourite part of the Addams Family process: “the energy and the dedication.”

“Everyone’s been keeping their spirits high and has been helpful,” he said. “You get people that have been coming and building sets that are also members of the cast.”

Hudson also highlighted the final stages of rehearsal as the most exciting. “The way it comes together every year is just thrilling,” she said. “The vibe of everyone being so excited is the best part.”

If you’d like to meet the Addams Family, visit them from Jan. 25 to 27 at Convocation Hall. Advance tickets ($10 for students/seniors, $12 for non-students) are available at the MASU office, Tidewater Books and Jean Coutu. $12 student/senior tickets and $15 non-student tickets can also be purchased at the door.

“Mt. A taught me to listen,” said alumna Crystal Chettiar on the phone last week. Originally from Bathurst, N.B., Chettiar is currently based in Montreal where she is finishing the production design and technical arts program at the National Theatre School.

After a short period working as a child actor in Toronto, Chettiar found her place in high school theatre. “I never really got a part or anything, but it was just nice to be part of that culture,” she said.

When it came to university, however, it seemed that theatre would remain extracurricular. Chettiar’s parents wanted her to study a science, and she chose psychology.

“I thought maybe if I got into music therapy, that might be something I could include some creation in and sort of understand the art through psychology and vice versa,” she said. “I hated it.”

“To maybe drown out my sorrows of midterms, I did Garnet & Gold,” Chettiar said. She was cast in Fame and found something she had been missing: “It was all the feelings of high school and community coming back and I really felt for the Mt. A community.”

She was approached after a show by professor Paul Del Motte and student Landon Braverman about Windsor Theatre (now Motyer-Fancy). Following a “eureka moment in my dorm room,” Chettiar switched to drama.

She performed with Garnet & Gold Musical Theatre Society, the now-defunct Black Tie Productions and Windsor Theatre. In addition to acting, Chettiar experimented with video and sound design.

Chettiar also founded Mt. A’s Drama Studies Society. “There was no communication, so we changed that,” she said. “With all the different theatre companies, there can be a weird resentment or competition when we’re all kind of working towards the same thing, doing art.… I don’t want to have to compete with Justin Collette [founder of Presents: the Improv] when we’re both into acting and we’re both into producing things and both want to do things.”

Eventually, Del Motte “suggested I apply for a summer position at Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia,” Chettiar said. That position as technical director both empowered Chettiar and led to more volunteering in stage management positions and working as Windsor Theatre’s front-of-house manager.

After graduating, Chettiar got “a real adult job with salary and benefits,” backstage at the Fredericton Playhouse. She was exposed to great art, but felt unfulfilled – so she applied to the production program at NTS.

“I did not think I was going to get in,” she said. “I spent all this time believing I was not good enough and here they are, only accepting eight people internationally.” Chettiar’s hard work paid off and she was accepted to the “very labour-intensive” program.

“It’s kind of like having tech week every day,” she said. “It’s taught me what the industry actually is for production.”

NTS has also given Chettiar experience on crews, as a department head, in sound, in lighting, in welding, in carpentry and, in her final year, as the production manager and technical director. To Chettiar, “NTS is my big shiny stamp that says I can do stuff in Canada.”

Chettiar wants to pass on one of the school’s most important lessons to current students: “Find the joy.” As theatre’s inequalities towards women and people of colour become even clearer, passion can wane and anger can take over. To Chettiar, it’s important to channel this frustration and reconnect with the love for the art.

“I think as a young woman, and I identify as a woman of colour, in this industry, it’s really important to know what you’re fighting for,” she said. “That’s what it’s about. Why do you do it? Why do you fight the fight? Why are you passionate? Is your mandate about working in Canadian theatre? Is it about women’s rights? Is it about diversity? What do you want to fight for?”