Dunedin designer wins Dora award
Steve Lucas of Dunedin used to describe himself as the biggest loser in the history of the Dora Awards, but he jokes that he recently ceded that crown to a sound designer. The Dora Mavor Moore awards from the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts is Canada’s oldest and largest professional theatre, dance, and opera awards program. Over the course of his career, Lucas has had 36 nominations, and five wins.
His most recent win, in collaboration with Rebecca Morris of Orangeville, is for Scenic Design on a Brandon Jacobs play called Appropriate. In what has been described as a searing comic drama, the estranged members of an Arkansas family return to their crumbling plantation home to settle the affairs of a recently deceased patriarch. They come face-to-face with repressed memories and family secrets, forcing them to deal with unfortunate truths about the past. The play was presented at the Coal Mine, a small Toronto theatre, in the fall of 2023.
Lucas says, “It is a gift of a play, with the best stage directions I have ever seen. When I read the play I called Rebecca and said, ‘We will do this together and we’ll win an award.’”
The play is set in a single room of an old plantation that has seen better days.
“We used forced perspective with walls angling in and ceilings angling down,” he said. “There was a lot of symbolism around how white America has not aged very well.”
In the final moments of the play, the entire house collapses.
Lucas’s career spans several decades, and includes work on more than 500 productions in 27 countries. His portfolio includes traditional theatre, a few films, and event design projects like the 2014 Luminato Festival Hub and Nuit Blanche’s Drivethru Funhouse in 2012.
“I always thought I wanted to be film director and I saw theatre as an entree,” said Lucas. “Then I discovered there’s nothing fun about a big film production, whereas theatre is all about fun. Everybody is doing it for the love of it.”
Lucas is currently working on a new show called Powers and Gloria at the Blyth Theatre, and he’ll be part of a staged reading of The Time Capsule at the Dunedin Hall on Oct. 18 during the upcoming Clearview Small Halls Festival. It will be a dinner show featuring actors from Stratford and Toronto.
Lucas said, “In theatre, you go where the work is, but Dunedin is home. When we wanted to leave the city to have kids we wound up north of Shelburne, and that was fine but then I came to see the valley and meet people here and I fell in love. I remember driving along County Road 9 on a winter evening, the moon was reflecting off the snow and there were about a dozen deer on the road. I knew then that this is a magic space and we’ve now been here for 13 years.”
