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HAVE YOUR VALID BOARDING PASS READY FOR AIRPORT SECURITY!

HAVE YOUR VALID BOARDING PASS READY FOR AIRPORT SECURITY!
Gruppo Rubato’s newest production takes off June 4th.

Airport Security, the newest play by award-winning artist Patrick Gauthier, marks Gruppo Rubato’s  return to the Ottawa stage.

Presented at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre-Studio Theatre, 1233 Wellington St. West (at Holland Ave), the performance runs June 4-12, 2010, with a special preview performance on June 3rd.

Can’t wait that long? Visit our website, www.rubato.ca, to catch the latest installment of our 4-part short film, Airport Security, before we open!

Airport Security exposes our fears and foibles of airport protocol in Rubato’s characteristic witty and political style.  Playing on our insecurities and overconfidence in a system destined to both convolute and demystify air travel, from shuttles to baggage carousels, departures to arrivals, Airport Security scans Canada’s growing obsession with “security.”

Written and directed by Patrick Gauthier (2010 winner of the Council for the Arts in Ottawa’s RBC Emerging Artist Award, Rideau Award-Emerging Artist nominee and director of the multiple award-winning production Countries Shaped Like Stars), the production features talented local actors Simon Bradshaw, Kris Joseph, Catriona Leger, Tania Levy and Kate Smith.

Sarah Waghorn designs Costume and Props (having previously designed for Rubato’s productions of Listening and The Churchill Protocol). First time design collaborators are: John Doucet (Set), Pierre Ducharme (Lighting) and Original music by Ottawa newcomer, Ann Walton. Emily Pearlman (co-creator of Countries Shaped Like Stars by ¡Mi Casa! Theatre) is production Dramaturg.

Tickets are on sale now through the Great Canadian Theatre Company Box Office, in person or by phone (613-236-5196).

Show times are 7:30 p.m. with a Pay-What-You-Can Matinee on June 6 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 ($20 for students).

For more information, visit our website at : www.rubato.ca.

Gruppo Rubato was founded in 2002 by Patrick Gauthier and Tania Levy, and includes core members Kris Joseph and Gavriella Silverstone. Rubato presents challenging, contemporary, politically-charged Canadian theatre for a young, educated, urban audience. We are exclusively dedicated to the creation and presentation of new work, specializing in works by Ottawa artists.

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Just the Facts

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
— Edward W. Saïd

I suppose it takes chutzpah for a theatre company to program a play that deals with Israel/Palestine issues.  Based on what I’ve seen of public reactions to any piece of media that touches upon what goes on in the land sandwiched between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, I can understand the trepidation.  Some people don’t want to talk about it at all; some people bristle at anything that could even be perceived as criticism of either side.

I am working with the Great Canadian Theatre Company right now on a play called Facts.  It’s the world premiere of a script by Arthur Milner, and it maps some broad strokes of Israeli-Palestinian politics on to a murder mystery involving an Isreali detective, a Palestinian detective, a Jewish settler, and the murder of an archaeologist who was trying to prove that King David never existed.  If you’re not up to speed on Jewish history and culture, the implication here is that this archaeologist was murdered over his claim that Jews have no historical claim to the land on which their nation currently sits.

On the surface, it’s the kind of theatre I love to be part of: political and opinionated.  With the current pressure being placed on Israel by the US government over Israel’s expansion of settlements, it is also VERY timely and topical.  It is difficult to color the play as pro-Zionist, which runs somewhat against the grain of popular opinion in North America.  And while I don’t think the play is particularly inflammatory, it is certain to get some audience members riled up because, at its heart, it puts a Palestinian in a room with a man who believes without question that God gave every square inch of Israel to Jews.  I welcome the discussion, and even the argument.  But I have no control over how the audience will respond to the play, and that makes me a little anxious — especially since I’m playing the hard-line Jewish settler.

