Last week I went to see Driftwood Theatre Group’s production of Shakespeare’s Othello in Toronto’s Taylor Creek Park.

I rented a lawn chair, swabbed on mosquito repellant and took in the fascinating pre-show audio installation The Cyprus Project (the production’s set in the context of the 1974 Cyprus war, focusing on Canada’s involvement as part of UN peacekeeping forces).

The summertime neighbourhood vibe was great — friends and families picnicking, passersby looking on curiously. The play started; it all seemed very promising . . .

And then the skies opened up. About 30 minutes into the performance, as a sprinkle became a significant shower, stage manager Victoria Wang informed the audience that we’d take a 15-minute break in hopes the rain would abate.

It didn’t.

The experience led me to wonder how this erratic, wet summer is affecting this and other theatre companies.

This was, Driftwood’s artistic director D. Jeremy Smith later said, the first performance this summer they had to call off due to rain. The company tours across southern Ontario and 70 per cent of their locations have shelter from the weather or backup indoor spaces; Taylor Creek Park is not one of those.

“With 23 years of touring outdoors, Driftwood has grown used to this delicate dance we play with the weather,” says Smith. Their rehearsal space, Todmorden Mills, has both indoor and outdoor spaces so they can keep on schedule even in unpredictable weather.

Shakespeare in the Ruff, which performs in Withrow Park in August, has a similar rehearsal setup, moving back and forth between the park and Eastminster Church on the Danforth. Megan Watson, director of this summer’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, says that managing the weather is a close collaboration between her and stage manager Tamara Vuckovic. “I’m always trying to keep the rehearsal going and Tammy has a super-accurate app that can predict rain within 10 minutes.”

What will happen if the weather continues its unpredictability into August is “a bit more nerve-wracking,” says Watson. They have an alternate indoor location for their last weekend of performances. Their ticketing is on a pay-what-you-can basis with a suggested $15 price; potential loss of box office revenue for this six-year-old company if performances are cancelled is “pretty significant.”

Weather was “very much on the forefront of our collective production brains” this year, says Heather Landon, production manager at Canadian Stage, which is producing its 35th season of Shakespeare in High Park.

The company has made full use of its contingency procedures, which include extra scheduled technical and rehearsal time and a backup indoor rehearsal space at its Berkeley St. HQ. Landon says the surface of the High Park stage is quick drying and they can pull out tarps to cover the playing area and props tables backstage.

All told, Canadian Stage lost three and half days of rehearsal in the park and moved inside for two rehearsal days. Two performances of Twelfth Night have been cancelled; none so far of King Lear.

With ongoing productions, there’s always the option of audience members coming back if they get rained out, but several big Canadian Stage community events this week are one-offs. This has meant a lot of advance and contingency planning, says Autumn Smith, the company’s education and audience development manager.

They’ve rented a tent for Thursday’s Community Citizenship Ceremony at High Park, but Smith says they’ve had to leave Friday’s day-long Global Village free family festival “up to the rain gods” because there are so many individual activities involved (including music, dance, craft, food and storytelling). At the time of writing, there was a 60 per cent chance of rain on Friday.

Rain can have a positive effect on companies that perform inside, says Mirvish Productions’s director of communications John Karastamatis. “It gives people a reason to escape the outdoors.” He says that Mirvish’s production of Beautiful is currently doing “boffo business,” though he attributes this as much to the quality of the show as the weather.

While it brings inconveniences and hazards, unpredictable weather does have its upsides for outdoor companies too, says King Lear director Alistair Newton. Sometimes there are moments of serendipity and collaboration with nature that are “magical for the audience.”

The opening night of King Lear was “very ominous; there were storm clouds, but it never actually rained,” says Newton. “When Diane D’Aquila came out with Cordelia dead in her arms, shouting ‘Howl, howl, howl, howl,’ animals in the park started to howl with her.”

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D. Jeremy Smith’s favourite weather story concerns the closing night performance of Driftwood’s 2008 Romeo + Juliet. There were heavy skies and thunder, but no rain, and as the evening wore on “a heavy fog rolled in. At the end of the show after Romeo and Juliet had died, we had blocked for them both to get up and walk off stage, separately, before returning for curtain call.”

And so, this last time, his Romeo and Juliet “rose up from the dead and literally vanished into misty darkness. It was the most powerful union of environment and performance that I have ever experienced.”

Driftwood’s Othello tours through Aug. 13: driftwoodtheatre.com. Shakespeare in the Ruff’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs in Withrow Park from Aug. 15 to Sept. 3: shakespeareintheruff.com. See canadianstage.com for information about Canadian Stage’s community events and Shakespeare productions.

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