A hundred seats on 118 Avenue: the Alberta Avenue playhouse books a full season
Five companies, forty weeks, and a box office that fits in a cash tin. The neighbourhood theatre model, working.
The hundred-seat theatre in the old lodge hall on 118 Avenue announced its season Tuesday, and the announcement itself is the story: forty weeks booked, five resident companies, and for the first time since the room reopened, nothing dark between September and June.
The model is deliberately small. The companies share the space, the light grid, and a technical director paid jointly through an arrangement the five artistic directors negotiate over one long dinner each spring. Rent is a percentage of the door, which means an empty week costs a company nothing and a full one funds the next.
It is the inverse of the festival economy the city's theatre scene is famous for — eleven months of quiet around one loud fortnight. "The festival taught everyone here to produce a show for four hundred dollars," the venue's manager said. "We are just giving that skill somewhere to live the rest of the year."
The season opens the last Friday of September with a new play set, the program notes say, "within walking distance of this chair." Tickets are twenty dollars, cash tin and card reader both accepted, and the lobby coffee remains, by long-standing house policy, free.
