Trevor Schmidt refers, with some irony, to Northern Light Theatre’s nearly concluded 07/08 season as the “family values” season.
 
Last fall, the company produced The Busy World Is Hushed, about the difficult and complicated relationship between a biblical scholar and her gay son. Then came 3 Different Heavens, Nathan Cuckow’s story of two women coming to terms with the relationship between their (again, gay) sons. Now, to finish the season, there’s Cherish, about two gay couples—Jess and Maeve, and Tom and William. Jess and Maeve are raising two daughters, both fathered by Tom. Tom and William ask Jess to have a third child, whom they’ll adopt—but when the time comes, Jess can’t bring herself to give the baby away.
 
Approaching middle-age himself, Schmidt found his own paternal instinct welling up when he read the play.
 
“Oh God, I want a baby so bad, my uterus aches just sitting in rehearsal,” he says. “I’m at that age where that’s for sure kicked in. But beyond that, it’s the same theme of almost every play that I appreciate and want to do. It’s that struggle between what I think is best for me, for selfish reasons, and sacrificing what I want for someone else’s happiness. That’s what every good play is about, to me.”
 
NLT’s production will be the North American premiere of the play, which is little known outside of writer Ken Duncum’s New Zealand home. (Even online, there isn’t much information to be found on either the play or its writer. There is a 2003 review from Wellington’s Dominion Post, which reports Cherish to be an “extraordinary and exciting new play, [the strength of which] lies in Duncum’s ability to dissect with surgical skill the tangled emotions of his characters and expose them clearly and convincingly while he ratchets up the tension with an intriguing plot.” For whatever it’s worth.)

Schmidt says that the thematic unity of this year’s line-up was an accident, though the selection of under-the-radar plays hasn’t been. While other local companies are staging the predictable, if deserving fare making the rounds of Canadian stages, Schmidt makes a point of finding and staging the unusual suspects. And fair enough—a peek through NLT’s history bears him out. His biggest resource, of course, is  the Internet (what else?).
 
“I spend lots of time online looking for obscure plays that nobody has heard about,” he says. “I came across Cherish and it seemed like good subject matter, so I hunted it down, I went to Starbucks, and I sat by myself. And when I got to intermission I pulled out my cell phone and called the office and said, ‘We need to get the rights to this play. I don’t know what happens in the second act, but unless it goes completely off the rails, this is the most well-written thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.’ Duncum’s agent sent us some other scripts as well, and it turns out there are a lot of cultural similarities between New Zealand and Canada. The work translates really well here.”
 
The artistic exchange has proven fruitful—another New Zealand play will open NLT’s 08/09 season, and Schmidt will soon be off to the country to collaborate with theatre artists there.
 
“They’ve been so lovely about a real fair exchange of work and finding the similarities between their culture and ours. The indigenous culture, the artisitic aspect of ours and theirs, it’s just been a real great relationship.” V

Fri, May 2 - Sun, May 11 (8 pm)
Cherish 
Directed by Trevor Schmidt
Written by Ken Duncum
Starring Nadien Chu, Sue Huff, 
Brad Loucks, Richard Meen