It was the best 29th birthday gift a perfect stranger could have given Kristine McCallum.
The March 25 email asked if the Walnut Grove paralegal would like to audition for Langley Players Drama Club’s next play?
Eleven years had passed since McCallum had taken to the stage as a student, and several years had gone by since a brief spell studying theatre at the University of the Fraser Valley, but the acting bug had never left her. Now, with a shorter commute since moving from a job at a prestigious law firm in Vancouver to another well-respected law firm in Surrey, she had time to devote to her thespian passions.
She quickly landed the role of Abby Rothstein in John Lazarus’s The Grandkid, opposite Marko Hohlbein as Julius Rothstein. The drama is what’s known as a “two-hander”, with just two actors and a whopping lot of lines to learn. Hohlbein and director Cathie Young are seasoned veterans with many credits to their names, but McCallum quickly proved a natural.
“Abby is strong-headed, stubborn, figuring out who she is, rather than what’s expected of her,” McCallum says. She sees several parallels to her own life and to what many young people encounter as they mature.
The play, which was written in 2014, is what Young calls “a love story” in which two people — the Ontario college professor and the granddaughter who moves in with him — have to find ways to meld their lives yet respect their differences, while not being afraid to challenge each other.
Abby appears mainly as an 18-year-old (going on 19). She has scenes with the audience, in which she is about 30, and in flashbacks she is a girl of five.
McCallum, who had lead roles in school plays from elementary (Peterson Road) through high school (D.W. Poppy), loves the challenge. In the play, she has an unseen boyfriend, Noah, whose influence leads to some fierce exchanges between granddaughter and grandfather. McCallum again sees parallels to her own life; she is getting married next February to someone she credits with being her steadying influence.
As the two Rothsteins demonstrate the chemistry between them, so too do newly acquainted McCallum and Hohlbein.
“Everybody knows a Julius Rothstein!” says McCallum.
“She’s my ninth grandkid!” cracks Hohlbein, who already has eight of his own.
The Grandkid, which will also be the Langley club’s entry this year in TheatreBC’s Fraser Valley Zone competition, opens April 28 and runs to May 20, with 8 p.m. performances Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights and 2 p.m. Sunday matinees. Tickets are $15. For further information, go to langleyplayers.com.
