The "A" Word

by Dennis Johnson, Community Theatre Coordinator

One day last February while watching the Winter Olympics on television, I happened to tune in to an interview with the Canadian Bobsleigh team.  They were being asked about their financial support and how much time they had to commit to their sport. One of the team pointed out what was to him, obvious: “We’re amateur professionals.”  What does that mean?  Are they part-time athletes?  Is it a reflection on their financial status and the fact that they are self-financed? Are they, like Rodney Dangerfield, not getting no respect?

“Amateur professionals.”  What a great concept!  I wonder if we in community theatre might not say the same thing of ourselves.  ‘Professionalism’ is a word we hear a lot.  Community theatres strive to shed their work of the ‘amateur’ epithet.  And indeed, at its best, the quality of local productions often exceeds some so-called ‘professional’ work.  But we’re unpaid. So maybe we too are amateur professionals.

What I hate to see is a community theatre infested with professional amateurs – people whose attention seems to be focused on eliminating professional artists from the work of their community production company, rather than striving to raise their own work to a professional level.  Professional amateurs would rather work in a bubble of ignorance. They see outsiders as some kind of threat to their own status.

I vividly remember a couple of productions I worked on about 30 years ago. In each case, an established community theatre brought in a professional director to direct one of their shows.  What astonished me was the number of new people who came out of the woodwork to audition, but equally astonishing was the absence of the company veterans who chose to sit out any production led by a so-called professional. This was their company and no outsiders were going to take it over, thank you very much.  To be fair, I’ve seen less and less of this attitude in recent years, but then there are fewer and fewer opportunities to hire professionals (we have less and less money).

Festivals

In Ontario, the Theatre Ontario Festival has always been about enabling the highest quality volunteer theatre to assemble annually for a showcase of the best pieces from each region. Recently, Theatre Ontario hosted a festival in which a couple of professional actors participated.  Inevitably, some people began to ask questions.

Theatre Ontario has Festival Guidelines that assert the principle that a theatre professional cannot win an individual award in the area of his/her expertise. But the professional amateur will ask: if professionals are involved in a production, shouldn’t that disqualify the production from winning the overall Best Production award as well?   Isn’t the whole production tainted by the presence of one or two professionals?  Shouldn’t professionals be prevented from winning all awards including a group award?

Let’s cut to the chase.

Does the presence of professionals raise the artistic level of a community theatre production?  Well, I would hope so, but that is not necessarily the outcome.  Does the presence of professionals in a festival entry create an uneven playing field?  Only if you believe that the quality of work done by an experienced “amateur” is bound to fall short. But it doesn’t. Does the presence of professionals make a production more likely to be a winner? The more experience you have with theatre festivals, the more ludicrous that idea becomes.

The fact that a person belongs to a professional organization or union does not make them more talented, better trained or more experienced. We have all seen community theatre and educational theatre productions that would put professional companies to shame.  We have also seen professional productions of plays that we could do better.

The community theatre participants I know and admire, treat theatre as a VOCATION not as a PROFESSION.  Their lives are devoted to practicing their art, not to making money from it.  The pursuit of excellence is sufficient. Their rewards are not financial, and their rewards are certainly not trophy hardware. Many of them spend more of their time on their vocation than so-called professionals do.  Many professional actors would give their eyeteeth to be able to act or direct as often as “amateurs”.

Surely all this does not mean we have nothing to learn from those who do see theatre as a profession.  And surely the so-called professional has much to learn from community theatre.  If we divorce the two, we prevent much-needed dialogue between groups of people who are actively participating in the same art form. And if they happen to live in the same community, that dialogue is vital to the health of that community.

The ‘A’ Word

In many ways, a theatre professional in Canada is simply someone willing to travel anywhere in the country to pursue their art.  Community theatres are rooted in one place, good citizens who serve their community through the arts and entertainment.  Some people confuse the terms “commercial” and “non-profit” with the terms “professional” and “amateur”.  We have to make sure we define our terms carefully.

In festival plans and regulations, we seem to obsess with defining the word “professional” as if naming it will control it.  But in my opinion, the word we have never come to grips with is the word “amateur”. Amo. Amas. Amat. It means someone who does it for love, not money.

But “amateur” has become a pejorative word interpreted as meaning “dilettante” and we don’t like using it to describe ourselves. In Britain, “Am-Dram” is a recognized concept, but not here.  The word “amateur” is very un-Ontarian.  Community theatres in Ontario have never used that word to name themselves.  We call our companies “clubs”, “guilds”, “players” and traditionally “little” theatres, but never “amateur.”

Community theatre in Canada has never been exclusively amateur. The concept of a “little” theatre, for example, has nothing to do with “amateur” status. The Little Theatre Movement began a century ago just as community-based theatres were being established in cities all over North America. Little Theatres were dedicated to the staging of the spoken word, not to commercial spectacles.  The “big” commercial theatres of the time were staging extravaganzas such as burning buildings and horse races, on expensively equipped stages, using popular vehicles like melodrama and light opera.

The Little Theatre movement wanted to get away from all that and return to understated realistic or avant-garde plays with the actor at the heart of the experience.  Little Theatres fostered new play writing and gave a voice (and production opportunities) to local playwrights.  Little Theatre could be professional or it could be amateur, but it was always a repertory company fostering a community of artists. The movement lent itself to the development of community-based repertory companies.

Far from being a novelty, the presence of so-called professionals has been a mainstay of community theatre in Ontario ever since the early days of the Dominion Drama Festival.  In the 1930’s, Herman Voaden was imported by the Sarnia Little Theatre and did some of his best work there. In the 1940’s, Robertson Davies (fresh from acting at the Old Vic with Tyrone Guthrie) was ringleader to the Peterborough Little Theatre.  In the 1950’s and 60’s, Peter Dearing was Artistic Director of London Little Theatre and regularly directed festival entries and won awards.  Valerie and Gordon Robertson, meanwhile founded Domino Theatre in Kingston, raising the bar for all groups in Eastern Ontario.  Richard Howard is so fully integrated into the theatre scene in Sault Ste. Marie that it is impossible to find an actor or director in that city (professional or amateur) who has not benefited from his influence.

In the early days, theatre groups without constant input from a professional director were actively seeking expert advice from adjudicators at regional festivals and at DDF festivals, which were always adjudicated by established professionals from England or France.

Even governments recognized the value of investing money to place professionals into community theatres. In 1965, the Ontario Arts Council announced “a $25,000 pilot project, designed to build production standards in some seven community theatre groups across Ontario.”   Professionals were hired to direct plays and give workshops in all aspects of theatre crafts.  Theatre Ontario was founded six years later, in part to facilitate liaison between different sectors in the theatrical community in this province.  Funding for the Talent Bank was put in place to make professional expertise available to all community theatre groups.  The Talent Bank became a permanent resource, and community theatres were encouraged make use of it, especially when it came time to stage their festival plays.  By 1990 the annual budget for Theatre Ontario’s Community Theatre Training Program was over $100,000.  We all know what happened next!

Theatre Ontario’s current Board has established an Ad Hoc Committee to explore ways to rejuvenate the Community Theatre Training Program (CTTP) to go along with the Professional (PTTP) and Youth (YTTP) programs still fully funded by the Ontario Arts Council.  The thrust of the community theatre tradition in Ontario has always been to find ways to bring theatre professionals together with local practitioners – to seed and fertilize their artistic work and leave them to till the soil and reap the rewards.  It would be a tragedy for us all if this commitment was allowed to atrophy.