Cast of One

For the past year I have been involved in the world premiere of a play. Brenda Thompson wrote it from the memoirs of Lester Beeler, who lived most of the 20th century in the settlement of West Dalhousie, in behind Bridgetown, Nova Scotia on the top of the South Mountain. Brenda asked would I direct the thing and I said yes. And then we had a real problem finding an actor ready to take the play on and bring Lester to life.

It's a one-person play, essentially a 75-minute monologue. That's a lot of words, a lot of builds and dramatic pauses and snappy comebacks and tongue-twister lines. Not hard to see why local actors were reluctant to agree to play Lester.

So I said I would perform the play. And I have been doing it over and over again: being Lester in community halls and church halls and fire halls for audiences that often include people who have never ever been to a play before in their lives.

It's a long, long script. I had to break it down into scenes and beats to learn it, and then identify hooks I could remember to take me from the story that I had just finished to the one that was about to start. I met with members of Lester's family, to find out how he spoke and how he gestured. I borrowed a jacket from his grandson that was "just like" what Lester would have worn.

I gotta tell ya, the show is a hoot, and worth all the effort we've put into it. One of the greatest things is that, after the show, audience members share their own Lester stories--either stuff from their own lives that is just as funny and incredible as what I tell in the play, or actual stories in which the real Lester Beeler played a part. I particularly treasure the night when I finished telling the story about Old Joe and his truck, and the the day he gave Millie the schoolteacher a ride home and lost control of the truck and it and they ended up in the middle of a lake. As the final laughter faded down, a voice rang out: "That was my mother!" We had a good chat about Joe and Millie over tea after the show.

And now we get to take the play further afield. We are performing at the Fundy Fringe Festival in Saint John, New Brunswick August 16-21, and at the Atlantic Fringe Festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia September 1-11. It will be very interesting to see whether Lester's stories travel well beyond his home area, and whether the cast of one (me!) is up to the rigors of daily performances combined with handing out flyers and drumming audiences when I'm not on stage.

Another interesting challenge is the play runs about 75 minutes, but the fringe festival performance slots are 55 minutes (to allow setup time for the next act using the same venue). So Brenda and I have had the agonizing challenge of cutting 20 minutes of material out of a show without losing its spark and sparkle. To compound the challenge, the show is actually getting longer: Brenda is writing an additional scene about a "lost" episode in Lester's life, and that scene will meet its audience for the first time in West Dalhousie August 6.

And then I'll have ten days to unlearn it again.

Lester Beeler