Now a wider audience will have a chance to see the Elmira Theatre Company. If We Are Women, the ETC’s latest production, is one of five community theatre plays selected to compete at this year’s Western Ontario Drama League Festival in Windsor.
The production was also given awards for Best Production of a Canadian Play, and Megann Friesen was awarded Outstanding Performance by a Juvenile. Adjudicators Sandy Macdonald and Dennis Johnson praised the play for its acting.
“The audience really seemed to latch onto it,” said Joe Brenner, producer of the play. “We’ve all told that child or grandchild, ‘Don’t do the same things I did – you’ve got to learn from my experience.’ But every generation really has to live it for themselves. I think the audience can relate to that really well.
“There wasn’t too much bad [criticism],” he added, “so we kinda had the feeling we were going on.”
Written by Joanna McClelland Glass and directed by Sue Jennings, If We Are Women (which played in Elmira February 7-16) tells the story of three generations of women: a teenager who plans to quit college to elope, and a mother and grandmother who are all too familiar with young love.
Heading to Windsor, Brenner speculates the production may undergo some tweaks to fit the new venue.
“You do have to do some transitions, even if you don’t want to, to fit the new stage dimensions. There may be some lighting changes and there may be shifts in entrance. … I don’t envision us tweaking a whole lot. [The adjudicator] loved all the props, loved the costumes, loved the soundscape.”
If We Are Women will play the Western Ontario Drama League on March 10. If it wins, it will move onto a performance at Theatre Ontario.
The Elmira Theatre Company’s season will continue with a production of another Canadian play, Douglas E. Hughes and Marcia Kash’s Too Many Cooks. It runs April 25 to May 10.
