From Lunchbox

For anyone who assumed that Lunchbox Theatre had reached its curtain call, the Calgary staple’s 2008-09 season is proving there’s a second act left after all. Hand it to the drama of circumstance, though: it was a hell of a break.

For almost 33 years, the unique lunchtime theatre founded by Bartley and Margaret Bard in 1975 made its home in the downtown Bow Valley Square. But with the relatively sudden end of the company’s rent-free lease in 2007, Lunchbox was faced with an essential dilemma — how to continue producing work for corporate Calgary without a downtown address. As if the question wasn’t acute enough, the company’s imminent homelessness was followed swiftly by the departure of artistic director Rona Waddington, who had replaced Johanne Deleeuw, the Bards’ hand-picked successor, after the board of directors terminated the latter’s contract in 2005.

The outlook, to all outward appearances, was bleak.

Then late last season, the company announced its new home in a former Mercedes dealership at the base of the Calgary Tower. Offering the company the chance to build a theatre from the ground up, allowing for adjustable seating and staging, the new theatre will see its first performances under artistic director Martin Fishman.

Better known to Calgary audiences as the artistic director of Mount Royal’s summertime Shakespeare in the Park, the former interim AD hopes to bring an “edgier” feel to the company’s productions, taking advantage of the new location to maintain and expand the long-running company’s audience base.

“We've got a large core of older audience members who’ve been very faithful over the last 33 years and will hopefully continue to be,” he says. “But moving here to the cultural heart of Calgary is an opportunity to expand our audience base, and to more truly reflect the kind of city Calgary is now as opposed to when [the Bards] began 34 years ago.”

According to Fishman, it was last season’s With a Twist, a modern satire that included, among other things, cyber sex and swearing, that opened his eyes to the possibility of future Lunchbox offerings.

With a new space embedded in Calgary’s downtown theatre district, he believes the company can engage more directly with other local work. Conceding that Lunchbox’s one-act plays will always maintain a level of safety that’s marked the company since its beginnings, he sees works like Stagefright, the season’s first production, as more “in touch” with the company’s hoped-for broader audience.

Adapted from a full-length version, Stagefright (September 17 to October 4) is a musical taking aim at self-help through a woman’s attempts to have actors perform her life and, in doing, expose its flaws. Written by Toronto playwright Jim Betts, the chaotic swirl of music and catharsis will be followed by A Life in the Theatre (October 20 to November 15), a two-hander written by David Mamet and directed by Fishman, an ardent Mamet devotee.

From a valentine to the theatre to the requisite Christmas comedy, Norm Foster’s The Christmas Tree (November 24 to December 20) will hit the season’s midpoint, followed by a musical tribute to Frank Sinatra called Come Fly With Me (January 19 to February 14). “The Frank Sinatra tribute is a no-brainer,” says Fishman. “Everyone loves Sinatra.”

Originally performed by writer Darren Hagen, an Edmonton-based drag queen, Tornado Magnet (February 23 to March 21) will replace Hagen with local actor Karen Johnson-Diamond for the company’s second-last production, before human actors will replace whales in Lunchbox fixture Clem Martini’s The Invention of Music (March 30 to April 25).

Of the season’s six productions, two, The Christmas Tree and The Invention of Music, are original Lunchbox Theatre commissions. Fishman says that further commissions will allow the company to create Calgary-centred works drawing attention to the increasing sophistication of the city.

But if the company’s commissions are providing opportunities for new work, perhaps one of the most exciting promises of the new space is the possibility of a new, flexible stage in the downtown core that would likewise offer Calgary artists the chance to produce their own work. “My hope is we can rent [the main stage] out to smaller theatre companies at minimum cost,” says Fishman. “I know a lot of the younger companies are trying to run a space and it’s prohibitive. Breathtakingly expensive.”

While Lunchbox’s rehearsal hall will still be rented out at commercial rates, Fishman is promising that smaller companies will be able to take advantage of the theatre proper, which is necessarily vacant during the hours when most companies would be staging work. With Lunchbox finding its own second act, it’s comforting to think that its success might also offer the same lease on life to other local companies.