A backyard Shakespeare production shut down by a City of Ottawa bylaw officer may be staged in Windsor Park thanks to a hasty compromise hammered out at city hall.
Mayor Jim Watson announced the deal on Twitter following a brief but furious backlash.
It means the student production of William Shakespeare’s play, The Comedy of Errors, can take the stage.
But co-director Paul Keen is not sure Windsor Park is the best venue and he’s still hoping the student troupe will be allowed to stage the play on his backyard deck, where the young actors have practised for two months.
“It’s not ideal,” said Paul Keen, co-director of the play. “The actors have their entrances and exits choreographed, and we’d have to figure out how to build some kind of set in in Windsor Park in one day.”
Cynthia Sugars and Paul Keen were mounting a student Shakespeare production that has been shut down by city bylaw officers, who say the backyard at 57 Glen Avenue in Ottawa is not zoned for theatre productions.Councillor Shawn Menard visited the family’s Glen Avenue home Friday in an attempt to help broker a deal with the city. He said he was surprised a complaint was lodged in the case.
On Thursday, a city bylaw officer shut down the Shakespeare production in Old Ottawa South for failing to respect theatre zoning.
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 summertime 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.
Related
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 since their backyard was not zoned for theatre productions.
The bylaw officer said he was acting on a complaint.
The troupe’s first performance was supposed to take place Sunday before family and friends.
“We’d really like to be able to keep doing it here,” Cynthia Sugars said.
The actors – cast members range in age from 11 to 17 – had their last rehearsal Wednesday night and celebrated with a pizza party. An email from city bylaw arrived the next morning demanding that the performance be moved.
“Unfortunately, your property is not zoned for such matters,” the bylaw officer wrote. “You will have to make other arrangements for your production.”
Keen called the bylaw officer, believing he must be 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,” said Keen. “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,” said Small.
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 plays, The Comedy of Errors tells the story of two sets of identical twins who find themselves in the same city, Ephesus, after many 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 in into the play in quite a wonderful way so that the masks onstage make sense,” said Sugars.
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.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
