The Greystone Theatre is coming back to the virtual stage with its second performance of the year.

Gordon Winter, a play by Kenneth Williams, will make an appearance in Greystone’s virtual stage under the direction of Deneh’Cho Thompson, a faculty member from the drama department. This will be the theatre’s second show of the year, and it will be happening on March 31 to April 3.

Third-year drama student Leze Pewapsconias, who plays the role of Cynthia, says to “go in with an open mind.”

“Try and learn something about yourself or something about people because… It’s a commentary on what society is like as a whole,” Pewapsconias said.

Gordon Winter is a play about an “RCMP hero, a lifelong champion of First Nations and a bigot” named Gordon Winter, according to the theatre’s website. Pewapsconias says that her character, who is a young lawyer, goes through “trials and tribulations” while defending him. The play, according to Pewapsconias, asks the question to the audience of whether a person should be condemned for saying something wrong “that one time.”

“Where’s the line that we have to draw to say, ‘We can’t let you be part of the power anymore because what you’re doing is wrong or what you said is wrong,’” Pewapsconias said. “It’s [about] finding that line within society.”

The play has six actors, which is a significantly smaller cast compared to the theatre’s first show of the year Under Milkwood, which had 26 actors overall. 

Pewapsconias says that her performance involved a lot of research, which made it more serious than her previous acting experiences. 

“Everyday we always have to bring something new to the table and [ask], ‘What did you learn about this character?’ or ‘What did you learn about the whole story or the trial that this play is based on?’” Pewapsconias said.

The play will be a blend of live streamed performance coupled with pre-recorded films stitched in throughout. Of course, that’s not all of it. There will also be added animation and puppetry. Pewapsconias says that the play is an “amalgamation of multimedia.”

“This is really a big huge ‘yay!’ to the tech crew because they’re actually going to be doing so much work to make this very much like a huge diverse world of multimedia-mixed storytelling,” she said.

Pewapsconias says that being in the arts as an actor during precarious times has been challenging.

“[I’m] going to be alone this whole time… Nobody is going to be watching [me] but the people on a tiny little camera,” Pewapsconias said. “There’s only so much we can do out there, so why not just do the best that you can and be the biggest that you can when it comes to these more condensed environments that we live in.”

Pewapsconias says she misses the theatre space and the energy from people that she fell in love with during her first play. 

“It’s like a huge machine or like a big pot of food cooking and everybody has a place and it just feels like such a wonderful community,” she said.

After a fall semester without any plays, Pewapsconias says that it’s great to be back and “just be an actor again.”

“I love performing,” Pewapsconias said. “[It’s] a very very stressful, heart-pounding and terrifying experience, but I enjoy it.”

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J.C. Balicanta Narag | Editor in Chief

Graphic: Poster for the Gordon Winter online performance taken from the Arts and Science website.