A Mission theatre group lost its stage. It's still looking for a new one.

You know what happens next in a fictional play. A community rallies; the building inspector gets some kind of comeuppance; a new relationship is formed; a last-minute problem threatens to doom the whole endeavour; and in the end, a local institution is saved, proving to grumps and idealists alike that a theatre is a vital part of a community.

But real life comes with no guarantee of a satisfying third act, and months after being told its home base of nearly two decades could no longer host plays, Mission’s Opening Nite Theatre continues to search for a happy ending.

‘It was going great guns’

It didn’t come as a total shock to Camille Atebe when she was told in May that her community theatre group could no longer perform at the downtown Mission venue it had called home for 18 years. For years, she and her colleagues had expected to one day be told they would have to move—albeit for different reasons. But just because the inevitable had come to pass didn’t make the next step easier to take.

Opening Nite Theatre, the non-profit theatre company of which Atebe is now the president, began in 1993. After initially using community halls and churches for performances, the group began performing at the Clarke Theatre when that facility opened in 1996. As the Clarke became busier and harder to book, the value of their own space became increasingly obvious.

The group first rented its North Railway Avenue space 18 years ago. The site, across the street from Mission’s railway station and on the ground floor of an old building, wasn’t fancy, but it was an affordable place to rehearse for performances to be held elsewhere. And gradually, bigger things began to take shape.

“We called in the fire marshal and [asked] ‘Hey, can we do shows here?’ And they said ‘Oh, yeah,’ and gave us a number for occupancy,” Atebe remembers. “We went from there.”

Over the years, the group improved the site, adding risers and theatre seats and a full stage. Opening Night Theatre had its home. And it kept that home for nearly 20 years, rehearsing, then performing between three and five shows each turn of the calendar.

“It was going great guns,” said Atebe, who first joined the group in the early 2000s.

At the same time, Atebe and her colleagues were realistic about the future. The space was leased from an elderly couple who were happy to host the theatre group. But as the wheels of time turned—as their hosts aged and as other potential options became more expensive or disappeared—the space seemed increasingly precious and vulnerable to change. Eventually, the building would be sold. And whoever bought it would inevitably need their tenant to pay more.

“It has always been in the back of our minds that this is not permanent,” Atebe said. “We always knew our time was limited… We were always kind of keeping an eye out, looking for other places, but there was never anything that was available.”

Then the City of Mission—almost accidentally—pulled the rug out from under the theatre.

As the Mission Record reported earlier this year, a seemingly innocuous change in 2019 that required non-profits to obtain a business license triggered a cavalcade of bureaucracy that brought a building inspector to the theatre’s door five years later. When a new building bylaw created a category specifically for non-profits in 2019, the organizations affected probably weren’t even notified of the fact they would be expected to get a business licence, Mission’s chief administrative officer told The Record.

Eventually, though, someone at city hall realized that Opening Nite Theatre wasn’t up to date on its paperwork. Last year, a bylaw officer sent Opening Nite Theatre a letter, telling it that it needed a business licence—and a building inspection to get that licence. The inspection turned up the building’s lack of a sprinkler system and other violations, and just like that, it couldn’t host plays any more.

“We know it's an old building. We know there's stuff that needs to be improved and we've done everything we can to make sure it's as safe and as accessible as possible,” Atebe told the Record in June. But rules are rules and having discovered the theatre’s violations, the city couldn’t let them slide.

Five months later, the shows are still going on, but in a new, makeshift location. The theatre recently wrapped up a set of performances at Copper Hall, just down the road from the theatre. It’s now holding auditions and planning rehearsals for new plays in 2025 and is trying to line up space at the Clarke. But the future remains unclear despite promises from the city that, having almost accidentally evicted the theatre, it would help them find a new home.

The challenges come down to money, time, and the whole point of having a community theatre organization in Mission in the first place.

‘They’re being destroyed’

In June, Atebe visited Mission council with a legion of backers to plead for help from the city, and to try and communicate the challenge before them all.

She told council that it’s one thing to find a makeshift place to hold a play. It’s another to find a space that actually works and allows a community group to persist over the long-term.

Atebe posed a thought exercise to council, asking them to consider how they would cope if they lost their meeting chambers and were forced to relocate to a local restaurant.

Atebe said that while her theatre group doesn’t need anything fancy, it does need a place to host regular uninterrupted performances in a manner that will be acceptable to audiences. And that is different than finding a handful of openings on a calendar at a venue like the Clarke, where booking costs are high, or at other facilities that can’t properly showcase a theatre production.