The only thing I have complete control over is my job as an actor, which is to embody my character to the full extent and intent set forth by the director and the playwright.  This means that no amount of discussion or debate with any audience member, on any side of the issue — no matter how persuasive or convincing — can sway me from the course of my work.  It mustn’t.  I tell myself this now because I am anticipating post-show discussions and talk-backs where I will be called upon to defend the things my character says and does.

There is a reason the play is called Facts, and I think that reason has a lot to do with the quote at the top of this post.  What I think Arthur Milner has cleverly done with his script is demonstrate how people cling to things that they claim are true (whether they can prove them or not), and how the utter certainty of those beliefs can lead to disaster.  The effects of this are deeply visible in the play, and I anticipate strong reactions from our audience as well.  As we barrel through our last days of technical rehearsals and into our opening week, I’m wondering if we’ll talk about the abstracted themes of the play, or if we’ll end up trying to “fix” the Middle East at every talk-back session.

We simply won’t know until you come and tell us.

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Preview of a dress rehearsal

Mother Courage and Her Children is open; it has been quite a week for the National Arts Centre’s English Acting Company.

I wrote previously about the immense challenges presented to us by mounting a play that is considered one of Brecht’s masterworks.  The outcome of working through those challenges was a Pay-What-You-Can dress rehearsal this past Tuesday, and I want to tell you a bit about that day.  I’m not writing this in the spirit of gossip, but because I have often talked in my own blog about the beautiful moments that can come with a career in the theatre, I think it’s important to describe the opposite end of the spectrum.  If you’ve been keeping track of our work on this play, you know that the preview performance that was supposed to take place on Wednesday night was canceled; after reading this, you may understand some of the reasons why.

To recap the events of the lead-up to last Tuesday, allow me to quote myself:

With six very full and focused days of rehearsal on the stage, we have yet to finish working all the way through the play once, and I am only cautiously optimistic that we may manage to wrap it up some time tomorrow, during day seven.  We’re still figuring out where the pedals in the car are, and how to adjust the mirrors, and hoping we never have to parallel park in the snow.

Well: at the end of day seven, we had managed to work through almost the entire play.  This left us five hours of rehearsal to finish working through the final scene-and-a-half or so, and then to work through the sound and light cues for the first four scenes or so.  It was a pretty tall order. And regardless of our progress on Tuesday afternoon, we knew that our audience on Tuesday night would be seeing us run the play from end to end for the first time. Ever.

Speaking personally, I was very excited about Tuesday.  I thought, as many of us did, that it was actually going to be a terrific experience: for us, because we’d finally get to feel the entire play, with all the bells and whistles; and for an audience, because stopping the show was basically going to be an inevitable occurrence, meaning they’d get a cool and utterly unique glimpse into how a theatre company works.

At 4:45 PM in the afternoon, though, we had run out of rehearsal time, and did not complete our ambitious plan for the day.  The stage manager used the final moments to show us some lighting states that we didn’t get a chance to look at, and then we broke for dinner. Our assistant director, Stephen Ouimette, assured us that he’d be in the house with the script for the performance, in case we needed to ask for help with a line.  Tanja Jacobs, our Mother Courage, suggested that Stephen might benefit from a vocal warmup.

7:30 PM arrived faster than many of us hoped.  Our director, Peter Hinton, addressed the dress rehearsal crowd of about 300 before we started. “Tonight’s a bit different than other dress rehearsals in the past,” he said.  “It’s the very first time we’ve put all of the scenes, costumes, sound, lights, music, props, and special effects together and run this play right through from beginning to end.”  He explained that actors would very likely be asking for help with lines, because a first runthrough can be overwhelming.  He warned the audience that we would very likely have to halt the show at some point, to correct something, and that we’d get going again as quickly as we could.  And he thanked everyone for being patient.

