Many local youth aspire to perform on the stage. From teens to small children, from standup comedians to Shakespearean dramatists, there are galaxies of up-and-coming theatre artists.
The majority will not become professionals, but like sports, learning an art form provides for a lifelong fulfilling recreation and source of personal expression.
Meg Peters is but one of these. The dance studios and school drama rooms of the city are loaded in these bright lights. Many of them show more than promise; they are already verified talents. Peters, for example, is only 12 years old but she has already been a cast member of this past summer's Bard in the Yard program under young director Melissa Glover. It was the third time she participated in the program, this time cast in the role of Paris in their production of Romeo & Juliet.
She was highly successful at the Speech Arts & Drama Festival in spring where she delivered a number of memorized monologues. It was her fifth year of participation and she won many of the prizes and was called to the roster at the Honours Performance that closed the event.
She has performed in school plays at Malaspina elementary school and Polaris Montessori elementary school where this past year she and classmate Danielle Garner wrote their own script as well as did the work to perform.
When Theatre North West needed a young actor for a part in a PGTV commercial, Peters was the one selected and then, when TNW needed young actors to be in their production of A Christmas Carol, Peters became a professional by making the cut into the cast that opens their run tonight.
Peters has three parts to play each show, and will alternate from night to night with Aleisha Ramsay so neither of them is overwhelmed by the all-pro schedule of rehearsals and performances.
The other youth actors in the show include Claire Ramsay and Keara Hicks sharing their three roles, and Aidan Harford and Cecil McCrae job-sharing their three parts.
All of these young actors have a pedigree of early participation in the performing arts. When TNW made the casting call, they had a lot of applications and plenty of options. Their final decisions were difficult. Peters knew her chances of making the final cut were slim, so the news was all the sweeter when it arrived.
"I was in camp at Ness Lake, so my parents found out and had to wait four more days to tell me," she remembered. "I got in the car and my mom said 'so do you want to work this summer?' and I said no, it's summer, what kid wants to work? And she said 'oh, OK, I guess I'll call Jack (Grinhaus, TNW's artistic director) back and tell him he'll have to get someone else for Christmas Carol.'"
The preparation was light during the remains of the summer. The kids were instructed to become familiar with the general story, and it is so ubiquitous that wasn't difficult. The adapted scripts arrived in October and then it became a regimen of rehearsals and character research. That process ramped up right until last night, when the conversion was made from practice to showtime.
She remembers the day the actors were shifted from read-along rehearsals in a simple room, to getting to step on the stage where the set was still being constructed. The recollection makes her head loll back and a grin explode across her face.
"I said 'I didn't know faeries worked here' because it was so amazing. The details and little ideas they have built into the sets and the costumes are amazing. I'm hoping one of the nights I'm not performing I get to sit and watch it from the audience's perspective."
She's considering perspective a lot these days. Until now, acting was a recreation. Now it has changed. She is deeper on the path than she is used to, and more so than most Prince George peers.
"I don't consider myself an actor," she said. "I know: I am doing this, I'm in it, there I am. But you find yourself taking a step back from yourself when you think of it like a job. It's just such a great experience. I was wondering if I could be an actor to make a living, or maybe I could be a teacher, but I do find myself thinking how awesome it would be to keep doing this my whole life."
She calls A Christmas Carol "the best thing I've ever done in my life" and finds herself looking forward to rehearsals all day long. "I can't think of a place I would rather be than working on the play," she said. And that grin explodes again.
THE MEG LETTERS
Being involved in theatre is a pleasant pastime for many, but it is also a profession for a lot of Prince George actors, dancers, sound and lighting technicians, comedians, writers and other positions. Arguably, more have gone on from Prince George into professional acting than professional sports.
On the eve of Theatre North West's latest play, some of them from afar (all of them TNW alumni) offered their thoughts to Meg Peters, and all the aspiring actors and technicians in the region.
Demitri Goritsas is perhaps the best known actor the area's theatre industry has produced to date. He has had numerous film roles in movies like Little Women, Saving Private Ryan, X-Men First Class and is about to appear in the upcoming biopic Snowden. He has also been a cast member of multiple television shows, his voice has been on popular video games, and he narrated the Steve Jobs documentary One Last Thing, among many other credits.
Still in close touch with Prince George, Goritsas sent Peters this dispatch:
Dear Meg,
I was thrilled to hear you are acting in speech arts festivals and plays. Acting is such a meaningful part of storytelling. Actors are lucky people who get to step inside stories and share them, which can transform people's lives. I wish you to have great fun acting, for it is essentially playing. No matter what you do with your life it's going to help you.