“What it really comes down to, is we need to have an investment in community based infrastructure,” she told The Current recently. “One of the things that we've run into is even when they say, ‘Oh, well, you could just rent this space, or you could just rent this space’—Those spaces are really, really full. They're always packed and busy, or they're so prohibitively expensive that they're empty because people can't afford to use them.”

When she spoke to council in June, Atebe asked the city to consider buying a space, or upgrading an existing facility for the theatre’s use. Today, Atebe says the theatre is looking at a range of options. A local property owner has offered up a space that Atebe says would work for rehearsals, but not for finished performances.

Atebe has also stressed that the problem isn’t just one afflicting her theatre—and that a solution might not only help Opening Nite.

The solution might be both simple and—for a municipality already struggling to keep tax increases down—politically complex: spending money on flexible but unprofitable community cultural spaces.

“I think the city needs to really invest in some community spaces that are flexible, that are usable by not just us, but a lot of different groups,” she said. “I know they’ve definitely said that’s something they want to do, but they’ve been saying that for decades now and we haven’t [seen it]. We’ve seen the opposite happen, where rather than those spaces being built, they’re being destroyed, taken down, taken away.”

Atebe doesn’t know what comes next. But one place she doesn’t want to go is across the river to Abbotsford.

“There are theatre groups all around the valley and… I think it's important that Mission has a theatre group as well. If we don't, then that's one more thing that is like ‘You can go up somewhere else for that,’ and I hate to see that happen.”

A theatre for Mission

Mission, as anyone who has lived there knows, has always been a bit different from its neighbours. Its tight-knit urban core, low home prices, proximity to Abbotsford, and train connection to Vancouver have created a place that feels like a paradox: a (partial) bedroom community that sometimes feels like the antithesis of a bedroom community.

“There’s a lot of artists, there’s a lot of creative people, but it has also been seen as the boonies for a long time,” Atebe said. Whereas, say, Chilliwack might have the size and distance from other communities to support a vibrant arts community, she said, Mission had an “interesting dynamic.”

So far, Opening Nite Theatre has both embraced and added to that dynamic, playing its own role in the evolution of Mission as its own place.

Atebe is herself an emblem of that.

Having moved to Mission with her family when she was 13, Atebe graduated from Mennonite Education Institute, left to study in Calgary, moved to Ireland, then eyed a return to BC in her early 20s. She returned to Mission mostly because that’s where her family lived, she said. (Her father, James, was a city councillor before being elected mayor in 2005. You can find a 2022 FVC interview with him here.)

Atebe stayed because of the theatre.

Around the time she graduated from MEI in 1998, Atebe decided she wanted to try to be a professional actor.

Moving back to Mission put her close to the epicentre of the Vancouver movie industry and Atebe has been grinding out a career in film and television ever since. But Mission wasn’t exactly perfectly suited—it didn’t put her at that focal point, continually crossing paths with directors and casting agents. What it did have was Opening Nite Theatre.

Having joined the theatre group shortly after her return, Atebe discovered a group of likeminded people who wanted to make plays. Those people—and the linear, tangible joy of theatre—kept her in Mission.

“It’s a great city and I do love the people, but you have to get to know the people, and for me that was through the theatre,” she said. “Professionally, it would have made sense to move to Vancouver a long time ago.”

Atebe said she’s hardly the first person to find a community in the theatre.

“We get a lot of people who are new to the community and go. Maybe they’re not even interested in theatre or don’t know anything about it, and go just to meet some people,” Atebe said.

She said theatre can tell stories in ways that are otherwise unheard of in today’s world.

“There’s a lot of art out there—there’s TV and film and everything else, but there is something about theatre that is really, really impactful and can tell stories that don’t get told anywhere else,” she said. Atebe has herself written and directed a variety of plays that have been staged by Opening Nite over the years. Several of those are set in small towns with characters that seem pulled from Mission’s streets. “It’s a validation thing, and I think a lot of minorities know it very intensely, but I think it applies to everybody, no matter who you are. To be able to see something of yourself reflected in storytelling is really, really important.”

Theatre, she said, brings people together. It provides a creative outlet, a space to build community, and something that makes a smaller town worth living and staying in. But she said it’s also what gives people a sense of themselves, and an opportunity to explain to define oneself for both one’s own community and the broader world.

“If we lose the ability to tell our own small stories,” she said, “we lose a bit of who we are.”