Evelyn Jacob SPOTLIGHT FEATURE

"M ON the periphery of theatre now," declares Anne Marsh,

Anyone who knows Marsh — and everyone in the theatre com- munity does ~ must find this statement unfathomable.

Who could imagine a North Shore theatre without the actively helping hand of Anne Marsh?

This is, after all, a woman who has been a fixture of local theatre, who has never missed a single Mainstage Festival since attending her first in 1976,

“Yell, maybe one.

.-As North Vancouver prepares to host Mainstage ‘93 — the annual competition of plays that attracts the finest in B.C, anrateur theatre — it's obvious that Marsh can never detach herself from what has become a lifelong passion.

That was evident on the after- noon of our: meeting, when, rushing around delivering last- minute press releases for Mainstage ‘93, she didn’t even know if she was getting paid to run

~ Theatre BC's North Vancouver of- fice... 7

“It doesn’t matter,” Marsh says, plopping down an enormous - file folder on the table in front of her and cracking a toothy grin. “I enjoy it so much I'd do it for nothing.” ;

Marsh may be on the periphery of the theatre scene now, but she was usually to be found in the eye of the storm.

For example, she has worked for

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virtually every North Shore ama- teur theatre company at one time or another, served as president of the North Vancouver Community Players; been a Mainstage Festival chairperson, a North Shore zone president and president of Theatre BC — the oldest provincial theatre association in Canada,

“Everybody knows Anne Marsh and everybody loves the stuff she does,"’ says Paul Kloegman of the Actor's Com- pany, who worked with Marsh this past spring in the company’s pro- duction of Squabbles.

“She's pulled back from theatre a bit, but | can’t imagine what this community would be like without her. If Anne Marsh stopped becoming involved it would be a tremendous loss.’

Marsh’s love affair with local theatre began in 1972, when she came upon a casting call in a focal newspaper: the North Vancouver Community Players were holding auditions for their production of Early to Bed.

With no previous acting experi- ence other than the skits she and

her colleagues would put on at the | ANNE MARSH has worked for virtually every North Shore amateur theatre co

Vancouver law firm she worked for, Marsh took the plunge without hesitation.

“TL went along to audition and was asked if f could stage- manage,’ she remembers. ‘‘The Players didn’t have many members then and they really needed an infusion of people. That’s when | came along and dragged a lot of my friends in.’

Marsh, who keeps the crumpled 20-year-old ad folded up in her’ wallet, and many of those friends have remained closely aligned with the company ever since.

In 1975, a scant three years later, despite ‘knowing nothing about organization or internal pol- itics,”” she was voted president of the North Vancouver Community Players and in four short years

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