The performance began, and went off the rails almost immediately, as we all expected it would.  The net effect on the cast was both crushing and galvanizing.  The audience saw some very raw rehearsal work: lines were dropped and prompting was common; actors missed cues or were in the wrong places; one scene was done in the wrong lighting cue; set pieces knocked into each other or were moved incorrectly; actors saw each other in costume or in wigs for the first time, which affected focus; songs had to be stopped and restarted due to sound balance problems; props were missing or didn’t work or got lost in the shuffle of scene changes; the show had to be stopped many times — eight or so? — in order to correct issues.  At one point a disgruntled man in the balcony screamed “SPEAK UP!!” at the stage.  Many of our guests left at intermission.  Those that stayed witnessed a production that ran for about four hours.  After all was said and done, most of the cast was found sitting together in a single dressing room, not speaking, sipping beer and slowly shaking their heads.

In all honesty, nothing that went wrong was terribly unusual; it’s all stuff that I expect to happen on any show when it’s being run for the first time from end-to-end with full tech and costumes.  In fact, I’ve been involved with first run-throughs that were far worse: the difference here was that we had a few hundred people sitting in the audience watching us; and despite the pre-show speech, some people’s expectations simply could not be met.  It was a frightening realization of the kinds of bad dreams I have before opening nights, and I hope I don’t have to experience another night like it for a while.

And so, for these and a few other complicating reasons, the decision was made to cancel our subsequent preview performance, giving us a much-needed extra day of rehearsal.  We took what we learned from Tuesday night — a great deal, indeed — and poured it into preparation for our “first” preview on Thursday; that outing was far, far better, as evidenced by the fact that we shaved 18 minutes off the first act alone.  And now that we’ve finished our first weekend of performances, I can say that we all look back on Tuesday as a gift of a failure for what it taught us about the show and about each other; ultimately, Mother Courage and Her Children is better for it, and with heartfelt thanks to the audience members who were with us on Tuesday, we are now ready to present the show we always intended to present.  And it’s pretty damned good.

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Learning to drive Mother Courage’s cart

For a play that is often referred to as one the theatrical masterpieces of the 20th century, Mother Courage and Her Children is a play that is not staged very often.  I suppose, like many plays that have had long lives, it comes in and out of fashion.  But I also suppose that we don’t see it more often because a respectful and passionate mounting of the play requires more meticulousness and care than most theatre companies can provide.  This past fall, even the National Theatre in London, England, had to cancel one preview performance and do partial performances for another.  Fiona Shaw, who played Mother Courage in that production, wrote a terrific rehearsal diary for the Times Online, and two days before first preview, she wrote the following during a tech rehearsal:

I am called for a change into scene 4. We are moving on. Stephen Kennedy, who is playing the pastor, and I spend every spare moment crunching lines and discussing the essence of what we might try in the impending performance. It is so terrifying I wish we were the Berlin Ensemble and had six months to rehearse. If we get this on in the time it will be a miracle.

As I write this, during my day off before our final week of rehearsal, I could be the kind of ingratiating theatrical shill who promises that our NAC English Theatre production has effortlessly resolved all issues and is on the triumphant road to this year’s must-see coup de théâtre, but that would be a hollow and patently false statement. I’m exhausted and a little depressed, but although I’m part of a tight ensemble, I have absolutely no claims on the job of carrying our production. I can only relate empathetically to the stress and fear that are simmering in those in our company who have to do more of the heavy dramatic lifting.  We finished our last rehearsal of the week at midnight on Saturday; whereas the end of the work week is usually celebrated with a group trip to the bar, many of us decided to head straight home to rest.

So what the hell is it about this play that makes it so daunting?  I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single answer, which somehow seems a propos to play whose scope defies any concise description or aphoristic synopsis.  David Hare, who is one of many folks who have adapted the work from its original German, said that Mother Courage is a play that was written in three months and refined for twelve years. What is absolutely clear to us, in lifting the play off the page in Peter Hinton’s new adaptation, is that we could fill our lives with a years’ ceaseless work illuminating its infinite facets and paradoxes… after which we’d finish looking at scene one and give scene two a try.

Whole libraries full of books have been populated with analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s approach to theatre (you can even read about my three-week Ark experience here), but one significant aspect of our production focuses on Brecht’s love of dialectic construction.  Basically, this means that Brecht gleefully presents both sides of an issue as equal and opposite.  He takes great pleasure, I suspect, in finishing one scene with Mother Courage saying “I curse the war,” and starting the next scene with Mother Courage saying “I won’t let anybody spoil my war for me!”  Both statements, in their respective contexts, make sense; audience members are left grappling with the contradiction and must arrive at their own opinion of which statement they prefer.

