Culture is a network of intertwined pulses of art. Two of those veins in Prince George are connecting more closely.
Theatre North West presents a number of plays to local audiences each year. Each one is derived from a script, the words of a writer. Each one has its surface premise and its underlying themes. Each one sparks thought and debate and emotion.
The Prince George Public Library is where the written word has its bastion in this community. It's where shelves are stocked with ideas and insights wrapped between two covers. They are in the form of films, albums, magazines, newspapers, and especially thousands of books.
Theatre North West and the library are now working together directly, each one looking to the other to enhance the public's experience inside local culture.
For each TNW play, artistic director Jack Grinhaus has provided a prospectus to library staff. It maps out the play's key messages, its setting and plot, its historical content, and the script's literal words. The library's team will then compile a set of materials within their collection that relates to all those things. It will be promoted as a reading list and there are plans to in some way display the materials together.
The theatre company's first play this coming season is Fly Me To The Moon, an Irish comedy about two women who take care of an elderly man. The man dies suddenly on their watch, they tell a small lie about it that begins to lead to ever-growing fabrications and dramatic tension.
So for the library's purposes, their reading list might include anything from Frank Sinatra albums, to manuals on wills and estates, to classic Irish novels, to anything pertaining to elders or dying or finding the humour within tragedy.
"They made the decisions in-house from their own knowledge of their collection. And we hope it is the first step towards a deeper relationship between us and the library," Grinhaus said.
"It means that there is engagement with the library and the theatre all season long. We have a theme for the season (strong female characters) and we have each play's own themes, so there is a lot of ways to utilize that."
For some plays, like Alice In Wonderland, there is an easy side to the library's work.
There are many versions of the classic story, and biographies of author Lewis Carroll, and his sequel Alice Through The Looking Glass.
Also, there are the plethora of stories that have borrowed thematic inspiration from the Alice tale like Pan's Labyrinth, Finnigan's Wake, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Tom Hood's From Nowhere to the North Pole, and the bodies of work of Roald Dahl and Lemony Snicket.
There is even popular music to consider, like songs by Jefferson Airplane and Captain Beefheart and others.
The film The Matrix, with its choice of pills to swallow for choosing a life path, also touches on Alice imagery.
The surreal art of Salvador Dali is often linked to Carroll's literary tones, as well.
Some, none, or all of these may end up in that play's library collection, plus many other biblioptions besides.
The work of thinking up the reading lists falls largely to librarian Patricia Gibson, with the input of others at the library and from TNW's staff, too. They are calling the program Backstage Books.
"It can work two ways," said PGPL spokesperson Amy Dhanjal. "Maybe you go to see a play, and you leave with a lot of things on your mind, and you want to explore it more, so you come to the library to go deeper into those thoughts. Or, maybe the topic you were already fascinated by and reading about is going to spark your interest in going to see the play that touches on it."
What the library is light on, said Grinhaus, is an in-house script collection.
For a town as experienced in theatre and hungry for the dramatic arts as this one, he was surprised, upon his move to Prince George two years ago, to discover a small number of scripts held in the municipal book collection.
"I brought this up with the library, just as conversation, something I'd like to see built up, and that discussion led to other topics, which eventually ended up in Backstage Books coming together," said Grinhaus, who added there are many ideas for partnership still afoot between the two cultural facilities.
"It just makes sense," he said.
"Libraries are all about the literary arts and photography and graphic design, and these are elements we use, too, in our way. Writing is so important to the medium of theatre, even more than it is to a movie. In Shakespeare's time, they didn't refer to it as 'going to see a play.' People would say 'I'm going to hear a play at the theatre tonight.' The auditory experience was absolutely central to it, and it still is, and that all comes out of the written word."
Dhanjal said this partnership was unique to Prince George but elements of it were already in use by the Ottawa Public Library from which they took their initial inspiration.
You can book yourself a ticket now to see TNW's version of Fly Me To The Moon starting Sept. 15.
Library cards are available for the asking at the front desk of the library. They are free and provide access to a universe of information and entertainment.
