COLUMN: Blowing out the candles 60 years after curtain call

“Blow out your candles, Laura!”

Former Sault radio and TV personality John Meadows left the audience in the packed Sudbury theatre hushed for several long seconds as he whispered these five words just before the final curtain of the Tennessee Williams drama “The Glass Menagerie”.

The crowd then broke into thunderous applause as the play’s four characters in this March 1962 Sault Theatre Workshop production took several curtain calls after a well-received presentation where everyone managed to hit their marks.

So good was that performance, in fact, that The Workshop garnered eight of ten awards from the Quonta (Quebec and Ontario) Regional Drama Festival at the wrap-up ceremony on that St. Patrick’s Day eve in The Nickel City.

John received the Best Actor Award from adjudicator Peter Symcox for his portrayal of Tom Wingfield while his co-star, Arla Jean Sillers, got the Best Actress nod as family matriarch Amanda Wingfield.

The sister of Tom Wingfield, Laura, was portrayed by Barbara Fletcher and she tucked the award for Best Supporting Actress into her suitcase for the car trip back to Sault Ste. Marie. 

The fourth role – that of The Gentleman Caller whom Tom brings home as a blind date for his reclusive sister Laura – didn’t win anything except the thrill of learning that the play had been selected to head to the Dominion Drama Festival in Winnipeg in May of that year.

And I ought to know because I was The Gentleman Caller.

“What a lovely evening in the theatre this has been,” Adjudicator Symcox told the Sudbury theatre-goers at the conclusion of the Quonta event. “The play never really put a foot wrong. It is right from the start.”

Director Marj Turnbull was singled out for high praise by the adjudicator, as reported by Sault Star staff writer Gwen Keatley – who was also the award-winning set designer for the play: “What the play really had was control. The only way this could have been is through the director. Eventually, everything comes back to the director.”

Symcox backed up his praise by awarding Turnbull the Best Director trophy, as well as several other prizes including a cash award of $100 – worth almost 10 times that much today.

The ensemble didn’t do so well two months later when they took the show on the road again – this time to the prestigious DDF – the pinnacle of dramatic success for amateur theatre in Canada.

A performance slot on the first Wednesday afternoon of the festival resulted in a sparse crowd of playgoers and, try as we might, we just couldn’t generate the enthusiasm required to set up the intense dramatic undertones that would have had the audience sitting on the edge of their seats. 

The cast’s Air Canada flight back to Ontario was far more subdued than the trip home from Sudbury in March since we had no “bling” to show off upon our arrival at the Sault Airport after the tumult and the shouting of the festival winners had faded away. 

But we contented ourselves with the knowledge that we had been given the great honour of taking part in a national theatrical event that in years past had seen such luminaries as William Hutt, Frances Hyland, John Colicos, Kate Reid and Douglas Rain tread the boards.

Probably our biggest disappointment was the negative review Globe and Mail critic Herbert Whittaker gave the play – after he’d written a glowing report of it following our Sudbury win.

His flipflop was all the more stinging because he had devoted almost an entire page in The Globe to praising our Sudbury performance yet, in his review of the Winnipeg gig, he rewrote journalistic history and said he had known all along that we just didn’t have the right stuff.

However, the show must go on as they say and John and Arla Jean did it again by appearing in the Workshop’s production of “Luv” in 1970 that was also selected for a DDF performance – the last year this particular competition would be held. Their fellow actor, Richard Farrell, received the award as the best amateur actor in all of Canada.

Meadows contented himself with returning to his on-air job in the Sault where he spent most of the rest of his working career.

Both Sillers and Farrell went on to greater heights in stage, television and movies (Sault TV viewers might remember Richard in a long-running television commercial where he did a comedic turn as Leonardo da Vinci). Barbara Fletcher eventually married journalist, author and historian Donald MacKay and enjoyed a long teaching career that had begun in the Sault’s elementary and secondary systems before she accepted a professorship in drama at Concordia University in Montreal.

By some strange twist of fate, The Gentleman Caller is the only member of the cast of “The Glass Menagerie” – as well as the “Luv” troupe as it turns out – who hasn’t yet gone to that Great Green Room in the Sky.

And, because I’m still here, I am able to relate one funny story resulting from our 1962 trip to the big lights in the big city of Winnipeg. (Other stories will go with me to my grave to protect the guilty!).

Since the DDF was held in that windy city in May, I wore my spring topcoat on the trip for the last time that season before packing it a few months later to wear in the fall when I left for Europe and a stint in the administrative offices of Canada’s Department of National Defence Schools in Metz, France. 

The next time I donned the overcoat was on a weekend trip to Paris. When I stuck my hand in my coat pocket, I was surprised to find the room key to the Fort Garry Hotel that I had inadvertently taken with my when I checked out after the Winnipeg event.

On the back of the tag attached to the key were the words: “If accidentally carried away, please drop in any mailbox. Paid postage guaranteed.”

I dropped the key in a round postal receptacle on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées – wondering to this day if it ever arrived back at the Fort Garry and what the reaction would have been when management was handed a bill for postage from the city on the Seine to the city on the Red River.