Back to the problem at hand, though.  Scene 5 stands out for me as prime example of the immense booby-trap in which we find ourselves. On one side of the stage we see Mother Courage’s canteen-cart, where business is doing well and drinks are being served to soldiers who can pay for them.  On the other side of the stage we see the chaos of a house barely standing after it’s been sieged and looted by those same soldiers.  Injured people are hauled out of the house as soldiers and Mother Courage watch; a helpless baby is trapped inside the house. The dynamics of action on stage are complex enough:in the presence of soldiers, clergy, and even a daughter who runs into the burning house, Courage is publicly called upon to sacrifice business for the sake of helping strangers. And on top of the dramatic horror of dismembered civilians and the danger inherent in running into a burning house, Brecht layers the sounds of an army’s victory parade.  It’s less than five minutes of theatre that executes with the precision of a fight sequence, and whose morality could be the subject of a Master’s thesis.  It’s downright daunting.  There are many productions where scene 5 is cut altogether.

What we have in Peter Hinton, however, is an adapter and director of singular tenacity.  I’ve worked with Peter on a few productions now, and I have never, ever, ever heard him utter the words “it’s good enough”.  If a stage picture is unclear, it must be addressed.  If a moment is imprecise, it must be examined. Time will be taken to ensure that attention is paid to every detail. And there is so much detail.

Our move from the rehearsal hall to the theatre has introduced new elements that have had earthquake-like impacts on all of the painstaking work we’ve been doing since October.  The technical elements of this play are almost comically-simple relative to the work we presented in A Christmas Carol last month, but the focus and clarity and precision required on the part of our company of eighteen actors is of a scope many of us have never experienced.  We want to get it right, and Peter wants to help us get it right, and so progress on stage has been slower than anyone anticipated.

When I described the technical rehearsals for Christmas Carol, I mentioned three hours spent on a single scene change.  For Mother Courage and Her Children, we’re spending hours clarifying how the message of the onstage action is affected by everything from how far apart actors are to the way props are handled and every imaginable variation in between.  The irony is that, like A Christmas Carol, Mother Courage and Her Children will be functioning at 100% when audience members wonder what all the fuss was about, because it all looks very minimalist and straightforward.  To paraphrase Edward Albee, sometimes you have to go a very long distance out of your way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Analogously, it reminds me of learning to drive a car.  I remember sitting behind the wheel of my mom’s Ford Tempo for the first time, at age 15, terrified of how it was even possible to manage pedals, and steer, and check mirrors, and keep an eye on speed, and follow traffic signals, all at the same time.  Now — like many — I can drive from home to work without even remembering how I did it.

And so I have gone a very long distance out of my way to say that I simply do not know how ready we’ll be for our first pay-what-you-can preview audience this week, and take some comfort in the knowledge that this play has conquered many, many companies before ours.  With six very full and focused days of rehearsal on the stage, we have yet to finish working all the way through the play once, and I am only cautiously optimistic that we may manage to wrap it up some time tomorrow, during day seven.  We’re still figuring out where the pedals in the car are, and how to adjust the mirrors, and hoping we never have to parallel park in the snow.

But it’ll get there.

This is a week when I must remind myself that there is a difference between a preview performance (which is still a rehearsal) and an actual performance; and even though we will have members of the public watching us work as of Tuesday, we don’t actually open until Friday.  Our preview audiences will, I expect, get a few glimpses of the foundation as we put the finishing touches on the walls.

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Blowout

Bad things come in threes.  Number two tonight was a lit candle falling on my head onstage; number three was an apron falling off in the middle of the Fezziwig Christmas Party dance.  The first bad thing happened before the show began, and is why I want to say that the National Arts Centre’s wardrobe staff are godsends.

