Cooper’s Chaos

Going into his fifth year with the Church Mouse Players, Cooper Rushton decided he wanted to put his own words in his mouth.

The Church Mouse Players take to the Legion stage this week for their winter production, and for the first time, the play is written by one of their own.  After working mainly behind the scenes over the past four years, Cooper Rushton is the playwright this time around, in a show he calls “Grandpa’s Christmas Chaos.”

With four shows that include dinner (November 12, 13, 14 and 15th), the play will be held as usual at the Royal Canadian Legion–Branch #36, on Jackson Street in Oxford. The menu features a roast beef dinner with tea or coffee, plus dessert, $30.00 per person. Tickets are available at the Parkview Family Restaurant (902-447-2258).

Hello Oxford sat down with Cooper for a chat during rehearsal last week. The grade 11 student at OREC says this isn’t something he had planned to do: “It just came out of my time here. I never thought I’d write a play ever.”  

Cooper’s first appearance on stage with the Church Mouse Players was as Tiny Tim in the 2021 play Call Me Mr. Scrooge. 

Asked whether the story came from real-life experiences with his grandfather, Cooper says… “Maybe.”

“Sometimes there are some parts in there that I could picture him doing. And most of the lines come from real life. I think about (my grandparents). I wanted an old fashioned Christmas like they used to have.”

He says he’s looking forward to his family seeing the show: “Mom’s coming opening night with some family on her side and then they’re all coming Saturday night with some family on both sides.”

Cooper says there’s a mystery afoot this Christmas:

“It’s about a big chaotic family Christmas, with a bunch of mysteries. And the two weird detectives are going to somehow solve it.”

We asked Cooper about the writing process. While the idea was there, getting the words on paper took some time: “Long. I got a little frustrated every now and then because you couldn’t think of everything. But it was fun.”

He says he worked on the play “Every day when I got home from school.”

Starting in the Spring, Cooper worked with play director Kendall Mills. The two batted the story around over the summer, with Mills helping with editing and a few ideas to move the story along. 

Mills also worked with Cooper on the mechanics of translating a story into action on the stage. Mills says he’d thought about writing a play too: “…you know, at some point I was thinking, when I retire maybe I’ll have more time, maybe I’ll write a play. But we have this up and coming young star, 16 year old young man, and just in passing he says, you know, I might try one sometime. So, hey, great, by all means, I said, if I write one, great. If you write one, great. Or if you want just any kind of guidance about stuff.”

Mills says there wasn’t a plan, or a timeline, to have Cooper deliver a script — it developed through collaboration over the past several months.

“You’ll have your inventory of your items and then you’ll have your acts and the different pieces that go together. But I said, the main thing is your ideas. So get your ideas down and we’ll figure out how they go and put things in order later on. So didn’t know where it would go. I thought, well, you might have a skit. Who knows what it will be… He kept coming back a couple of weeks, another week, another week…. he come back with a few more ideas and then he actually wrote a couple of scenes. Hey, we’ve got something here now.”

Mills says it was a learning experience for Cooper, given all the parts that go into making a story into a production: “(We talked) about fleshing out your characters a bit and who you’d see and what not. A lot of plays we do, we have small cast. I want to be careful how many male characters we have. So he was doing all the right stuff. So just he started to sort of build it with the idea that maybe we would actually perform it. This is pretty good stuff!”

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Dinner and a Play, $30:  “Grandpa’s Christmas Chaos” at the Oxford Legion, November 12, 13, 14, 15. Get your tickets now at the Parkview Family Restaurant (902-447-2258)!