Lindsey Keene didn’t land the first Sock ‘n’ Buskin role she auditioned for.
At the time, Keene was a second-year public affairs and policy management student at Carleton University, and had done local theatre throughout her high school years and even over Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She had come a long way from her first ever role as Babette the feather duster in a community production of Beauty and the Beast when she was 15-years-old.
But she was “devastated” when Sock ‘n’ Buskin didn’t cast her in their April 2022 production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
“No shade,” she joked in an interview three years later.
The following season, the same company that rejected Keene cast her in the titular role of its December 2022 rendition of Dracula.
The Charlatan called her stage presence commanding and confident as she embodied the vampire’s evil, sinister nature.
Aside from getting to become someone else for a couple performances, part of what Keene loves about theatre is the community-building aspect — which rings especially true for Sock ‘n’ Buskin.
“It’s so special, the bonds that you create, the inside jokes and the references you start to understand,” she said, recalling late-night campus runs to Ollie’s Pub and Oasis with Sock ‘n’ Buskin crews.
“It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever done.”
Founded in 1943, Sock ‘n’ Buskin is Canada’s oldest student-led theatre company and has seen many notable alumni spread their wings under its marquee.
For alumni and current members, Sock ‘n’ Buskin breeds a love for theatre and community, in addition to professional experience.
“It’s just incredibly special in bringing people together,” Keene said. “Theatre is really magical like that.”
But Keene owes more than a love for acting to the art of theatre. Through a mutual friend’s local production of a self-written play, Keene met her now-fiancée, Dawson Fleming, who is also a community theatre actor.
The two recently played an engaged couple in Ottawa Little Theatre’s June production of 37 Postcards (they got engaged in real life three months later). The Charlatan wrote that Keene and Fleming’s “dynamic chemistry” propelled their scenes and left audiences in stitches.
Part of mixing their personal relationship with theatre is learning to work together.
“We know that we can work together at home and we can work together in a relationship, but in a working capacity, we take it very seriously,” Fleming said.
“Those are different skills and those are different things that we have to approach.”
In their Sock ‘n’ Buskin days, Keene and Fleming also worked together on shows like 2023’s Elephant’s Graveyard, where Keene played Ballet Girl and Fleming played Railroad Engineer, and 2024’s Murder on the Orient Express, where Keene directed and Fleming played Colonel Arbuthnot and Samuel Ratchett.
Keene didn’t take it easy on Fleming while directing him — “I have higher standards” — but said she learned more about how they can better understand one another.
“That’s a really interesting experience that not a lot of couples get.”
“It makes us work better,” Fleming added. “As a team in those environments, but then at home as well, we know we can trust each other.”
Outside of building understanding and community in Ottawa’s theatre scene, Sock ‘n’ Buskin has turned out some other notable alumni, like Driving Miss Daisy Oscar-nominated actor Dan Aykroyd.
Canada-based artist Zach Counsil’s resume includes starring in Sock ‘n’ Buskin’s RUR, What the Butler Saw and Bat Boy (a role he later took to the Winnipeg Fringe and reprised at the Gladstone Theatre).
“When you’re a young actor, you need roles that allow you to stand out and be professional,” Counsil said, citing Batboy as one of his notable early career roles. “That gave me the circumstances.”
Sock ‘n’ Buskin also gave Counsil the opportunity to flex his skills as a director — tackling their 2010 production of Peter Pan, a production he recalls had more than 60 people involved in the cast and crew.
“Peter Pan is a beast, like a technical marvel with a million fight scenes, flying and special effects, it’s a monster of a show to do.
“It was a wonderful way to dive into the world of directing.”
Now, with years of Sock ‘n’ Buskin in his back pocket, Counsil is an actor, director, fight and intimacy director. He has taught stage combat and intimacy coordination at the University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University and York University.
Counsil said Sock ‘n’ Buskin “catapulted” his fight directing capabilities. The theatre company’s space and resources, he added, provide an opportunity for young artists to work with mentors and proper theatre equipment.
“Sock ‘n’ Buskin having access to that is really rare,” Counsil said. “It’s a really brilliant stepping stone from the amateur world into the professional world.”
In the company’s 82nd year, seeing young artists come and go through Sock ‘n’ Buskin is part of the “rewarding” experience for co-artistic directors Max Schneider, a fourth-year film studies and communications studies student, and Zane Labonté-Hagar, a fourth-year software engineering student.
“I’m the one seeing the applications come in, and it’s nice to get to know people over the years,” Schneider said. “We know that we’re able to reach people with different goals and they’re still getting something from it no matter what.”
“Some people come because they enjoy theatre, but they just really like the community,” Labonté-Hagar said.
This year, Schneider and Labonté-Hagar introduced the inaugural role of the archives and alumni coordinator. Their job is to go through decades of Sock ‘n’ Buskin media coverage and create digital archives to preserve records of the theatre company’s history.
“It’s been really nice knowing that we’re rebuilding and reclaiming our history and having something to show for it,” Labonté-Hagar said, “just knowing that the stuff we’re doing right now isn’t going to be lost in time.”
When it comes to recognizing how they fit into Sock ‘n’ Buskin’s eight-decade legacy, it’s too soon to tell for Schneider: “I’m too into it right now to consider what that will look like for people kind of coming in the future.”
But Keene (who plans to continue acting in Ottawa’s local scene for as long as possible) said she and Fleming are a part of Sock ‘n’ Buskin’s story as much as the company is a part of theirs.
“I will be very grateful that something I got to be at the helm of will be there forever,” Keene said. “There are so many years, and at the end of the day, we’re just a couple years of it.”
Featured graphic by Alisha Velji/the Charlatan