We got the five minute call for the beginning of A Christmas Carol and, as is customary, the cast began to gather in the wings and voms of the theatre to start the show.  Niall Patrick McNeil, who plays the beggar boy, was with me at stage left, running over the lyrics to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” softly, with his beggar-boy-cap placed jauntily askew on his head.  In my capecoat and top hat — looking like Abe Lincoln after a few too many Christmas dinners — I chuckled and suggested that it might be fun to rap the song on stage.  “God rest ye, merry GIN-el-minz!”, I said, and began to crunk for my own amusement.  I worked my way down into a squat position in a fit of improvised choreographic bliss, and then heard a telltale ripping sound from my posterior.  At this point it was three minutes to curtain, and I was to be one of the first actors on stage at the top of the show.

I exited the backstage area quickly and reported sheepishly to the wardrobe room.  “I think I ripped my pants,” I said.  “But I mostly wear a coat in the show, so maybe it’s okay for now?”

“Turn around and let’s see,” said Linda.  I did, and lifted my coattail.  Linda’s eyes went wide for all the wrong reasons. “Wow,” she said. “You blew the ass right outta those things.”

“Were you goofing around?” asked Ann, somewhat rhetorically.

“No,” I lied, and put on my innocent actor face.  I could have argued that dancing is a great pre-show energy-booster and necessary for my craft, but crunking to a rap version of a 19th century holiday carol is not truly a part of my regular routine. I’m sure they both saw through my denial anyway.  “I was warming up.”  I smiled, for added cuteness.

We quickly determined that I couldn’t go on stage with the rip as it was, because the pants would likely split right in half before long.  We also quickly clocked the fact that I have to wear the pants through the whole show, so there was no chance for me to get out of them to have them fixed.  In addition, there’s the scene at Fezziwig’s Christmas party, where the apron I wear leaves my back end rather exposed. Finally, as Peter Hinton began his pre-show announcement on stage, I reminded them that I had to be in the wings again imminently.

“Well, then, I have to do something right now,” said Ann.  Then, with a twinkle in her eye of the sort I’ve only ever seen on a few other occasions in my life, she said, “turn around and bend over.”

And so, under stern orders not to break wind, a makeshift, under-two-minute repair was made to my pants just so they’d hold together for the show.  “I’ve done this before for dancers,” she said.  I am SO not a dancer.  “It’ll hold for a bit, but no more squatting.  And warm up before you get into costume, okay?”  I was back in the wings and ready to start the show with time to spare.

We have two wardrobe staff working with us on the show.  They get about 90 minutes to do their setup for each performance, and the two of them are looking after costumes for 21 actors.  In addition to looking after laundry, they need to make sure every item of clothing in the show is prepped and in its proper location in the theatre before we start.  In short, they bust their asses for us, and I don’t help them much by busting the ass out of my trousers.  But they grin and bear it and keep everything working for us, and so we owe them a huge debt of gratitude for literally making us all look good.  SO here’s to them, and here’s to refraining from fantastic backstage choreography while wearing a capecoat and trousers.

–photo by AndyRob on Flickr

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Why actors think tech rehearsals are boring

This post is coming at you as part of a brief respite (read: day off) of rehearsals from the NAC English Theatre Company’s production of A Christmas Carol, which opens this Friday. We are currently, um, mired in technical rehearsals… which can be painstakingly-detailed, intense and exhausting. And, really — that’s being polite.

So — what the heck is “tech”?

Roughly-put, “technical rehearsals” are the period when a play moves from the rehearsal hall to the stage, as part of preparation for opening night.  The emphasis on acting is slightly decreased while everything else is added to the production: set, lighting, sound, costumes, special effects, and so on.  The exact nature of any technical rehearsal period is shaped by a number of factors, from the complexity of the production to the preferred working method for the production team.  Some plays are very simply-designed: very powerful theatre can be created with no set at all, or with one lighting state.  Some plays (especially Fringe plays) can tech in a few hours; some plays (large, long-running Broadway-style shows) can tech for weeks.

