If you find yourself in Victoria, not far from the art gallery, off Rockland Avenue behind what was once a stately home, you will find a small court called Langham Court. If you follow the court, you’ll see a tallish red building with two belfries on the roof. This is Langham Court Theatre, Victoria’s oldest community theatre. It looks peaceful, with its neatly kept courtyard, its little free library and its new wooden staircase. Even on a night like this, when the rain is lashing down and the wind is rattling the belfries, it still looks peaceful. But step inside on the night, Sunday, November 13, 2021, and that image of peace is shattered.

There is a full house; there are boos and cheers, shouts of derision, but this is not a play. This is the annual general meeting of the theatre’s membership. A community AGM is often a site of petty drama, of arguments about budgets and grants, of small nepotisms and fights over who gets credit for what. But there is little petty about tonight; the membership has gathered nominally to decide the fate of one person but in that decision rests the future of the theatre itself.

But I’m bringing you in at the end of the story. Allow me to set the stage, if you’ll pardon the phrase, and tell you how we got to this moment, this place of crisis.

I know this place so well I could draw a map of every inch of it. From the basement dressing rooms where I have been a dresser, to the tiny back office where I helped purge over a decade of someone’s idea of filing, to the costume loft where I worked for five years. I’ve drunk tea with the ladies who garden and coffee with the men who build sets. I’ve tidied the sewing room and organized the play library, I even know the mysteries of the photocopier. I know this place, and I have learned its politics. Langham doesn’t like change. Individuals might, one on one, but when you try to make a change you hear, again and again, the Langham refrain

“That’s not how we do things”

“That’s not the way things have been done”

No matter the change, streamlining how customers are charged to rent costumes, or using social media to promote a show, or just changing the coffee filters. Always the Langham refrain.

In some ways, there is a charm to this reluctance to change, like an uncle who wears a three-piece suit to a family barbecue and addresses everyone by their full titles. It’s a little odd, and a little awkward, but Langham is Langham and we learn to work around it and laugh at the awkward. But some anachronisms are not so harmless.

In 2017 I was working in the costume loft when I heard the rumblings. The show that was in rehearsal, Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-sœurs, was troubled and the trouble was the director, Judy Trelor. I was privy to a lot that is not my story to tell, but it was not a happy set. What few people knew yet, was there was a bigger problem waiting in the wings. For all the problems that the actors on stage were having, there was one actor who wasn’t given the chance to be on the stage. In an email exchange with Judy, Tenyjah McKenna had been discouraged from auditioning, because she is Black. Judy said she couldn’t imagine a Black woman as part of the small family drama set in 1960s Montreal. It simply wouldn’t fit her vision of the play.

Here is the thing about a stage, who gets to decide which people appear on it, which stories are told upon it, and how? Is it the writer, who premiered the play in 1968, in another time and place, even another language from this stage at this moment? Is it the management of the theatre, a Board of directors of older actors and theatre enthusiasts? Is it the production chairs who choose the plays they think will appeal to the community? Or the director making decisions on her own, following her vision. In Langham, in 2017 all of those people had one thing in common, they were all White.

And so, when Tenyjah complained at being shut out from the stage, none of them took her experience into consideration. Judy offered to resign, and they decided to keep her as director and the show went ahead with a cast of white actors and one racially ambiguous mixed-race actor. The actors were told of the problem on opening night, but few in the theatre’s community knew much, not until the news broke in 2019 that there was a complaint lodged with the BC Human Rights Tribunal.

Following the news, the community began to fracture, a director resigned from a play that was set to premiere in February 2020 and the play had to be replaced. A lot of the regulars didn’t understand what Judy had done wrong. I was saddened, but also not surprised. I had been in too many rooms where, forgetting my ethnicity, people who were otherwise nice old ladies would say remarkably ignorant things. This isolated little bubble of a theatre community had insulated a lot of people from the realities of a changing world. And then the theatre went dark.

They all went dark, it was spring of 2020 and the pandemic shut everything down. The theatre didn’t put on another play that season or the next. I had stopped working there by then, but I read that the Board had decided to spend the time focussing on dealing with the complaint and work on strategies to make Langham more inclusive and diverse. I wanted to be hopeful but wasn’t optimistic; I knew the Langham refrain too well.

 Still, I was prepared to be surprised; and surprised I was, but not in a good way.

It’s May of 2021 and there’s an article in the Times Colonist reporting that Tenyjah has faced racial abuse because of the complaint. I click on it and can’t help but notice that the image contains some of my own work, a photograph of the empty seats the theatre has used for its Covid imagery. I read that she has been spat on by someone in the community, and I feel cold. As a kid, I was spat on for being mixed race. Up to this point, I had always thought Judy was wrong, been annoyed that the theatre hadn’t condemned her, but it wasn’t personal. I had always taken for granted that my body didn’t belong on stage. Assumed there was a reason I was cast as an extra in school plays. I was raised by a father who believed in assimilation and a Quaker-raised mother who spoke of humility. I was taught to be sure to be polite if I corrected people on how to say my name. Most of the people at the theatre said it wrong, and I had always been gentle when I pushed back against the nice old ladies and their ignorance. I had been nice, I had been patient, I had accepted being in the background, and now someone who had dared to stand up for herself and ask for a place had been spat on. That was when I broke my silence.

