Prout
Michael Reckord, Contributor
DOUGLAS PROUT, the chairman of the Montego Bay Little Theatre Movement (MLTM), has great faith in the city's theatrical potential. He predicts that within 10 years some Montegonians will be making a living from theatre.
Prout would like to be one of those persons. He would willingly give up his job as manager of the Montego Bay branch of the Globe Insurance Company.
"If I could, I'd live from drama," he said in a recent interview. "But I can't in Montego Bay."
The implication was that he could if he lived in Kingston and he actually moved to the capital city in 1997. However, he was so impatient at not getting into theatre activities within his first few months there that after a year he returned to the city of his birth.
Ironically, while he was preparing his return, opportunities started opening up. A role in the Pablo Hoilett production of Key For Two was rapidly followed by another in David Heron's Against His Will.
Prout's interest in drama started while he was attending Cornwall College (CC). "I'm a product of the Schools' Drama Festival," he says.
From CC he went to Sam Sharpe Teachers' College, where he both directed his first play and acted in the first MLTM production. The invitation to join the MLTM came from founder Paul Methuen, who over the next couple of decades became Prout's friend and theatrical mentor.
Apart from the year in Kingston, Prout has been with the MLTM since the inaugural 1975 production. The stay has proved fruitful - he has been associated with practically all the MLTM's activities. Those include staging plays and concerts and, most recently, conducting workshops at the Fairfield Theatre, the MLTM's theatre base.
Prout's résumé indicates that he has directed or acted in more than three dozen productions. He has performed on most local stages, in Cayman, Canada, in several cities in the United States and in the United Kingdom.
The director of the current Heron play, Redemption, he has received a number of Actor Boy Award nominations, for 'Direction', 'Set Design' (with Peter Dodd) and 'Lighting Design'. Another career highlight was his spearheading, in 2000, the MLTM's well-received tour of South Florida with Heron's Against His Will.
Prout sees his role as a theatre practitioner as, primarily, entertaining audiences. However, to him, 'entertainment' encompasses mentally stimulating audiences, getting them to ask questions, challenging, informing and even educating them.
For Montego Bay, he would like to see more theatre spaces opening up, larger audiences going to those spaces and more tourists going to see Jamaican theatre. He admits that Montego Bays theatre community has never seriously 'logged on' to tourism entertainment.
"We should have all entertainment managers and playmakers," he said about the audience composition at Fairfield's productions. This is, of course, in addition to the regular theatergoers.
Asked why over the years the MLTM has not been able to attract consistently large tourist audiences, he opines that "Maybe it's the all-inclusive concept the major hotels have." (The concept results in visitors staying on the hotel compound.)
However, MLTM directors have addressed and will continue to address the challenge and search for solutions, Prout declares. He recalls, "We used to have yacht club and Round Hill Hotel audiences and we've bused in visitors to the theatre." However, he adds, "the complexion of the audiences has been changing over the years, gradually getting darker."
Prout says that audiences have been good or poor depending on the nature of the production, the marketing associated with it and the popularity of the cast. He is confident the MLTM's next show, Children, Children will do well.
