Dating is hard. What if you could find your perfect partner by listing the top 10 attributes you desire from them?
That’s the question answered by The Love List, a play that will be performed by Melfort Amateur Dramatics at the Kerry Vickar Centre over the fourth week of April.
Ardath Salen, the director, chose the play because she thought it was well-written.
“I’ve wanted to do this play for a while, so I figured this would be a good time, being that we’re taking it to festival and it’s our spring dessert theatre.”
The festival they will take it to, after its Melfort performance, is TheatreFest 2017 in North Battleford on April 24 to 29.
The Love List has three major roles. Bill (Michael Hotsko) is a mild-mannered civil servant consumed by his job. Leon (Emery Nelson) is Bill’s friend and a novelist, who signs Bill up for a dating service run by a gypsy woman, as a 50th birthday gift. As Bill fills out a list from the service with the top 10 attributes he desires in a woman, Justine (Brookelynn Allan) pops into existence, fulfilling all of those desires. As Bill modifies his list, so too does Justine’s personality change.
“So it’s very interesting,” Salen said. “Be careful what you wish for.”
The director said when the play opens, the three actors will have auditioned for eight weeks.
“It’s been a lot of fun working with the cast. The two men are very strong actors. Brookelynn is fairly new; this is her second play but she’s doing very well. They’ve been working very hard, they’ve got a lot of lines to learn, so it’s coming along quite nicely.”
At TheatreFest, the play will compete against five others.
“It’s a really interesting experience because your play is adjudicated,” Salen said. “They talk to you and the cast the following morning and go through some things you could have done differently with your play, key points that maybe you as a director didn’t think of, that you didn’t notice, something you could do different with the actors.”
Salen said she’ll also be at the festival the whole week, watching each play, sitting in every adjudication and taking workshops.
