Norman Young: Moving on to a Higher Stage

 

 

 

It is with great sadness that I note the passing of my old mentor, Matthew Norman Young, from a heart attack at the age of 94. He was one of the major characters in British Columbia’s theatre scene for about 60 years as (in no particular order) a stage manager, technical director, professor, actor, and community leader.

I knew him when he was Technical Director at Freddy Wood Theatre at UBC in the 1970s when I was trying to scam my way to an academic degree in Theatre History, while indulging as much as I could get away with in my true talent, which was technical theatre.  He soon discovered that he had a graduate student who was an experienced carpenter and liked stage management, and the match was made.

Our best trick was when he decided he was going to start a 400-level course in Advanced Stage Management. He needed a graduate student to do all the research and create the reading list for the course. So I embarked on a “directed studies” course, which mainly involved sitting in his office once a week talking about stage management. He ended up with kudos for supervising a grad student (I think he only had a BA, himself), and I ended up with an easy A and a combination of esoteric knowledge from books and practical examples from a pro. I never heard of anyone else with a graduate course in Stage Management. Looking back, it was an excellent learning experience. But we thought we were just having fun.

A story you’re not going to hear anywhere else was his technique for managing a Technical Rehearsal. This is the first time the actors are on stage, trying to do their job and fit in all the props and lighting and sound cues. It’s usually a 12-to-14-hour day, full of equal shares of frustration and boredom. Theatre people being as they are, it was quite normal for people to start getting bitchy around the tenth hour.

Norman would wait for the right moment, then storm out on stage and tear a complete strip off a crew member, often the lighting operator (who was often me). He would give the lecture about focus and professionalism and yada, yada, yada. Then, in the dead silence that followed, he would stomp offstage, pick up the headset, and say, “There. That oughta settle them down.”

I would just say, “Thanks, Norman,” and bring up the next cue.

I will always remember one thing he straightened me out on. Because there were a lot of practicing theatre professionals on faculty at UBC when I was there, and they turned out a lot of professional theatre workers (Brent Carver, Alan Gray, John Maclachlan Gray, Nikki Cavendish, to drop a few names) I thought of UBC as a professional theatre school.

Not so, said Norman. “We’re here to foster theatre in all of B. C. We’re here to turn out the amateur theatre actors and directors, the high school drama teachers. That’s what a university is for.”

And Norm did his share, advising on the construction of community theatres, serving on the Canada Council and the boards of just about every community theatre project in Vancouver, and teaching a huge number of people to love theatre and to find their own place in it for life.

And one of those people was me. Thanks, Norman.