At the Lighthouse Festival, Jamie Williams’ new comedy pays homage to the family westerns of his childhood
iPhoto caption: Ryan Bommarito in rehearsal for Pinkerton Comes to Prospect. Photo Credit: Aidia Mandryk.
Actor-writer Jamie Williams doesn’t appear in his latest comedy — but he’s still performed every part.
The play in question is Pinkerton Comes to Prospect, a tongue-in-cheek homage to the western genre, produced by Lighthouse Festival. The production begins previews on July 30 in Port Dover and transfers to Port Colborne on August 20. Pinkerton features actors Ryan Bommarito, Matt Oliver, Adrian Shepherd-Gawinski, Jessica Sherman, and Evelyn Wiebe, and is directed by Steven Gallagher.
“I’ve done a lot of farces [as an actor],” said Williams in a Zoom interview. And indeed, over his 30-year stage career, he’s made frequent appearances in fast-paced comedies at theatres across the country, including Lighthouse, Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, and Halifax’s Neptune Theatre. It’s only natural that when writing the farcical Pinkerton, Williams’ “acting brain was really engaged,” he said. “I was playing each of the characters in my mind as I was writing them.”
Audiences will recognize those characters as classic archetypes from films and stories set in the Old West (a shorthand for the western United States during the period of settler expansion in the 19th century). There’s an ambitious young woman named Lacey, who “wants to get out of Prospect,” said Williams, “and go to the big city to get an education.”
Unfortunately for Lacey, she’s entangled in the schemes of her uncle Doc, a con man whose life is under threat from a notorious killer. When a naive surveyor named Herschel Pinkerton arrives in town, he too gets swept up in the town’s drama. “His belief in himself grows by a magnitude that he doesn’t expect,” said Williams.
For those wondering why the play’s title involves the name Pinkerton, not Penkerton, that’s a twist Williams said he didn’t want to spoil. Suffice it to say, a case of mistaken identity early on in the show leads to a spiral of comic consequences.
Although Williams enjoys gritty westerns — he named the classic spaghetti western The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, starring Clint Eastwood, as one of his favourites — he said the inspiration for Pinkerton came from his “childhood enjoyment of… family westerns,” such as Disney’s 1975 The Apple Dumpling Gang, which featured skilled comic actors like the late Don Knotts.
Williams also noted a practical reason for Pinkerton’s period setting: “It allows for greater opportunity for miscommunication… It’s a little harder to make those things believable in a modern setting, particularly now that we carry cellphones and have [so much] access to information all the time. The less information characters have, the more opportunity for comic situations.”
Williams named Gallagher as the ideal director for Pinkerton Comes to Prospect. Gallagher was the creator and director of Murder at Ackerton Manor, another zippy farce that, like Pinkerton, spoofed a specific genre: Agatha Christie mysteries.
Gallagher is “a great guy, and he’s been a great help in this last stage of [Pinkerton’s] development,” said Willams. He praised the director’s “keen eye and keen ear, towards making sure all the [farcical] sequences are in place.”
Williams honed the script for Pinkerton in Lighthouse’s play development program, which nurtures new Canadian comedies. The program gave him a chance to test the script in front of an audience and receive valuable feedback. “You get some first-hand earnest reactions,” he reflected. “You write in a vacuum for so long that you lose the perspective of a first-time reader or listener.”
He described how the process of working on his first play, It’s Your Funeral (which premiered at Upper Canada Playhouse in 2018), taught him the value of rewrites.
“The day I finished, I thought, ‘I’ve finished it! I’ve written a script!’” he remembered. “And it was a piece of crap. But that’s okay! I’ve learned since then that the first draft should be the crappy draft. You just get it down, and then you’ve got a body of material to work with — your clay, which you can then mold.”
Though Williams has apparently molded Pinkerton to be a tightly plotted, saloon-storming farce, he’s made sure that there’s a heart of gold at its centre.
“All the characters in the show come to a place at the end of the day where they’re better versions of themselves,” he said. The fact that the town in the play is called Prospect “represents [on the one hand] this miniscule possibility that there’s gold in the ground,” and on the other hand the idea that “if you search for it and you believe in it enough, you will discover” gold — metaphorically — wherever you are.
“There’s gold [inside] the characters of the town,” said Williams. “Each of these people are [the real] nuggets [they] value.”
Pinkerton Comes to Prospect runs July 30 to August 16 at the Lighthouse Theatre in Port Dover, and August 20 to 31 at the Roselawn Theatre in Port Colborne. Tickets are available here.
The Lighthouse Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
LEARN MORE
Rhubarb! Festival director Ludmylla Reis wants artists to embrace ‘the detour’
"We do something formative at some point in the arts, and then we just continue doing that in different fonts until we’re no longer on this earth," says Reis. "The important thing is to know what that is, because you don’t want to be controlled by it. You want to be in control."
iPhoto caption: Wing Chun Dance Drama, courtesy of Shenzhen Opera and Dance Theatre.
Wing Chun Dance Drama is a martial arts movie come to life
“In China — especially in the history of Chinese cinema — Ip Man is a household name,” said Han, in translated written responses to questions over email. Ip had a lasting influence on wing chun, a style of kung fu that originated in southern China over 300 years ago. In his 60s, he trained Bruce Lee, who would go on to become a famous performer in Hong Kong and American martial arts films.
iPhoto caption: Michael Rubinoff and Mary Francis Moore. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
Theatre Aquarius’ National Summit for New Musicals showcases original works from across Canada
“I want us, as a community, to be confident in our own work,” says Theatre Aquarius artistic director Mary Francis Moore. “I want us to get to a place where we don’t need the validation of outside communities to tell us that we’re good. I want us to be in a place where we have the resources to take chances, so our projects don’t have to leave the country to find success.”
iPhoto caption: Manus Halligan in Dan Colley's adaptation of 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings'. Photo by Ste Murray.
A contemporary Gabriel García Márquez adaptation touches down in Toronto
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings has toured internationally since 2022, with a shifting cast of performers. Halligan and Beaman, the original actors and co-adaptors, will reprise their roles for the Toronto premiere.
iPhoto caption: 'Narnia' in rehearsal. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
"What emerged for us was this idea of life cycles,” reflects Narnia adaptor-director Fiona Sauder. “‘What happens when you get stuck in one season [of life], and what happens when that season comes to an end? [What things] have to die and fall away in order for new things to grow?’”
iPhoto caption: Headshot of Njo Kong Kie. Photo by Tam Chi Chun.
For composer Njo Kong Kie 楊光奇, the word ‘artist’ is a complicated label
At the ping pong table, eating pastries that Njo had thoughtfully laid out, I listened as this artist reflected on the back and forth of a career that’s bounced between multiple genres and disciplines.
Comments