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Photo by RICHARD LAM / PNG

She continued: “I fully expect someone to scream in the middle of performance and we would need to evacuate!

“This is urgent!!!!!!!!”

Among those who received Gajic’s email was Jason Lynden, a building services supervisor who appears throughout the documents. Lynden’s emails are a suitable stand-in for narrative exposition, providing the background and history needed to put the situation in context.

“Rodents. This will never be more than a control program. Given the age of the buildings, we are likely to always have a mice population,” Lynden wrote in March 2015.

“According to our (exterminators), from a maintenance point of view, we can spend a million dollars sealing the buildings and drilling holes in the walls to place traps and eradicate nests, and still the buildings would not remain mice free.”

The problem has been spectacularly bad at times.

A vice-president at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, which performs at the Orpheum, relayed this nightmarish account in mid-2014: “Dead mouse bodies have been falling from the ceiling.”

A year later, staff at the Orpheum had begun to “start their day every morning by cleaning their desk surfaces from mice droppings,” Gajic said in an email last fall. In November, she termed the problem an infestation.

Photo by Steve Bosch / PROVINCE

A month later, a far more disturbing incident unfolded at the Playhouse Theatre.

“After handing out a booster seat at the Playhouse today, I noticed a strange material,” wrote a staff member to Lynden and others. “Upon closer inspection of the material … I realized it was coming from little black boxes that were labelled as Rodenticide and had a pest control number on them.”