Happy Anniversary David!
Date Posted: 13/07/2017
Eighteen years ago this week a mop-headed actor walked through the front door of what is now RustiK Restaurant to take over the reins of a fledgling
summer theatre company. Theatre Orangeville was barely five years old. Its admin offices were located in a former bank building: box office employees baked or froze in the front window looking over Broadway, a tenant lived in the vault in the back. Founding Artistic Director Jim Betts was moving onto other things and David Nairn was his chosen successor.
David was finishing up a year’s run of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” in Detroit. A seasoned performer who’d worked extensively in the US, he was thinking about applying for a green card and staying. He’d directed maybe four plays over his career and had no plans to become an artistic director.
(David Nairn - Mini Putt)
“I was looking out the window of my 19th floor apartment towards the Detroit River when Jim called. The board had interviewed lots of people, but nobody wanted to move to Orangeville. He told me he was putting my name forward and I thought what the heck.”
David drove up on a Monday for his first interview. The interview committee sent him home with an assignment: design and budget a season. For the second interview, wife Leisa Way did the white-knuckle driving through wicked winter weather. “Leisa gripped the steering wheel, while I held a flashlight with my teeth scribbling down production numbers.” David knew things were serious when the Board called him back for a third interview and asked him to bring Leisa. “We were actors, always on the move. The idea of putting down roots was appealing and we fell in love with Orangeville.”
David remembers meeting then-Board chair Ken Pagel in a Toronto bar and signing his contract on a pool table. He still has the scratched out and initialled original document.
He also has another important memento. On his first day of work, July 12, 1999, he sat down at his desk and began opening the drawers. All were empty but one, which contained a tiny bound copy of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book”.
“I still have it,” laughs David, “and when the day comes that I leave this place, somebody else will find it in their desk!”
Happy Anniversary Boss!
-Bernadette
87 Broadway, Orangeville ON, L9W 1K1