The writing's on the drywall: Theatre tries to preserve signaturesKingston Whig Standard, July 19, 2008
The history of domino theatre is written on its walls. Now that Domino is vacating its home of 33 years, steps have been taken to preserve that history.
There have been 231 productions while Domino has been in residency at 370 King St. W. At the end of each production, cast and crew have signed a part of the wall in the Domino dressing room. If they were part of the sound and lighting crew, they signed the walls of the lighting booth.
Pieces of sets and props have also been hung from the ceiling and placed around the dressing room, which has become a jungle of memorabilia.
The building has been sold by the city to Queen's University and Domino will officially
vacate the premises Monday. For the next two seasons, Domino will put on its plays at the downtown Baby Grand and have set-building, storage and rehearsal space at 745 Development Dr.
A recent visit to 370 King St. W. saw the stage stripped and the audience seats gone, along with all the lighting and sound equipment. Andrew Roberts laboured on, carefully working to preserve the history of those walls.
"I want to see the storied past preserved and shared for future Domino audiences," says Roberts, a recent Domino recruit who has been designing and building sets for the last three years.
"I didn't want to see it bulldozed into a dumpster."
The job has proven to be fraught with difficulties. The walls, for example, did not want to be moved. They're basically just drywall, but Roberts says whoever put them in - a Domino volunteer when the group originally transformed a neglected building into a theatre - used three times too many fasteners and used fasteners that are nearly impossible to extricate.
Roberts worked for a couple of hours trying to remove a part of the wall that held the autographs from Hard Maple, written by the late Kingstonian Bill Harding, which was performed for the first time in 1976 in Domino's second season there. After almost prying the few square feet of drywall loose, Roberts wasn't sure he'd be able to save it.
Roberts was becoming resigned that, in the end, the walls could only be photographed. As it was, some of the names had been lost a few years earlier when the dressing room was redesigned. A sink now covers some of them and a wall was recovered, erasing more of them.
Signatures were often signed on unique items. The cast and crew of Harvey (performed last fall) autographed a large stuffed rabbit (since the main character contended his best friend was an invisible giant rabbit).
A pair of men's underpants were used for Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, a 2004 production, that was racy by Domino's standards since it opened with a nude bedroom scene.
There's a model airplane from last year's production of All My Sons (plane crashes played a pivotal part in the plot) and since many plays feature drinking on stage, there are a variety of liquor bottles. There's even a phony tombstone courtesy of the 1985 production of Journey Into Silence by the late MacArthur College of Education professor Andrew Orr.
If you look carefully, you will find the names of actors who have gone on to professional careers. One of Domino's first shows at the new location was A Delicate Balance performed in 1976. Its director was a youthful Mo Bock, now a stalwart at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque.
His cast featured Carolyn Hetherington, who, in middle age, began a career as a professional and is returning to the Playhouse this fall to perform in the acclaimed play Half Life; and Norma Edwards, who also had a mid-life acting career, often appearing in popular commercials.
Jacob James, who spent several years at the Stratford Festival, seemed to be on stage continually in Kingston when he was a high school student, and was the lead character in a trio of Neil Simon autobiographical plays including Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1994.
Respected Canadian playwright Judith Thompson acted in a couple of Domino shows as a high school student, but she is not the Judy Thompson inscribed on the walls for a couple of shows in the '80s. (That Judy Thompson was a stage manager.)
Sitting in that dressing room when you were waiting to go on stage, the walls afforded a welcome distraction. I acted in seven plays and directed five others in a 12-year span between 1978 and 1990. Sometimes it seemed like the memories were bursting from the walls.
When visiting with Roberts, I noticed a door that held the autographs from my first show at Domino, Wait Until Dark, in 1978. In later years, someone, who apparently didn't like one of my Whig-Standard theatre reviews, wrote over my name "He is a poop."
Wait Until Dark is the story of a blind woman terrorized by three gangsters, and I played the good one, who, for his troubles, was stabbed in the back every night and had to fall down three stairs.
Looking at the door, I remember how the director, the late Valerie Hirschfield - who was later responsible for getting me to direct - kept insisting that I act tougher; and how Sandie Cond, playing the blind woman, was able to cry on demand. (She told me it was looking up at the stage lights that made her eyes water.)
Then there was the time that my fellow gangster, played by Carl Cogan, had to make a sandwich on stage but someone forgot to change the sandwich meat, which had turned green with mould.
Everyone who's been involved with a Domino show has a story or two like that. When you're involved with community theatre, it's part of the game to improvise when things go wrong. Being kicked out of their home has made Domino do the biggest improvisation of all.
And, yes, the tradition of signing walls will continue, says Domino chair Liz Schell.
"It'll probably be on Development Drive, until we find a new home," she says.
"We'll probably sign them on something that can be attached to the wall so we can take it with us."