For the last few working days, the actors have been in tech for A Christmas Carol.  I’m specifying “actors” because our tech actually started a long time before we actors got involved, with the stage manager and production team working to prepare the theatre for the arrival of the needy-types (again, the actors). Although I haven’t checked with our stage management to see what they’ve done for Carol, I would be surprised if they hadn’t already done a “paper tech” — talking through every moment of the show to make sure all the cues are in the right places, and nothing is missing — and a “dry tech” — running through all of the technical cues on stage, without actors present, to make sure the basic setup is right.

The map for all of this work is something called the prompt book — literally, the bible for any production.  This is a heavily-marked-up and exhaustively-annotated version of the same script that actors use.  It’s far, far, far more than an acting script, though: it contains information on where every actor is on stage at every moment of the play; what they’re wearing, what props they’re carrying, where they enter and where they exit.  Our cast features a company of twenty-one actors, so this alone is a massive feat of documentation.  The prompt book also contains diagrams showing where all of the set pieces are, including all the bits that move (such as furniture… but we also have to track things like when doors and windows are opened and closed).  It contains a list of every lighting cue and sound cue and special effect used in the show, and dictates where and when each of those cues must be executed.  The prompt book knows all; the stage manager, who painstakingly builds the prompt book from scratch and uses it to run the show, sees all and controls all.

For A Christmas Carol, tech rehearsals with the actors have taken the form of a detailed, careful walk-through of the show from moment to moment, working and re-working every intersection of people and technology.  I’m estimating a bit, but I’d say we will spend at least 40 rehearsal hours picking through the details of a production that will eventually run at a length of 100 minutes.  Details include all of the following, in addition to things I’m sure I’m forgetting…

• We have to adjust to being on the stage: just being in a different space affects us, of course, but now that we can see the seats in the theatre in front of us, we can see where there may be problems with sight-lines. Additionally, we’re on a thrust stage (such as at Stratford), which carries its own challenges in terms of being visible and alive to everyone in the audience.
• We have to adjust to being lit: stage lighting can be very particular, in that being just a few inches out of position can mean the difference between being seen and being invisible. In this production, where light and darkness are almost characters themselves, this is particularly critical.
• We have to adjust to sound cues: scenes may be underscored or accentuated with sound, and often sounds have to be matched with onstage action.
• We have to figure out “traffic patterns” backstage: where props and furniture need to be placed so actors can find them when they need them; how to move on stage in the pitch darkness when six pieces of furniture and a rug are being moved down stairs and through doorways in seconds; where quick costume changes can happen so that they are effective and safe; which pathways need to be clear so that people can safely and quickly get from one part of the theatre to another.
• Our production also features lit candles and chandeliers and stairs and a trap door and ladders, and all of these things must be treated carefully so there is minimal risk of injury or accident.

A Christmas Carol is highly technical show thanks to its gorgeous design and direction (I don’t get paid to say this. Honest. Peter Hinton’s brain and vision are formidable and his style of theatre is the kind of theatre I love to be part of; Eo Sharp’s design skills are awe-inspiring, and I fell hopelessly in love with her work this past Spring when she designed the production of The Changeling that I did).  The play moves along at a very fast clip, with frequent set changes that exploit elegant tricks of stage magic.  These changes require precision and focus and in many cases have to be rehearsed several times to work out; as an extreme example, one sequence that will run about a minute on stage was the subject of almost three hours’ rehearsal.

For actors, tech rehearsals can be tedious: an actor waits interminably on stage to go through a scene change, thinking that nothing is happening, when in fact the stage manager is communicating over headset to an army of crew members and designers who are putting elements in place to help make the actor look and sound good.  Sometimes I get through less than a line of text before I’m asked to stop; I wait a few minutes while things are tweaked, wait another moment while things are reset, and then am asked to take it back again.  Sometimes what will eventually be an “offstage break” of a few minutes in the final production stretches to hours in tech… but actors have to be on “standby” at all times because they could be called upon at any moment.  Tech rehearsals test the patience and focus of everyone as much as they expose and help correct issues.  Anyone can relate to the exhaustion that comes from waiting for things to happen.

