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Winnipeg Free Press

How do you climate-proof promenade-style theatre?

The only pollutant Waiting for Godot's Pozzo, played by Tom Keenan, is scripted to inhale is whatever substance he's used to pack his pipe. But as historic wildfires ravaged northern Manitoba this spring and summer, the outdoor company Shakespeare in the Ruins — whose productions are always shaped by the tendencies of the weather — had its repertory season of Waiting for Godot and Macbeth forged by the smoky climate. Scheduled to open June 5, the play director Emma Welham calls 'Mackers' did little to contradict its cursed reputation: hours before the promenade production at the Trappist monastery ruins was to begin, the company cancelled the Scottish play owing to provincewide air-quality advisories. Leif Norman photo Lindsay Nance (left) as Lady Macbeth and Darren Martens as Macbeth in the Scottish play After a two-day hiatus, Macbeth, which shared three actors with Godot, received clearance to go on. Then came a lightning storm that washed out two more performances. Of the 40 performances the company had scheduled this season, which wrapped up Sunday, 14 were either cancelled or heavily modified owing to injury or health concerns, with actors' conditions, especially lost voices, exacerbated by the heavy smoke in the air. On back-to-back days, the directors of both shows were thrust into the action as replacements, with Welham subbing for Keenan's three roles in Macbeth and Rodrigo Beilfuss taking the actor's place as the brutal charlatan Pozzo. For a stretch, the planned promenade of Macbeth became stationary to accommodate Darren Martens, who powered through his final five performances as Macbeth while nursing an inflamed lumbar disc. Beilfuss says in a given year between one and four performances are cancelled or postponed owing to rain and other weather phenomena. But this season, which still managed, to the artistic director's delight, to set company attendance records, re-enforced the twinned destinies of great outdoor theatre and the great outdoors, period. 'Human beings have kind of divorced ourselves from nature and that's not natural or normal. We are animals that need to be in contact with nature and because we aren't, that's why things are collapsing,' says Beilfuss, the AD since 2019. 'The great gift to me as the leader of SiR is that we bring people back into nature. It's a really peaceful place to be and I hope we can keep doing theatre out there, you know?' Beilfuss is by no means signalling an abandonment of the ruins, where the company's ever-shifting brand of classical summer theatre has lived since 1994. But he says the organization can't pretend climate-change events are anomalies. So in advance of next season, Beilfuss says he's exploring revised environmental contingencies to address climate effects on production locale. Programming one production at the ruins and another at an indoor space in the city? Producing only one play as opposed to the standard two? Those are options Beilfuss is floating. (Rainbow Stage, which has performed since 1954 in Kildonan Park, produced its first off-site indoor musical, Afterlight, in 2023.) 'I have all of these models I could run, but the truth is, people really want the shows at the ruins because it has become a summer event. They want to come out to be at the park and they want to promenade because it's only us that do that,' Beilfuss says. 'In the long-term, it would be lovely to build a semi-permanent structure on site that's sealed so that in case of weather, we can just move into it.' But the artistic director readily admits there's nothing that can top nimbly produced theatre that responds to the possibilities of shifting winds. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. That was made especially clear during the Canada Day performance of Godot when right before intermission, Didi (Arne MacPherson) and Gogo (Cory Wojcik) consider parting company. 'Didi says, 'Well, shall we go again?' Huge thunderclap. And then Gogo says, 'Yes, let's go.' It was just so beautifully synced,'' says Beilfuss. 'It's those moments you cannot have in any (indoor) theatre on the planet. I'll remember for the rest of my life when (Gogo) says to look at the little cloud, which is in the script, and everybody in the audience looks up.' With outdoor theatre, to paraphrase Pozzo, one absorbs the air in spite of one's precautions. Ben WaldmanReporter Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. 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