This Generation:
Neptune producer Glenn Cairns says
the time is now for alternative theatre in Halifax

September 1985 • On a hot August day, Neptune producer Glen Cairns sits drinking hot coffee, a broken air conditioner on his desk. Cairns has been hired by artistic director Tom Kerr to coordinate Neptune Theatre's first alternative theatre project in ten years, a 'second stage' season called Neptune North.

"It's going ahead mostly on the strength of last season's surplus," says Cairns, his feet on the desk. "We can afford to take chances." 

"The focus will be alternative theatre, but, at the same time, not so off-the-wall that people aren't going to want to come," says Cairns of the new company. He sees the second stage's first year as an experiment, a period for the artists involved to find a balance between accessibility and artistic innovation. "You want to keep leading your audience and provoking thought, but 'you don't want to get too far ahead of your troops or they'll shoot you in the back,' " Cairns says, quoting Tommy Douglas, one of his heroes.

Cairns will begin Neptune North's three show season with Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. "We felt It was important that Beckett be done here," he says. "People deserve to be able to see it."

Cairns has yet to decide what the second play of the season will be. There are a number of possibilities. 'We're looking at Hosanna, Margerita's Way, The Blues, Winter Kills and Night, Mother, among others," he says, adding that he has had some difficulty in getting Michel Tremblay's new play, Albertine, in Five Times, which he had originally planned to run as the second show. 

"Cold Comfort is going to hit pretty close to the bone," says Cairns of Neptune North's last production of the year, a satire by Canadian playwright Jim Garrard. Cairns describes the play, set in rural Saskatchewan, as a variation on the old travelling salesman joke. "It's quite erotic," the producer says. Cairns has also arranged for Garrard new play, Peggy's Song, to be performed.

Cairns is optimistic about Neptune North's chances for success. "There is a market for alternative theatre here," he says, echoing the words of Kerr and many other local theatre people. The problem, he believes, is that "too many people have come to the city and said, 'Oh, yeah, I'm going to do an alternative theatre thing', started it, and then buggered off. Nobody's stayed with it."'

Neptune North will perform in an old Salvation Army building recently purchased by the Nova Scotia Drama League. Located on Cunard Street, the theatre can seat about two hundred people. Cairns thinks the new playhouse will go a long way toward unifying the local theatre community. "The big problem here is lack of space. Everyone is at each other's throats over the little amount of space we have."

Cairns, 26, has spent almost half his life in the theatre. He brings more then a little pragmatism to his job. Although a "committed left-winger", Cairns says he has come to face the fact that theatre is a business. "There's no point in doing theatre that most people don't want to see." Cairns also defends Neptune's role as a "regional theatre", pointing out that without the stage to support a community of theatre artists, "fringe theatre" would not exist in the city. Says Cairns simply, "If you want to have an acting community that lives in Halifax, then there has to be an edifice like Neptune. Otherwise, there's not going to be enough work."

Cairns also speaks up for Neptune's recent repertoire, which has been criticized by some as unadventurous. The producer cites last season's Twelfth Night and the musical Cabaret as productions that took risks and still worked financially. "The seasons certainly have been successful and popular, and one is always confusing popular with safe," Cairns says.

Professor Alan Andrews disagrees. Andrews, a teacher and director at the Dalhousie Theatre Department, considers Neptune's repertoire staid and unadventurous, like every other 'regional theatre' in the country. Andrews believes many of Neptune's major artistic decisions are influenced more by political concerns within the local theatre community than by economics. He hopes the new stage will be "engaged in more imaginative endeavours" than its mainstage counterpart. Comments Andrews, "It's badly needed."

Cairns knows. He talks of the theatre artists the city will lose if more alternative theatre doesn't happen here. "The city is at the point where either it's going to happen, or it's not. The thing is, there's money here and there are young and dynamic people here. Unless something is done by us to establish it, it's going to die. And it's going to be a very long time before the next generation." ~ John Stevenson

Originally published in the September 1985 issue of New Works magazine.