Pocket Theatre's cast of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike has departed for Mainstage. They perform today. But they aren't the only Prince George talent at the annual Theatre B.C. provincial drama festival.
The competition also has Rebecca Strom, who is one of the cast members of Surrey Little Theatre's production of The Last Lifeboat. She already has her performance behind her, so she will be able to enjoy watching her hometown friends without the pressure of competition still on her shoulders.
"I've never competed at Mainstage before so the fact I get to do it with so many people from P.G. is just icing on the cake," said Strom who now lives in the Lower Mainland where she has built an award-winning acting career for herself and now augments that with work in the talent casting field and she also writes and produces film projects.
She may not have competed at Mainstage before, but she has been there in other ways. As a youth, she was the 2006 provincial winner of the Jessie Richardson Scholarship for a theatre student intent on pursuing the craft at the post-secondary level.
It worked. She soon became a graduate of the Douglas College Theatre Program and the Langara College Film Arts program.
Her recent stage credits include the titular role in the Surrey Little Theatre's production of Sylvia last year, for which she won the Best Female Actor In A Leading Role trophy at the 2015 Community Theatre Coalition Awards. She won the CTC trophy for Supporting Role when she played in Home Fires in 2013.
In fact, she was recently in the running for a CTC Award twice in the same category. "And get this, both of me lost," she said. "But I won the year after that, so that helped ease the sting of losing with those odds. But either way, I was going to lose. One of me had to lose no matter what, even if one of me won. The only way to save myself is if I tied with me."
Screen is her main domain these days. She has appeared in 30 short films released between 2008 and this year, plus parts in feature-length movies and TV shows. Her most recent work includes co-starring with Bruce Novakowski in the comedy movie Shooting The Musical, co-starred with Jara Zeimer in the movie Interspecies Dating, and appeared in the Joel Ashton McCarthy short I Love You So Much It's Killing Them starring Alex Duncan.
There was little in the screen arts industry available to her when she lived in Prince George but there was plenty of live theatre. She was a young regular in the productions done by the now-defunct Prince George Theatre Workshop Society and Serious Moonlight Productions. She even became a board member of the theatre workshop while still a student at Prince George secondary school.
"Theatre was and is my first love. I've written one play, a one-act, and I think I'd love to go back to that process again and write another play. I think I have a pretty strong grasp on character, based on my acting background - that training and being on stage or on film-sets - so I believe I have some tools I can use to build characters in a script sense."
The play she wrote was Rupert, a coming-of-age tale about a 13-year-old and her crude, porn-addicted, talking teddy bear who helps her make sense of her transition into young adulthood. She performed it in Prince George in 2008 at Theatre B.C.'s one-act drama festival ACToberfest hosted here that year.
"I was very sad when I heard Theatre Workshop went under," she said. "They offered me a lot of opportunities when I was younger, and I doubt I'd be in any of the professions I am now if it weren't for PGTW. But there is still a want and a need for it, and an audience is there for it, so I'm glad Pocket Theatre and some smaller theatre companies are still trying to do that work."
One thing she especially appreciated from the Prince George lessons she learned was theatrical ingenuity. All the amateur theatre companies doing regular seasons of plays have their own home theatre, she said. What killed PGTW was losing the day to day operational control of the P.G. Playhouse, and being forced instead to scramble around the city for makeshift rehearsal, set-building and even performance locations. That problem persists for Prince George to this day.
"It would be great if there was a community space in Prince George for that. There is so much talent and so much quality there," she said.
She will be rubbing shoulders with the top level P.G. talent this year, when she reconnects at Mainstage with old friends and new ones associated to those old friends. One thing stage and screen arts does above all, she said, is forge personal bonds.
"So many people back then took me on as friends, but they were so much older than me, because I was the youngest one in the cast a lot of the time," she said. "But they treated me with a really incredible sense of respect and community. All my friends at school couldn't figure out why I wanted to hang out with all these 'old people' but they were so wonderful and if you haven't been a part of community theatre I'm not sure you can exactly understand, but it is 'community' to the utmost, right to the people ripping the tickets and holding flashlights back stage and pulling ropes in the wings to make the set work. Everyone is part of it, everyone is equal in each others' eyes, and supportive of each other. And those relationships last and last."
Pocket Theatre is the play in tonight's spotlight, with productions representing the Skeena region and Okanagan region to round out the week. Mainstage began this past Saturday and carries on to this coming Saturday when the Theatre BC annual general meeting is held and the festivals awards are handed out. Perhaps some Prince George names will be called up for trophies, even if the name isn't a resident of our city anymore.