Today is our “day off” from the theatre; tomorrow we’ll jump right back into the 12-hour-a-day schedule.  We’ll wrap up a few loose ends with tech, and run the whole show twice.  On Tuesday night we’ll invite a pay-what-you-can audience to our dress rehearsal, and additional rehearsal time during the week will be used to correct and tweak any issues that arise.  We then have two nights of “preview” performances, and we officially open on Friday, December 11.  And that, dear reader, is what tech is all about, and why most actors, when asked how rehearsal is going during a tech period, will force a smile and say “great!”: tech is rough, and totally worth the effort.

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Egregious Facial Hair and “A Christmas Carol”

Back in 2001, I was doing a show that required me to grow a moustache.

“Required,” of course, is a word of my own choosing. The advances of theatre technology have resulted in amazing objects, made of fake hair (or hair of dubious origin), that can be attached to the face by way of wondrous substances such as ‘tape’, to simulate things like moustaches. But taping hair to one’s face is a bit of a pain in the ass, and it can be argued that it’s easier to grow facial hair than tape facial hair onto your head every night. Unless you’re a woman.

But I digress. So back in 2001 I grew this moustache for a show, right? And it looked ridiculous. I felt like a sleazy used car salesman, and most strangers who saw me with it asked me for directions to strip clubs and sex addiction meetings. Worst of all, the legacy of the 2001 moustache lives on forever, because my brother-in-law got married during the run of that show, and so I am present in all of the wedding photos as the guy who’s waiting to steal the dress off the bride’s back and pawn it for heroin money.

When I have some highly-visible physical change in effect for a role, I become That Guy who apologizes emphatically in public every time the physical change is noticed. “It’s for a play,” I utter sheepishly, and then wait for whomever has noticed the shaved head or toplessness or moustache or unfortunate weight gain to imagine the circumstances under which they’d willingly look like a dork in public for “art”.

What a ridiculous reaction, though. Isn’t it? I mean, I’m in a play, sure — and this is my job, and I get paid for it, and I’m doing very well with my work, thank you, so why not just be happy to look like a dork? After all, isn’t it at minimum a conversation piece that helps promote the show?

I think I trace it back to a number of Formative Experiences at an Earlier Age, when the response to my pride over growing facial hair for a role in a show was a patronizing assertion of my quaintness that belittled my career choice — especially at a time when my career choice wasn’t earning me anything. I was forever at the mercy of people who finished such encounters with statements like “Yeah, well, I had a dream once, too…” that trailed off judgmentally, leaving me in a pit of artistic despair. So, you know, growing hair for a part is now connected with a great deal of Silly Past History.

Enter A Christmas Carol — set in London, 1843, when I can only assume that the cost of things like razors and soap made hygiene and a clean shave impractical. The designer for the production asked most of the guys to grow some variation of lambchops; some said yes, and some said they’d rather tape dubiously-originated hair to their heads. I have a hard time saying no to anything or anyone — least of all to a designer I deeply respect — so I acquiesced.

Last night I trimmed the beard I’ve been growing into the facial hair that I’ve been asked to keep for the run of the play. It looks a lot like this:

I got out of bed this morning, looked in the mirror, exclaimed “Good MORNING, Brother Jedediah!”, and wondered how long it would take me to milk the cows. Then I got dressed and got on the bus to go to rehearsal. This is how I’ll look for the next month.

This time, however, I will make no excuses. This time, I own the Egregious Facial Hair I have grown, and aim to set a new trend. So many of the shop windows in the downtown mall already feature Victorian-era top hats and waistcoats, so… buy all that stuff, yeah? And then why not go all pre-Puritan and complete the look with facial growth that will save on shaving cream and inspire hipsters everywhere?

My name is Jedediah Joseph, and my Egregious Facial Hair is sexy. It’s ALSO for a play.

