Local artist Hayden Maines recently performed Emergency Ops, a solo comedy about a group of civil servants managing a disaster in a small town. Taking place last weekend at the Irish Association of Manitoba, this play is part of the Little Theatre Festival, a festival that spotlights local community theatre companies.
The plot of Emergency Ops centres around a semitruck crash in an unspecified small town one Friday evening, resulting a spillage on a railroad crossing. This causes a train to derail and its tank cars to leak gas.
“This small town and the five people who just happened to show up, all having their own worst day of their lives, are forced to work together and put aside their differences to try and save their town from total catastrophe,” Maines said.
Born in Neepawa, Manitoba, Maines is an artist and creator whose work spans across theatre, fiction, acting and more. He also worked at the Public Health Agency during the COVID-19 pandemic, updating displays in its emergency operations center and tracking shipments of COVID-19 samples and equipment across Canada.
“The original idea for the show came when I was doing my training for the logistics position […] We would go through several workshops and roleplays of different scenarios at different levels of government,” Maines said.
“As we were doing these things about snowstorms and power outages and car crashes and train derailments, I thought, ‘Man, this would make a really great sitcom in the style of The Thick of It, or The Office or Parks and Recreation.’”
Maines wanted to present a five-person show at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival last year but struggled to find a full cast, so he ultimately adapted it to feature only himself. This time, he performed the dialogue using ventriloquism.
“Each person in the Emergency Operations Centre wears a different coloured vest. Those vests are on poles, and I can talk back and forth between them, and the audience can understand the dialogue between them,” Maines commented.
“It’s also allowed me to really develop the characters, identify which jokes are working, which ones aren’t, which character attributes resonate with audiences and […] evolve the story to have more character arc and relationship between them all.”
With global unrest, climate change and economic challenges weighing on people’s minds, remaining positive may seem like an uphill battle. Maines’s Emergency Ops reminds us that community can still offer a glimmer of hope, despite the gloom and doom.
“The whole world is on fire right now, but we’re a community when we work together,” Maines stated.
“We’re not alone. We’re all in this together and we may have our disagreements, but at the end of the day, when we’re in trouble, we got to help one another.”