 I posted on the theatre group page that I couldn’t be part of a community with people who would spit on a woman of colour, or anyone for standing up for themselves. That tolerating that makes the place unsafe for marginalized people, for me, and I wouldn’t be part of it. From the reaction to my post I learned more about what had been happening since I left.

The community had fractured with the younger generation taking a stand with Tenyjah, and many of the old either behind Judy or silent. There was also a third contingent, a very vocal group who, while they insisted that Judy wasn’t in the right, were more concerned with the way those advocating for Tenyjah were acting. Of course, they condemned someone spitting on her, but really we must be patient with the older members who might not be ready for too many changes at Langham. We have always said we welcome everyone, if we talk about tolerance that will be enough. There it was again, the Langham refrain. We must not change too much or too quickly. That’s not the way we do things.
I learned that while I had been away, others had been hearing a lot of the Langham refrain. During lockdown the Board had set up a committee to advise on diversity and inclusion but had since disbanded it as the suggestions were deemed too radical. Communications had broken down completely. And they continued to as the year progressed. This is where things stood tonight as the membership gathered for the annual general meeting. The weather has a sense of the dramatic as the heaviest rainstorm in years is descending on BC the same night Langham is due for its reckoning.

I sit in the back and am soon joined by friends, a little knot of those who have been staff, who have shared the frustrations of this place. We have heard the refrain many times and expect to hear it tonight; it’s hard to hope, we all know that, but we want to try.

The house is soon full, but things begin quietly, the Board has brought in a young Indigenous woman to give us a song and a prayer for peace. Poor girl looks frightened but is the only person on this night who will be cheered by everyone in the room. For some I know this moment is a reminder of the fundamental injustices of the land beneath this place we are fighting for. For others I think it is a reminder of the importance of peace.

After the opening, there is a bit of business to get through, but eventually, we come to the moment we know we are here for. The complaint has been settled, and part of the settlement was an agreement that the membership would vote on whether to revoke Judy’s life membership. Such a small thing really, but it is something. It is a statement about who we are as a community, how we see this place. Whose place is it, that is what we are fighting for.

It is a fight. A loud and often angry fight. Judy is not well so her husband speaks for her. He proclaims her good intentions and argues the case against colour-blind casting. Argues the ethnic makeup of 1960s Montreal and the playwright’s intentions. There are objections from the floor at his speech and people objecting to the objections. All order breaks down for a moment as a nice old lady yells at a young nonbinary activist and proceedings must stop for a begrudging formal apology. Order breaks down again when a friend of Tenyjah speaks to the harms that she has suffered and one of Langham’s regular directors is nearly ejected for laughing. The noise is deafening, and a break is proposed, but difficult as this is the members vote to stay in this place, to get through it.

Various members say their piece, and I take a turn. I am nervous, I haven’t been in a room this crowded for almost two years. I talk often of justice and change these days, but usually through a camera or in a small classroom. I choose to speak from where I am in the back of the room, speak towards the stage instead of on it. The Board President calls on me by the wrong name, and I don’t hesitate to correct her. I identify my positionality for the activists in the room and my years of service for the community; I don’t speak long, but I take a stand. I say that I love this place but won’t be a part of it if racist actions don’t have consequences. I feel heard. Others are heard too, several of them echoing the old refrain but this time it is proving less popular.

 Finally, it is time to vote. This is Langham, so it happens the old-fashioned way, a couple hundred small green scraps of paper are handed out to be marked and collected. Time passes as they are counted by hand in the lounge. We talk among ourselves, what will we do if they vote not to revoke, do we walk out. Is there hope Langham can change. Is this place a lost cause?

The vote is in.

We have won this small victory. This one act of exclusion and racism has been rebuked. Is that enough to make changes?

Many of us knew it would not be enough, and so we stay. We stay for two more hours for the Board elections. A group has organized for this, I was given a list of names they would be nominating. Younger theatre folks with a background in antiracism. We don’t win every battle, but at the end of the night, half the Board has been replaced.

I have loved this place since my first day there. An old hand took me on a tour lead me around this labyrinth. He showed me the pictures of life members on the walls and the green room where everyone who’s been on stage has written something on the walls. The writing is a symphony of colour in every shade of marker and ink, but those pictures are not. One of those pictures is coming down now, and I hope that will be a start. 

Will it be enough to make real change? I don’t know. I do know that as I walk out into the rain the sigh I release is about more than finally removing my facemask. Maybe, just maybe we have started to change the tune.