Mist blankets most of the Avalon Peninsula, but a break in the weather lets the sun shine on Petty Harbour, a lovely little cove just outside St. John's. Or maybe it's the refracted flare of a film production. For Petty Harbour is the production centre for Hatching, Matching & Dispatching, written by Mary Walsh with Ed Macdonald, directed by Henry Sarwer-Foner, and starring Walsh, Mark McKinney, Shaun Majumder, Rick Boland, Susan Kent and Sherry White.
Hatching's been dubbed a "sketchsational," as opposed to "situational," comedy. "It's a hybrid," said producer Mary Sexton, "a mockumentary, a cross between a documentary and sketch comedy." The series follows the Furey family, who run their community's funeral parlour, ambulance service and wedding hall. The hour-long pilot, with a $1.6-million budget, started production on July 19 and is tentatively set to air in early January on the CBC.
The art department has converted Petty Harbour's old schoolhouse into a soundstage/studio. The call sheets list the nine scenes to be filmed, including three interiors to be blocked and shot in here. Film parlance fills the space, flowing from radios and walkie-talkies, "We have the second tripod." "Lock it up." "Sound." "Rolling." It's the chattering cadence of the set dressers and production assistants, the grips and the gaffers composing the 50-member crew.
Film is in the details: the drape of the fabric on the gurney, carefully taped by the art department; the configuration of props in the frame of the camera; the bounce of the light off the portable white screens. Everything is checked, measured and tweaked.
Two monitors show Walsh in a sleeveless pink and white blouse and Kent in a plain, sturdy apron and much eyeliner. They are performing "a testimonial," a consistent element in Hatching's script structure. First, assistant director Steve Reynolds, off-camera, asks a question, and they answer in a realistic overlapping of dialogue that is sharp and comic. Between takes -- they do five -- the director makes a few suggestions; to keep it small, to milk the awkward pauses. Each take earns applause from the assembled.
Walsh has had the idea for the series since she was 11 or 12 years old, when she misunderstood hatching, matching and dispatching -- a business slogan she saw spray-painted on an ambulance -- "as a joke, a wonderful insouciance to life and birth and death. But it was no joke, it was a common term." It was also common that one family in a small community run a funeral home and at least one other enterprise. Walsh enlisted actors White and Boland to interview different families who ran such clusters of business around the Avalon. Sometimes they had the school bus and ambulance services, sometimes a snack bar and funeral parlour. Walsh, White and Boland workshopped the material along with actors Johnny Harris and Joel Hynes, and Walsh then took those workshop tapes and started writing with Macdonald.
"CBC came in on the development," said Sexton. "We wanted to see if the lines flew or fell on the floor."
"Certainly the process to date for me has been fulfilling, exciting and challenging," Walsh said in her trailer between scenes, now wearing a crisp black-and-white suit.
All the principal actors have trailers, a clutch of them parked at the base camp/production office in Petty Harbour.
The series' "sketchsational" formats developed because she "thought I would want to write sketches." This is, after all, coming from the dynamic force behind This Hour Has 22 Minutes. The sketch-comedy framework doesn't exclude drama and character development and story arcs, although Walsh said, as an actor, "I'm not very good at arcs.
"But I knew I wanted to write about these people, and at the end of the half-hour show, you'd know more about them, and their community, then you did at the beginning."
Walsh's character, Mamesanne, is the matriarch of the Furey family. "She feels she runs everyone. Her children all live and work with her in one big building, which must be difficult in reality, and she wants to keep the lid on, to be in control. She says 'There's no privacy in this house.' "
Kent plays Darlene, the middle child, who does embalming and makeup. "She's self-conscious and shy and takes pride in her work."
Kent has many theatre credits, and is also working this summer with Rising Tide Theatre's Trinity Festival.
She knows that acting for the camera requires different tools than a stage performance. For one thing, events don't unfold in sequence.
"There are a couple of reads at the top. I always go through the script and mark the character's journey throughout. So when you come in on the day, the sides [scheduled scenes]are familiar to you. But it always takes on a life of its own anyway. With the mix of actors, it becomes this lively, different thing you can't prepare for."
"You know your lines, we've had lots of readings," said White, who plays Myrna, the eldest daughter "who thinks she's a little above the rest of the family." White also wrote and starred in The Bread Maker, a feature film screened at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. "Film roles can happen so quick, I'm lucky to have had a finger on my character for a long time. I spent all that time doing the research -- and not one of those people were what I thought they'd be like. They tend to be portrayed as cold and icy but you have to have a heart to be in this business.
"But honestly it wasn't until I got this hair (a prim pageboy cut that reached its fashion peak in 1974) that I felt I really got Myrna," White said, laughing. "It's so defining. It's like a clown nose."
Boland, who plays Mamesanne's husband Phonse, said the research and interviews took himself and White from Fermeuse to Conception Harbour. This kind of fieldwork is something he and Walsh have employed since the great theatre collectives of the 1970s and 1980s, like Terras de Bacalhau and Makin' Time With the Yanks.
"The method was to go and talk to people," said Boland, "the ladies of the night for Terras, the women who'd married American servicemen and moved to the States for Yanks. I love doing research and I love the idea that you base your work on real people. It really grounds the work. Not that it's not fiction. But it has verity, a residue of verity."