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Resident acting company returns to the National Arts Centre

The National Arts Centre in Ottawa used to have resident companies for opera, French theatre, and English theatre, in addition to the NAC Orchestra.  Massive funding cuts that began in about 1982, in response to budget deficits, scuttled everything but the orchestra — and the orchestra suffered severely.  The English and French theatre departments became “presenting” houses (meaning that they merely brought in productions from elsewhere, instead of producing their own), and all in-house production of opera was stopped (If you’ve not been in Ottawa long enough to remember, you may not know that the NAC used to produce an annual summer opera festival.  Its funding was cut because it was seen as elitist and uninteresting to Joe Q Public.)  It was hoped that all of these reductions would only last for a few years, as a means of grappling with cuts that took the NAC budget from $21 million to $7 million.

The English acting company, in that period, was home to some names that may be familiar to Canadian theatre-goers: Benedict Campbell, Neil Munro, Joan Orenstein, Jackie Maxwell, Richard Greenblatt, Diane D’Aquila, Paul Gross, and countless others.  Artistic director John Wood had a vision of a national theatre that would “reflect the country”, and he left the National Arts Centre when his ability to produce theatre was removed.

There has been a gradual return to ‘production’ at the NAC English Theatre over the last dozen or so years, but it is only now, in the Centre’s 40th anniversary year, that a resident English theatre acting company has been re-established.  Artistic director Peter Hinton has fought passionately to bring an acting company back to the building, and has won out: eighteen actors from across Canada are currently resident at the National Arts Centre, working in repertory style on productions of A Christmas Carol and Mother Courage in a 4.5-month span that will also take Mother Courage to the Manitoba Theatre Centre.

What a budget cut was able to kill with one sweep has taken more than a quarter of a century to rebuild.

The acting company is now a full month into rehearsal, and is getting ready to take Christmas Carol to the stage in just a few weeks. The acting company is made up of eighteen artists from every corner of the country, and proudly reflects our national diversity. The excitement in every corner of the National Arts Centre in palpable, and the company can’t wait to share its work with Ottawa audiences.  The sincere hope is that the resident acting company will once again become an important part of National Arts Centre programming!

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The Wrecking Ball is Swinging – November 16

PRESS RELEASE:  The Wrecking Ball swings in Ottawa once again!

Following last year’s sensational pre-election event, this one-of-a-kind co-lingual soirée of political theatre returns to the nation’s capital, in tandem with other wrecking balls swinging through cities across Canada this month.

This time around, we’re inspired by Yann Martel www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca to offer a few reading suggestions of our own. With a little help from our friends, we’ll consider what it really takes to win the hearts and minds of Canadians. And with our colleagues in BC now staring down the barrel of 92% cuts in provincial arts funding, we are spurred to step up to the plate and prove once again the power of art to affect political change.

This year’s writers, directors and performers include Ritallin, Benjamin Gaillard, Mélanie Rivet, Pierre Brault, Laurie Fyffe, Kris Joseph, Patrick Gauthier, Sonja Mills, Norman Armour, Waneta Storms, Kate Smith, Nick di Gaetano, musical guest Glenn Nuotio and fresh from the national slam in Victoria, the Capital Slam Poetry Team. And many more of your local favourites!! (we just don’t know which ones yet…)

About The Wrecking Ball
The Wrecking Ball was founded in Toronto in November 2004 to address a nagging imbalance: too much theatre in our politics, not enough politics in our theatre. There have been eight Toronto Wrecking Balls cabarets to date, and the October 2008 edition saw the WB go national – Wrecking Balls were staged simultaneously in ten cities across the country, in advance of the federal election. An unprecedented mobilization of artists and art lovers.

Writers are given no more than two weeks to come up with material that reflects the current state of affairs. They are free to write on whatever topic they wish: the global, the national, the local, the very local. The plays are then cast and staged at the last minute, and this immediacy is what makes the Wrecking Ball the rollicking theatrical nerve ending that it is.

Monday, November 16, 2009
Box Office opens at 6:30pm

Show starts at 7:30pm
Saint Brigid’s Centre, 314 St. Patrick St. (at Cumberland)
Pay-What-You-Can (no advanced sales) – proceeds to Les Prix Rideau Awards

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