Ottawa Little Theatre, the "Original Regional": Canada's Longest-Running English Language Theatre Turns 100

The health of a city's theatre culture can be productively articulated by examining its nonprofessionalizing community theatres. Conversely, healthy community theatres are signs of a city's dedication to the production and reception of theatre among nonspecialist practitioners. This is how we can gauge the extent to which the practice of theatre has meaning for people who have a range of experiences and dedications, but have not—or have not yet—committed themselves to "the profession." Moreover, as I argued in an earlier article for CTR, "Walterdale Theatre Associates and the In(ter)vention of the Audience," a community theatre is a site for the "training" of theatre-literate audiences that attend both professional and nonprofessionalizing theatre (Whittaker 37). Indeed, the serious study of Canadian community theatres and their participants across decades traces their cities' theatre ecologies, and the exchange of performance knowledges within these ecologies, in ways that similar studies of professional theatres cannot. This is true not only because of the vast number of Canadians who participate in nonprofessionalizing community theatres (there are hundreds in Canada), but also because these are our longest-running theatre companies.

Ottawa Little Theatre (OLT) is a case in point. On 15 November 2012, the company will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of its first production, making it Canada's longest-running English-language theatre company. According to OLT executive director Lynn McGuigan, each year more than fifty thousand people attend OLT shows; another ten to twelve thousand attend events organized by groups who rent space in the building. From a database of five hundred volunteers, about 150-200 work with OLT in a given year. Eight of the theatre's ten annual productions run for sixteen performances over three weeks; the two summer productions run two weeks each. With the exception of a couple of recent project grants and one operating grant related to the anniversary season, government funding for OLT has been limited to capital grants. Thus, for a century, subscriptions, box office income, and donations have funded OLT's sizeable operating expenses. Season subscribers may choose to become voting members of the company simply by indicating their interest.

OLT's nomenclature, like that of most "community theatres," has changed over the years. Even while retaining the "Little Theatre" name, OLT has shed the amateur terminology in favour of community, not only because the word amateur has taken on negative connotations over the years, but also because the company has, for the past forty years, operated more as a hybrid. Explains McGuigan,

We promote ourselves as a place at which all of the creative and crew functions are done by volunteers .... We have both "amateurs" and "professionals" in our company. So we tend not to use the "amateur" word a lot because then we're only talking about part of our company. So instead we talk about a company of volunteers. All of the directing, design, acting, and running crew functions are filled by volunteers. The only exception is that we have a house stage manager who is the senior paid staff member on site during performances. We have seven full-time staff in total, and I think that differentiates us from a lot of community theatres .... One actor in the community said to us that they would love to do a show here but can't because we want a professional commitment on a volunteer basis, and I thought that was a good way of framing it. People really do have to be committed and want to spend time in the theatre to volunteer here.

This sizeable number of full-time staff—in addition to about twenty part-time staff who include drama camp and youth theatre instructors as well as front-of-house and box office personnel—are necessary, McGuigan explains, in order to maintain OLT's pace of ten productions each year: "Our theatre is in use for fifty weeks of the year now, so that changes the level of operation that you have." Among the tens of thousands of people who walk through OLT...