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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1997-07-16, Page 20THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 16,1997 PAGE 21. Canada’s Neil Simon keeps his dayjob Norm Foster By Joanne Walters Norm Foster writes as long as he can stay awake. Even though he continues to be one of the most prolific and produced playwrights in this country - often referred to as "the Neil Simon of Canada" - he isn't about to quit his day job as morning radio show host for CIHI in Fredericton, NB. "I get up at 5 a.m. My show (talk, humour and music) is on from seven to nine and I'm usually back home by 9:30. So, as long as I can stay awake after that, I write," he says. What an understatement. Since his one and only bedroom farce, Blyth Scouts Continued from page 19 School. They'd come to visit us and sing their campfire and camping songs. This same troupe had come camping on the Eckmier property each spring for 24 years up until last spring. This was the 19th Girl Guide and Pathfinders Troupe of Egerton Baptist Church from London. Their captain is Mrs. Clara May Eckmier, honorary grandmother to the troupe. They gave her a wooden wall ornament, which she treasures. Sinners, was produced by Malcolm Black at Theatre New Brunswick in 1983, he has gone on to write "17 or 18" plays - so many, in fact, that he is not sure of the exact number. And how does he manage to write more than a play a year? "I get on a roll. Once I get an idea, I want to get it down on paper as fast as I can. It usually takes about four months from the time I get an idea until the time I'm finished writing," he explains. However, he recently wrote Ethan Claymore's Christmas in a mere month. "I got the idea toward the end of November and I wanted to get it done before the Christmas spirit left. I finished it Dec. 23." This summer, in these parts of Ontario alone, there are no less than five different Norm Foster plays being staged. There's The Last Resort, his first musical collaboration with Leslie Arden, at Theatre Orangeville; Jupiter in July at Port Stanley Festival Theatre; Wrong For Each Other at Summer at the Roxy in Owen Sound; The Affections of May (the most produced play in Canada in 1991) at Lighthouse Festival Theatre, Port Dover; and The Melville Boys (winner of the 1988 Los Angeles Critics Drama-Logue Award) at the Blyth Festival. The Melville Boys, opening July 30 in Blyth, was the second Norm Foster play ever produced. Janet Amos, current artistic director at the Blyth Festival, premiered it in 1984 at Theatre New Brunswick just after she had taken over the reins there. Of a cast of four, it featured three actors - Bob King, Patricia Vanstone and Deborah Kimmett - previously connected to the Blyth Festival. As fate - or good planning - would have it, two of that original cast are back in Blyth this season: Patricia Vanstone, who played the uninhibited sister Loretta, will direct Blyth's version of The Melville Boys', and Deborah Kimmett, who played the repressed sister Mary, has written and will star in her one-woman comedy Overboard! on Blyth's second stage (at the Garage). Of the five or six productions of The Melville Boys Foster has seen to date, that first Theatre New Brunswick production is still his favourite. Of all his plays, he also holds The Melville Boys closest to his heart. He says that is because there is more of him in that play than in any of his others, and also because, some 13 years later, it is still the play he is measured by. He feels a special bond with the Blyth Festival (which also workshopped his play Opening Night about seven years ago) and with Janet Amos who chose to do The Melville Boys in her first season in New Brunswick and again in her last season at Blyth. Foster got the idea of The Melville Boys, which has played twice Off Broadway to good reviews, from the Billy Joel song Allentown which is about life in the steel town in Pennsylvania. The steel factory became a plastics factory and then the setting itself changed from a factory to a cottage much like the one in the Haliburton area where he spent his summers as a child. Foster says many of his ideas for plays come from songs and sometimes from other plays as he is writing them. So far, his plays have all been comedies but many of them, like The Melville Boys, have a serious undertone. "I don't like to beat the audience over the head with (serious themes)," he says. "I feel most comfortable with comedy." Perhaps that is one of the reasons he is compared to Neil Simon, the American king of comedic plays (The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys'). He doesn't particularly like comparisons or being pigeon-holed but he can understand that people sometimes need a frame of reference. And he does admire a lot of Simon's work because it is comedy with heart in it. Foster, who was born in Newmarket and grew up in Toronto, showed no inclination coward playwriting early on. He wrote "the usual skits and short stories" in high school and then enrolled at Centennial College in Toronto to become a television writer. A professor at Centennial told him there were no jobs writing for TV in Canada so he left after a year to take a Radio Arts course at Confederation College in Thunder Bay where he graduated two years later. He then went on to work for radio stations in Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Kingston and Fredericton. After settling in Fredericton, he got involved with an amateur theatre group as the lead actor in a Falls Reserve hosts Car and Craft show Falls Reserve Conservation Area in Benmiller will be the site of the sixth Annual Car and Craft Show on Saturday, Aug. 2, and Sunday, Aug. 3. Anyone interested in exhibiting a vintage car or displaying their crafts is invited to participate. A new feature has been added to the show this year, motorcycles! Owners of classic motorcycles are being encouraged to display their bikes at the show. The Car and Craft Show is being sponsored this year by the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority and supported by the Radar Circle Region of the Historical Automobiles Society of Canada. production of Harvey. He learned a lot about the playwriting "form" from the late Alvin Shaw, Dean of Arts at the University of New Brunswick, whom he worked with on Harvey, and discovered that he was most comfortable writing dialogue. To this day, he only writes stage directions that he feels are necessary. "I like to leave a lot of that to the directors' and actors' imaginations," he says. Foster lives in Fredericton with his wife Janet Monid, a professional actress, eight-year-old son Daniel and six-year-old daughter Jacqueline. He has just finished another play called Drinking Alone, a comedy-drama about family members ironing out their differences. And what is he doing with all those royalty cheques that are rolling in? "In Canada," he laughs, "they won't make me rich." He'll keep his day job. • Exhibitors can register by contacting Leona Cunningham at Falls Reserve Conservation Area at (519) 524-6429. The cost to exhibitors is a $7.00 day pass per vehicle. There is no other registration fee. Exhibitors are welcome to attend for just one day, or for the entire weekend. The first dozen craft exhibitors to register will have the opportunity to set up displays in the park's covered picnic shelter. 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