news | Tuesday June 12, 2012

Vigil Comes to PAL Vancouver

Recently, there was a article in the Vancouver Sun by Peter Birnie about the new production of Morris Panych’s play Vigil this month at PAL Studio Theatre:

Joy Coghill will not go gently into that good night. Having just turned 86, the theatre legend is leading a campaign to keep older actors in the spotlight.

Coghill founded Western Gold, Canada’s first professional theatre company for senior actors in 1994. Now that she’s an integral part of the Performing Arts Lodge on Coal Harbour, the octogenarian actress has been busy calling on her colleagues in the facility for retired artists and performers to keep PAL’s wealth of talent working.

“I can feel this around me all the time,” Coghill says. “The people I know are saying ‘I have to work.’ ”

She recently helped organize a staged reading of Noel Coward’s Waiting in the Wings, which is appropriately set in a retirement home for actresses. Anna Hagan directed a cast of nine veteran thespians led by Barbara Wallace and Nancy Bell.

The next PAL project is even more ambitious.

On June 14, a production of Morris Panych’s wickedly dark comedy Vigil opens in the PAL Theatre atop the building, and this time Hagan stars, as the bedridden aunt of a man who appears with neither tea nor sympathy for his dying relative.

Panych himself played the part to great effect in a 2007 Vancouver Playhouse production. PAL’s production will offer an equally promising performance by gifted comedic actor Allan Zinyk.