On a recent Friday at the Princess Cafe on Central Avenue, three Prince Albert women with upcoming plays got together to chat.
Randi Maschak of Odyssey Productions, Maureen Pepper of Smokescreen Productions and Adreanna Gareau of Off the Cuff all have productions coming up for the stage and wanted to talk about the theatre scene and enjoy a meal.
Odyssey Productions will be presenting Misery, Smokescreen Productions will be presenting Dead Men Don’t Eat Quiche and, Off the Cuff will be presenting A Man Walks into a Bar in April. With so much in common, Pepper wanted to bring the trio together.
“Maureen is very good at supporting everybody and just staying in touch with everybody,” Gareau said. “She’s got a lot of enthusiasm and energy. I’m sure you could notice as soon as you walked in. She was like, we should get together and do lunch because we’re these three women. I think we’re the only women in each of our plays,” Gareau said.
Pepper said the idea to host a gathering at the Princess came when she was running lines for her play and thought about Maschak and Gareau. Pepper said community theatre is all about connections.
Gareau was involved in one of the first Smokescreen productions, and while Maschak has not done plays with Pepper, they have always wanted to work together. Once, they even began a project but the idea fell apart.
“I feel like we get excited for each other,” Gareau said. “I have done so many plays with Randi, I have known Randi for years. We go way back.”
She said that the day before she went through Facebook photos and found one of Maschak and herself backstage at Last of the Red Hot Lovers.
The three are always looking out for each other in theatre and in life.
“As soon as I saw Odyssey was doing Misery, I thought, oh, I hope Randi auditions because I think she’s even talked about Misery before, and she’d be so good,” Gareau said.
“It’s full circle moment here because Maureen told me years ago we should do Misery. I want you to be Annie,” Maschak said.
“And I would direct, of course,” added Pepper.
Maschak said Pepper was her first link to Misery. Maschak had never read it before Pepper gave her a copy of the script.
Gareau first met Pepper when she went to see Odyssey’s production of Driving Miss Daisy and sat at a table with Smokescreen founders Pepper and David Mulgrew.
“I wanted to get into theatre and so I thought, I’m going to go to this Odyssey play,” Gareau remembered. “I went by myself and the table I sat at, it was with Maureen and Dave. What a great table to sit at because they’re like, ‘oh, you want to do theatre? Well, you have to talk with this person and this person.’
“This was before Facebook so we went, (and) we watched the newspaper for audition notices. You had to know people,” she added.
Gareau went to a workshop and then got a part in a production. She has now performed in a play every year since then.
Gareau said Off the Cuff also came out of Odyssey Productions.
She remembered doing improv in high school and thought that would make a good fundraiser for Odyssey Productions.
“I had a first meeting. There was like 15 people in my living room,” she said. “Since then we’ve had people come and go, they come, they move away. But there are always new people. Most people have like stayed around, so Off the Cuff evolved from that and now it
produces plays too.” Odyssey Productions is presenting Misery and Maschak is playing the character of Annie Wilkes. Sshe said that production is going well.
“We have a very small but very talented cast and every week it’s getting more and more unhinged,” Maschak said.
“I am playing Annie Wilkes, nurse extraordinaire, sledgehammer enthusiast. It should be difficult but it’s more surprising how not difficult it is. It’s fun, as awful as that sounds to say.”
Misery will also feature Michael Lavigne and Aldreric Georget.
Odyssey’s production of Misery is at the Prince Albert Wildlife Federation Banquet Hall and Events Centre on April 2 and April. Two dinner theatre productions will be held on April 4 and April 5. It is directed by Trent Gillespie.
“We go way back, we’ve done lots of shows together, Trent and I,” Maschak said.
Dead Men Don’t Eat Quiche is a one act play by David Permberton. It will be Smokescreen’s next production. Pepper plays Lily, a femme fatale with a curious mind who is unlucky with men.
The play is a film noir parody which is what Smokescreen likes to produce.
“That’s what Smokescreen likes to do and we love performing here, but we also will take it to the provincial festival in the province,” Pepper said.
The Provincial One Act Play Festival is in Melfort on April 24, 25 and 26 at the Kerry Vickar Centre for provincial play competition. The Prince Albert Production runs April 11 and 12 at the Mahon Auditorium in the Prince Albert Public Library.
“This is our 20th anniversary, actually. We are a very small club, Smokescreen Productions. We were founded by four people myself, Maureen Pepper, David Mulgrew, Danielle Fehr and Larry Schlosser. We’ve been around 20 years and we do a play every two years in the community and at a provincial festival,” Pepper said.
She said that Smokescreen usually does plays for the provincial festival. They also like to partner with local groups.
“We’ve been with Odyssey and then the former Prince Albert Community players a lot,” Pepper explained. “We’re really big on supporting art groups within the city as one big community theatre.”
Dead Men Don’t Eat Quiche also features Ryan Hughes, Preston Morin and Lee Raymond.
The crossover comes from Hughes and Morin, who are in Smokescreen’s production and have worked with Off the Cuff in the past.
“Maureen and Dave are always welcome to do stuff with Off the Cuff and anytime we do an interactive Maureen has been in my head for a long time about how I need to have a character for Maureen, so it just hasn’t happened yet,” Gareau said.
The production of ‘A Man Walks into a Bar’ by Toronto playwright Rachel Blair is on April 24 to 26 and May 1 to May 3 at the Spice Trail.
“I have wanted to do this play since I read it,” Gareau said. “I read it back in 2019 or 2020. It was going to be for Persephone season in Saskatoon and I was going to audition and then, of course, COVID happened. It got shut down and then Spark Theatre was going to do it. For various reasons that fell apart, not Spark Theatre’s faults I want to be clear. (It’s) one person’s fault.
“It’s been in my head for a long time and I just really, really wanted to do it,” she added. “I love doing theatre that pushes the envelope and inspires conversation and that’s what I feel like this play does.”
Gareau will be playing woman/Jenny and David Lokinger will be playing man/Steve in the play, which is directed by Cara Stelmaschuk, with Dana Stokes as stage manager and Elliot Byers is production assistant.
“It centres around a woman. She’s going to tell a joke and she’s trying to tell this joke, and this man is helping her tell the joke. You go between the woman telling the joke and what’s happening between this waitress and this man in a bar,” Gareau said.
“It explores the dichotomy between how women interact with the world and with society and men. There’s a difference because we face different challenges,” she said.
Gareau said she loved the pay because it explores that topic and concept from both perspectives and does so fairly.
“We’re going to have a talk back after each performance, which I think will be great for people exploring good, solid respectful conversation,” Gareau said.
Gareau said the Spice Trail’s ownership is excited to have the play in the restaurant.
“There is going to be that slightly interactive perspective that Off the Cuff is known for because it’s going to be very intimate,” she explained. “We can only have about 40 people in the audience at a time and the play will be right in front of you—like right there in amongst the audience.”
Tickets for Off the Cuff go on sale on April 1 for $25 and are available on Eventbrite. Odyssey Productions tickets are also available on Eventbrite and Smokescreen tickets are available at the door for $25 or by calling 306-960-9501.
Gareau encouraged people to get involved in community theatre.
“People should do theatre because they love theatre and because they love telling stories,” she said. “I don’t believe in cliques. I’m just glad that we’re not full of cliques…. We just all support each other. That’s how it should be.”
michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
