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The Citizen-Blyth Festival, 1999-06-23, Page 34BLYTH FESTIVAL SALUTE, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 1999. PAGE 15. Layne Coleman has hectic career as director, actor Layne Coleman goes a long way back with Ted Johns, back to the days in the early 1970s when both they, and the professional theatre boom in Canada, were young. It was only natural then that Johns turned to Coleman when he was looking for a director for his new one-person show The Great School Crisis of '99. Coleman and Johns first crossed Guiding force Director Layne Coleman sees his job as helping actors trust their instincts. week workshop which Coleman describes as “listening to him, seeing where we're going”. To a point he was a “professional laugher”, he says, responding as the audience would respond. If the work didn't make him laugh then they knew they had work to do. Part of the excitement of directing The Great School Crisis of '99 is the chance to work up-to- the-minute issues, Coleman says. “There’s a lot of stuff in theatre portraying the past.” Coleman never dreamed the future his career would take when he arrived in Blyth for the first season, where he performed in all four plays and never had a night off. He went on to be artistic director of 25th Street Theatre in 1980, then, with Rogers, helped guide Theatre Passe Muraille through turbulent financial times in the early 1980s. Currently he is Continued on Pg. 16 The Great School Crisis By Ted Johns paths when Johns was part of the Theatre Passe Muraille troupe that was in Saskatoon creating The West Show and helping Coleman’s 25th Street Theatre create If You 're So Good What are You Doing in Saskatoon? Coleman remembers watching Johns do improvised pieces as part of Theatre Passe Muraille’s creative process and finding them “riveting”. “Every improvisation was like a little play,” he remembers. They worked together again when they toured England with The Farm Show for Theatre Passe Muraille. By 1978, when Johns created The School Show, both were established parts of the Blyth Festival. “I was a great fan of the writing in that first show,” Coleman remembers. As well, the late Clarke Rogers who directed the show and who later was Coleman’s partner in heading up Theatre Passe Muraille “really loved that show”. So Coleman was excited to be asked to direct Johns’ new look at the education system. They’ve already worked together in a one- Designing for stage more poetie than TV Continued from Pg. 14. agreed, though it meant she later turned down a movie job. The two have worked together many times from Johns’ St. Sam of the Nuke .Pile in I 980, through Johns’ direction of Lucien at Theatre New Brunswick to The Black Bonspiel of Wully MacCrimmon at Blyth in 1994. “Ted trusts Pat,” director Layne Coleman said of the invitation for Flood to design The Great School Crisis of '99. It requires a lot of trust both ways to design a show of this nature. Flood sat in on an early workshop with Johns and Coleman and the early design ideas were “all over the map” as they tried to find a setting for the one-person show. They went one way with the designs, then reversed and went another. There are special challenges to be met with a one- person show when the actor has to get off stage and change costumes without the audience being bored in the meantime. In the long run, Flood’s concept is a stage-within-a-stage to help put the focus on the lone actor on Design challenge Pat Flood examines her model for The Great Schoo! Crisis of ’99. The object is to focus attention on Johns, the lone actor on stage. stage. The stage will give an impression of an old one-room school house, even though the one- room school house is not actually mentioned in the show. Coleman and Flood have known each other for years, though she has never designed a show he has directed before. The other attraction for Flood is being back in Blyth for the Silver Anniversary season. “I have such a sense of history with Blyth,” says Flood who has designed for the Festival off and on for two decades. It will be fun to see what’s happening for the 25th season, she says. 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