No complaints about dinner theatre production in Inuvik

Inuvikians gathered in the East Three Secondary school foyer for dinner and a show put on by the theatre department Friday, Feb. 9 and Saturday, Feb. 10.

The Comedic Dinner Theatre production “Complaint Department and Lemonade” featured six student actors playing double and triple roles, as well as supervising teacher and actor Abe Drennan.

Nicole Verbonac said playing multiple characters taught her a lot about the challenges of quick changing.

“Quick changing is very difficult,” Verbonac said. “You go back stage and within a few minutes or even seconds you have to get a completely different costume on. I was playing three characters, so I had to keep running backstage, change into different button-up shirts and a bowtie, and run back out with the lemonade.”

The comedy took place in the “complaint department” – an office designated for anyone to drop by and voice their complaints about everything from a broken television to an ineffective lemonade recipe.

While the play was certainly funny, it also encouraged the audience to look within to find solutions to their own complaints. Katelynn Crocker, one of the student actors, said that was one of the messages she hoped people took away from the production.

“I think the message of the play is that everybody has problems, you have kind of just got to deal with them,” Crocker said. “That’s the message we were trying to convey.”

Anibe Abba, another one of the actors, said her favourite part of putting together the play was the creative freedom they had.

“Whenever we were practicing, we’d ad lib,” Abba said. “We loved adding and being creative and having fun with it. That’s what the process was for me – just fun, and absolute madness, but so fun.”

This was Abba’s first production where she worked in front of the curtain, and she wants to continue acting.

“Usually I’m working backstage,” Abba said. “It was super fun. It was a slow build-up. It was so fun. You’d expect doing something over and over again to be boring, but everyone had so much fun with it.”

Fletcher Dares, another actor, said putting the production together was really fun, but the best part was getting to know the other actors.

“The people who do the play with me are really fun to hang out with, it was nice to be able to talk to them and see them all the time,” Dares said. “It was really great.”

Actor Sierra McDonald agreed.

“I learned that you have a family behind stage. The crew, that’s your family now,” McDonald said. “We worked so many hours together. It’s like raising a child from a baby to 18. The play is like their graduation and we finally get to see them become an adult.”

Dares added that they couldn’t have put the play together without the help of their teachers.

Abba said she hopes that the play will encourage the community to attend more events like the Comedic Dinner Theatre.

“The play is something we’re doing on our own. We wanted to do something fun and promote drama in the school and I hope [the community] think that this is a fun idea and they come to more of these events.”

Drennan, their teacher, said he’s really happy with the final result.

“Overall it was really fun. I hope this brings attention to our program and what we’re trying to do here with the theatre program and the benefits it has for the community and the students especially,” Drennan said.