If acting itself is what you want to do as a profession, I'd like to offer some advice based on my experience that being an actor involves a sort of contradiction: Keeping open to the acting craft while having a thick hide for the business side.
Keeping open to the craft is a recipe of curiosity, vulnerability, and sincerity. This kind of learning never stops. Being curious sparks your imagination. Each character is a world. How do they work? Observe people. Not just what they do, but what's behind it. How do they hold their emotional life physically, in their voice, in the words they use? This isn't judgmental. You're a compassionate observer, building awareness of the different people or "worlds" out there, and honing these observational tools when creating a character.
Being vulnerable is applying this curiosity to yourself. What is your "world" like? What do you sound like, move like, behave like? Again, this isn't judgmental. It's a kind of friendly acknowledgment of where you are, so you know where you have to go to play a role. I believe Daniel Day-Lewis said acting is partly discovering the character and partly forgetting yourself.
Sincerity is to play your character, in spite of any fears or nerves which will be there, with honesty. Trust that your preparation and vulnerability will deliver great work. The best acting doesn't hide.
The acting business requires a thick skin because, unlike your craft, so much of it is out of your hands. Getting an agent, getting auditions, getting the job - quite often things won't go the way you wish. Two ways to develop a thick skin. First, don't take it personally. Ninety-nine percent of the time the reason you didn't get the job has nothing to do with something you have control over. I've lost jobs because I didn't have the right height, age, even hair colour, and I've booked other jobs for the same reasons!
Absolutely, your craft (that you've been improving all this time) helps tremendously. But luck is always involved. Which brings me to the second thing - keep showing up. Luck has a much greater chance of happening if you keep turning up, open and ready in the way you've developed your craft, and offering your work. Eventually, craft and luck combine, and you will be a force to be reckoned with.
Acting is a great adventure. I wish you the best for yours.
Kennedy Goodkey is a triple threat in the theatre world: actor, writer, director. You could add comedian just as easily.
He wrote and starred in (with Demetri Goritsas, his childhood friend from Prince George) the film Sons of Cohen. He was also the creative principal behind the award-winning film The Beast of Bottomless Lake. He has won a Jessie Richardson Award for his stage acting, he was on The L Word with his screen acting, and his script for The Gnome Who Knew Too Much won a special achievement award at the ReelFast 48HR Filmmaking Competition.
By coincidence, Goodkey also went to high school with Meg Peters' parents, so his letter gave him extra motivation:
Dear Meg,
LOVE your art for the feeling it gives you when created and complete. Do not do it for the money or fame it might bring - because it may never do that. You can be brilliant, and never get a break while the opposite happens all around you. Loving the process of creation might be the only positive feedback you get.
WHAT you choose as your medium should be something you can commit to learning to perfection - but never let perfection be the slayer of the great. Always strive with voracious dogged determination to be better, but recognize when to move on to your next work.
YOU are your audience. No one else. You can only ever be certain you are going to please yourself - so do. Chances are good there will be someone else in the world with similar sensibilities - but they are a bonus and they will always see when you are being true to yourself.
DO something else. Something related to your art or something that gives you the freedom to practice your art, but don't rely on your art being your everything. Stand upon the attainable while you reach for great heights.
Alana Hawley Purvis is one of the city's fast-rising new stars of stage and screen. Last year she was a co-star of the film The Valley Below, and she is one of the leads in the new independent sci-fi film The Great Fear due for release in 2016.
For years she honed her craft on the top stages in Canada. She was a regular at the famed Stratford Festival; she was lauded for her work in Venus in Fur at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre. This past spring Hawley returned to Prince George as special guest adjudicator at the Speech Arts & Drama Festival and remembered Peters from the girl's many performances. "Give my love to Meg," she said, and also gave this letter:
Dear Meg,
Always remember to follow your own curiosity. Do what you love and face, head-on, that which challenges you every day of your life.
A friend once told me to follow my bliss. I repeat this saying to myself every morning when I get up.
The business of acting is hard, but the reward makes you forget all the work.
Trust that, as a performer and as a person, you are enough. There is only one YOU. That makes you a specific, unique and powerful artist that no one can replicate and that no one can diminish. You are needed.
If you do something that you love every day of your life, your joy will encourage others to do the same. If performing is what you love, don't question it. Simply pursue that love with every fiber of your being. One day you may decide that you love something else. At that point, turn and follow that.
Remember - an actor never stops learning. Accepting the career of an actor is to accept the life-long journey of a student.
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