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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1987-06-10, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 1987. PAGE 5. ^7' ...comes the plaintive cry of an overworked 'props' mistress Deborah Ratelle, Props Master at the Blyth Festival Theatre, has all the smaller props she needs for the play “Bordertown Cafe”, but she is still desperately seeking several items of commercial restaurant equipment, and time is running out: the play opens on June 23. BYTOBYRAINEY Deborah Ratelie wants some commercial restaurant equip­ ment, and she wants it FAST. She’s ready to beg, borrow, rent or steal the stuff she needs, and will even consider buying it... just as long as it is in place on the stage of the Blyth Festival Theatre by June 23, the day that the new play “BordertownCafe” opensfor a month-long run. As Props Master for the theatre, Ms. Ratelie has less than two weeks to find a counter-top grill, a deep, stainless-steel sink, a com­ mercial ice cream freezer, and a milk refrigerator with stainless- steel or plexiglass doors, and she is getting desperate. “Everybody in the province knows I’m looking for these things,” she claims, “and still I’ve had no luck. My phone bill for this month is going to be astronomical - I’ve called restaurant supply hous­ es, demolition business, auction­ eers, every restaurant in Ontario that is closing down, and all the other theatres I can think of, but nothing has turned up.” She’swillingtobuy the items she needs, as long as they’re cheap (“ ‘Cheap’ is the operative word; we’re on a budget,” she says), but can’t even find used equipment for sale at this time of year, although she has been told by numerous supply houses that second-hand equipment would be easy to find in the winter, when struggling busi­ nesses are more likely to close, and profitable ones more likely to re-vamp. So if anybody out there has even the remotest lead on where this equipment can be found under any circumstances, call Ms. Ratelle at the Blyth Theatre at 519-523-9300 or 523-9225 immediately: time is of the essence! The equipment need­ n’t be in working condition, and it needn’t even be in good condition (the Cafe is, after all, a little seedy and run-down, situated as it is miles from anywhere on the Canadian side of the Alberta- Montana border.) “This is one of the most frustrating jobs I’ve ever had - trying to find this equipment with so little time left,’’ the Props Master says. “The search is always on my mind; I even wake up in the middle of the night thinking of it.’’ If used equipment cannot be found in time, Ms. Ratelle says there are three options open to her, all of them far from satisfactory. The theatre’s carpentry depart­ ment could attempt to build the needed items, but it is virtually impossible to fake stainless-steel. The theatre could buy new restaur­ ant equipment - but this would be prohibitively expensive for a play with a month-long run. Or the scene that takes place in the kitchen of the cafe could be cut from the script, but this would require a major re-thinking of the entire act; since a lot of important action takes place around the grill, changing the scene would lessen the impact of the entire play, making this the least favourable of the three options. Meanwhile, the search goes on, with each passing day bringing the time closer to a major decision, and with the brunt of the worry borne by the Props Master, who is, after all, the one responsible for having all the props in their proper places at the proper time. It’s a job that Ms. Ratelle loves, despite the odd bouts of panic that beset the position. “There’s a huge amount of job satisfaction here,” she says. “My life is like a giant treasure hunt, with new contacts to be made for every show, and new things to be found.” Part of the job is to go to local garage sales, where the most astoundingitemsoftenturn up, according to Ms. Ratelle. Eventu­ ally you get to know everybody in the area who might have any connection whatsoever to the things you want, she claims, and you always have an eye out for items that will be needed for other shows your theatre is doing throughout the season. For example, Ms. Ratelle is still finding bits and pieces needed for the season ’ s first production, ‘ * The Girls in the Gang,” although she was fortunate enough to have found, early in her search, the items which are traditionally diffi­ cult for theatre people to track down - authentic guns for the notorious Boyd gang which thrilled and terrorized Ontario in the late 40’s and early 50’s. With the help of a Clinton business, Ontario Gun Services, she has been able to get the 13 firearms required, including hand­ guns, shotguns, and even a machine gun from the right period. Fortunately, guns have changed little over the past 40 years, so even the modern air pistols which the theatre must use in lieu of the more deadly weapons which require the use of a gun permit, look authentic, Ms. Ratelie says. The remainder of the props required for “Girls in the Gang” were fairly easy to find, with the “props list” considerably shorten­ ed because the play is a musical, which requires more stylized scenery and furnishings than does a totally realistic production such as “Bordertown Cafe,’’ or last year’s big hit in Blyth, “Another Season’s Promise.” “The more realism a play has, the more realistic the props must be, because the actors have to handle them, use them as they would items in real life,” explains Ms. Ratelle. To demonstrate her point, she indicates a floor-to-ceil- ing stack of shelves in her tiny “props department” above the Blyth Municipal Office and Li­ brary, which contains literally hundreds of items that will be used in “Bordertown” to add realism, ranging from items as small as a teaspoon, as common as a 48- ounce can of tomato juice, and as cumbersome as a counter with bar stools which is currently being built by the carpentry department next door to the props department. The counter and stool tops can be built to fit the scene where they are needed, since all necessary materi­ als are readily available and easy to work with, with the exception of the stool pedestals which are on loan from another theatre. Ms. Ratelie has a unique understanding of the problems faced by the carpentry department, since she herself began her theatre career as a carpenter in the scenery shop of a theatre in Cleveland, Ohio. Later, she was hired by the props department of the famous Actor’s Theatre Louisville, Kentucky, where she became completely hooked on props work after having to collect (and build) all the items needed in her very favourite production, “A Christmas Carol”, which required “all sorts of wonderful things” to set the ghostly flashbacks and the Christ­ mas scenes. The native of Thunder Bay, Ontario, has travelled many paths since graduating with a degree in chemistry from Concordia Univer­ sity in Montreal a number of years ago, but she wouldn’t trade her present position in the “technical end of theatre production” for anything in the world - despite the rising panic that her temporary failure to locate some used restau­ rant equipment is currently caus­ ing! The Palestinians - the wandering Arabs BY RAYMOND CANON A very good friend of mine is a Palestinian Arab and, while I don’t get to see him as often as I would like, my conversations with him over the past 15 years have given me what I consider to be a special insight into the problems of that most nomadic of people - the Palestinians. Ever since the state of Isreal was formed in 1948, it has been a question of what to do with them and I must confess that the participants do not appear to be any closer to an answer than they were 10 years ago. Perhaps a bit of background material is in order at this point. The Palestinians are those people of Arab origin who lived in what we knew as Palestine, that part of the world that the Jewish people have come to consider as they home­ land. It was, in fact, the homeland of both Jews and Arabs; they are after all, according to the Bible, cousins. Jerusalem does mean something to both Jews and Arabs and, as in many a struggle, there has to be both a winner and a loser. So far it has been the Palestinians. The 1948 war, the first of several between the new state of Israel and its Arab neighbours, was basically which one should live in Palestine. The country had been awarded to the Israelis but the Arabs refused to accept the decision of the United Nations and thus a series of bloody battles. This should not be taken to mean that all the Palestinians left; at the present time there are over half a million of them in Israel proper, another 800,000 in the West Bank, which Israel took from Jordan and another 520,000 in the Gaza Strip, which is on the Mediterranean Sea between Isreal and Egypt but which is still under Israeli control. for tnose raiesimians who uiu leave, there has been very much of a love-hate relationship between them and the rest of the Arab world. Frankly they have been used as a club with which to beat the Israelis over the head since there is no reason why the same Palestinians could not have been adequately absorbed into the other Arab countries. Asitis, many of them still live there. To give you a few more figures, there are no less than 1.2 million in Jordan, 400,000 in Kuwait, 250,000 in Saudi Arabia, 350,000 in Lebanon and a further 350,000 or so scattered throughout other Arab nations. There are a number of Palestini­ an organizations but the chief one by far is the Palestinian Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Ara­ fat. Mr. Arafat, for one, would probably agree with my statement that some of the Arabs hate him as much as the Israelis do. He has seen his people kicked out of Jordan after a particularly bloody battle. Later on the same thing happened to him in Syria and Lebanon; one thing to keep in mind is that this is a case of Arab killing Arab but that apparently does not mean too much to some of them. As far as the Israelis are concerned, true negotiations can only begin between the two sides when the Palestinians officially accept the right of Israel to exist as a state and this is one thing that even Yasser Arafat, who must be considered as something of a moderate by Palestinian stan­ dards, cannot bring himself to do. Until that is done, say the Israelis, forget any talks. The Palestinians do share one characteristic with their Jewish cousins. In spite of all the persecution which has taken place, both feel themselves very much as an individual entity with a common destiny. The sad part is that both destinies include the same bit of territory on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. There is one thing that I am sure has notbeenloston the Israelis. Given that the population of Israel is not that large, it is quite possible that one day the Arabs might come to outnumber the Israelis. What then? I think that you can understand at this point that the Israelis, too, have cause to come to some sort of settlement before that happens. The Palestinians could well win with the cradle what they failed to do with the rifle. History does have a strange way of repeating itself.