I was very young – still in middle school – when I saw the production of Diary of Anne Frank starring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. It’s one of my first strong memories of going to the theatre. The story, of course, is well known, but I still vividly remember the beautiful and elaborate set. I also remember the feeling of being moved – transported – as part of that audience, and even at that young age, I realized the magic of live performing arts to have that effect on a group of people. That production was one of the theatre pieces that taught me, as a child, what could be accomplished by the arts and that paved the way for a career working in the arts.

Michael Jones

I grew up in the theatre but not traditional theatre. I grew up in Passe Muraille, TWP and the Blyth Festival, the alternative theatre, the theatre of new Canadian work. My parents were the upstarts. I grew up with The Death of the Donnellys, The Farm Show, 1837, and Richard the Third Time. All these were collectives, and some entirely improvised. While I love going to Stratford, one of my earliest memories was seeing Brian Bedford in Richard II, the coach race from Lucan to London in Death of the Donellys was way more exciting for a boy of nine. Watching Layne Coleman as Will Donnelly, my mum and Miles Potter pretend to be horses and the other actors twirling staffs to mimic the coach wheels, it was fantastic storytelling. I got to do a few collectives in my career and one of them was Whale at YPT. It was a largely improvised script based on a play that was written about a news story of two Grey whales being trapped in the ice flow in the North.

Usually, I’m not nervous rehearsing a play but Whale made me nervous. The thing about doing established plays is that they are just that, tried, tested and true. There is inherent faith that the play works, it’s been done before. With new work, you need to make that leap of faith. We had NO idea if Whale would work. As we approached the tech week of rehearsals I thought, “This is a mish-mash. There’s nothing holding it together.” We would draw the arc of the story on a white board in the rehearsal hall trying to make sense of it, taping up bits of the story to try and find something we all thought would tell an interesting yarn. We were rewriting the dialogue right up to tech week. Then, during my lunch hour on our first tech day, I remember hanging by my hands from the lighting grid 50 feet above the stage floor, looking down, not wanting to let go and let the harness carry my weight, when our stunt coordinator, John Stead, slowly, gently pried my fingers off the bars saying, “Just let go, brother. Just let go.” So, I did.

Did it work? We did three productions of Whale. The first year we mounted the show we won a Dora for best production. The second, we mounted for a week in order to take it to St Louis to shop it around to houses in the US. The third time was a remount for the YPT 1995 season that finished in Washington DC at the Kennedy Centre.

Yeah, it worked and what a memory.

Christopher Royal

It all started for me at YPT. I was in SK and desperate to follow in my sisters’ footsteps of attending the drama camp. Unbeknownst to me, my mom had to lie and tell the camp that I was in grade one. The secret was out when they handed me a script and I couldn’t read at all. Now, seventeen years later, I’m returning to YPT as part of the cast of To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m pretty excited that it’s all coming full circle… and this time, I can read!

Tal Shulman

YPT made me believe in Possibility…

One of my most profound memories involves the 18-year-old me sitting in a dark theatre watching YPT’s production of The Hobbit while weeping quietly and believing in the possibilities and magic of theatre. At the time, I was a brand new immigrant working as a co-op student in the theatre. I was working alongside Pierre Tetrault, the Artistic Director, and I was responsible for sorting resumes and helping the administrative staff with anything they needed. It was bliss. On the second or third day of my co-op placement, Pierre called me into his office and invited me and my mother to the opening of The Hobbit. I was nervous going into the theatre that night as it was the first time my mother and I would see a “Canadian Play”. I remember the profound joy I felt as the lights went down. The play was magical and like nothing I’d ever seen in India – the costumes, the colours, the performance, the production all of it! I remember turning to my mother at the end of the show and saying “I want that, I want to do that…”for the rest of the night!I’ll never forget that moment, and as always, I am so grateful to YPT for making me believe in the possibilities.

Anusree Roy

I was an actor in two productions in the second season of YPT. The Dandy Lion played at the Colonnade Theatre and I was Dalton the Daring, a lion tamer. I seem to remember we did six performances every weekend. That same season, I was also in a school touring show by Brian Way called On Trial. It’s hard to believe that, even though it was only YPT’s second year in operation, we took that show on the road and played for a week in Ottawa.

Right from the start, YPT had a strong audience. And I think most of Toronto’s theatre artists worked for YPT at one point in their careers. In those days, you felt like you knew everybody in the business. The community has grown and thrived so well over the years, it would be impossible to know every theatre artist now!

Tony Moffat-Lynch