Having worked for Gill in my cousins’ summer stock company I was sure I had an in. No sooner were auditions announced for the first two plays but I was there, ready to go. Gill did four plays a year and I fully expected to be in all four. Well, well, shrink that head of yours, Bill. Not only did I learn that no one did more than two plays with him a year, but I was not cast in either of the first two.
What was I to do? I suppose I could get an education, but that didn’t seem like full-time work. After a time I did land the small role of the valet in Sartre’s No Exit, which Kurt Reis was directing for the University College Players’ Guild. As it happened No Exit, exited before it began. I don’t recall why it was cancelled. Perhaps a play about two lesbians trapped in hell was considered inappropriate for the Women’s Union Theatre, the small attic theatre that was home for the UC Players.
Kurt Reis, then spelled with a C, was not to be denied, however. In January the university would hold a one-act play festival. The UC Players’ entry for that year was a Tennessee Williams one act called The Purification. Kurt cast me in the showy role of Rosalio. Also in the play was a dynamic young actor who would later play the leads in my first directorial efforts, Ray Stancer. One can’t help wondering. Had there been a National Theatre School in the fifties would Ray Stancer now be a world famous actor instead of a Toronto lawyer? He was an impressive talent. At any rate, my university theatre career had finally begun.
And, finally, Robert Gill cast me as Horatio in Hamlet, his final production of the year. The production was a touch wooden and I’m not sure I helped bring it to life. I believe the Globe and Mail drama critic, Herbert Whittaker, described me as a “piping Horatio.” People were beginning to wonder if Gill had lost his touch. But perhaps he had just lost that wonderful cohort of talented and determined actors from the post-war years. I was to do only one more play with Gill, Ferdinand in The Tempest the following year.
A solitary bachelor, constantly nervous with a perpetual shake and an ever present cigarette, Gill continued to be magnetic even as his talent retreated. I had known him when he was a major force in Toronto theatre, but now the sun was setting on a disappointing career. He died a few years later at the age of sixty-four, alone in his apartment, not discovered till some days after his death.
But if the production of Hamlet did nothing else, it introduced me to Catherine Cragg, who would eventually be my first wife. More than a foot shorter than I, Catherine was a second-year student playing a small role. Having been two years ahead of my class and several inches taller than I knew how to control, I was always impressed when an attractive woman found me desirable. They certainly had shown very little interest in high school. Catherine and I would be an item for the next four years.
One great advantage to academic life at U of T in the fifties was that we didn’t have to work very hard. Or to be fair, we didn’t have to work very hard until February or March. During the year there were essays of course, but no mid-term exams. Some of my brilliant colleagues in Jeanneret House boasted that they didn’t “crack a book” until February. And then they went on to stand first in applied mathematics. We were able to get by by going to lectures (sometimes), doing our essays, talking and listening and reading, but not really studying until spring. For me this meant an active life on campus, as actor, director, scene designer and builder, debater, and campus politician. And still able to do fairly well academically.
By 1956, my cousins had given up the Straw Hat Players, their summer theatre in Ontario cottage country, to focus their attention on the Crest Theatre, their resident professional theatre in Toronto. For reasons still unclear, the Crest has seldom been given its due credit as a major influence in the development of theatre in Canada, or Toronto at least. It operated from 1954 to 1966 with a full season of professional productions of a great range of plays. One comment from critic Nathan Cohen was that they never developed a unique purpose or style, a criticism which could be levelled at most of our current regional theatres. In some ways ambition and hopes were higher in the fifties than they are now. At any rate, like regional theatres now, the Crest tried and did provide a broad range of dramatic fare. As the only professional theatre in the city, it took that to be its mandate.
The theatre building itself put the company at a disadvantage from the start. A converted cinema, the house was long and narrow. Audiences now are used to being much closer to the stage. By today’s standards the audience numbers they needed were large indeed. The theatre seated 800 and the company needed 400 a night to break even, a number that would thrill many theatre managers in Canada now. Location was a further problem. Situated in a residential area far from downtown, not only were there no good restaurants nearby, but that area of the city was “dry.” In “Toronto the Good” in the fifties, alcohol was hard to come by and in this area of the city, impossible. Anywhere in Toronto in the fifties would be a challenging location. When we were playing at Hart House in downtown Toronto, getting a drink after the performance was only slightly easier than at the Crest. We had to rush to the Chez Paris and order food. Only then were we allowed a drink after 11 p.m. The only place worse in my theatre travels was Dundee, Scotland. In Dundee in the early sixties the pubs closed at 9 p.m. We had to drink at lunchtime. I recently finished reading Christopher Plummer’s wonderful memoir, In Spite of Myself. He seemed to drink endlessly after performances. Things must have been different in Montreal and New York.
What a different business model the Crest was. When it began it was a stock company: not just in the sense that it presented a season of plays, but it was a private company owned by its stockholders. Subsidy for the arts was still something only communist governments did. Like any private company the Crest hoped to make a profit. It never did. The deep pockets of the Davis family, derived from their tanning business in Newmarket, propped it up several times. When subsidies finally did become available in the sixties, its history as a family business limited its eligibility. I was in England when the project finally unravelled in the early sixties with none of the accolades it deserved. While Donald continued to have a terrific career as an actor, Murray never recovered. He did some voice teaching for me at the National Theatre School, but by and large he retired to his farm near Collingwood, Ontario.
But here I was, finally getting down to studying for my first year final exams at U of T and wondering what I would do for the long summer, much longer than a high school summer. My colleagues all seemed to have plans to make tons of money somewhere or develop their skills in some interesting internship, though that was not yet a term in regular use. My cousins could no longer provide me with a play or two to do, and the undergraduates who were now running a summer company in Muskoka had not invited me to join them.
My father, bless him, said that I didn’t need to have a job. He suggested I could develop a reading list and spend my summer quite productively. Yet it seemed de rigueur to have a job. And so, following my love for horse racing, I answered an ad and was hired by the newly opened Woodbine race track. The job turned out to be in the bowels of the building. I don’t think I ever saw a horse. At any rate I was fired after a few weeks, my first, but not last, experience of being terminated. How do you tell people you have been fired? How do you go home in the middle of the day — I was living at the family home in King at the time — and explain that you are a failure? True, they fired half the staff that day and probably only hired us to help get the new track open, but at age eighteen it was my first rejection since Jerry Campbell (female) stopped sitting with me on the school bus. And what was I to do now? Well, as it happened, rescue was at hand.
Ontario in the fifties was a hotbed of summer theatres. A new company was trying to revive Muskoka; Michael Sadlier was running the Peterborough Summer Theatre. There were companies or attempts at companies in Lindsay, Jackson’s Point, Vineland, and, of course, Stratford. With the exception of Stratford they were all stock companies, putting on a season of plays normally for a week each for tourists and lo
cals. A wonderful training ground for actors, directors, designers, and technicians, these companies were Canada’s answer to the British rep system, both, sadly, long gone.
In 1956 John Pratt, formerly a performer with my cousins and later the mayor of Dorval, Quebec, aimed to open a theatre on Centre Island. Well, it had something going for it. There was an abandoned cinema they could use and it was located in the large metropolis of Toronto. Well, sort of. The fact that you could only get to Centre Island by ferry was thought to be a pleasant summer outing for the hoped-for audience. I suppose it was for some, but driving to the harbour, walking a good distance, waiting for the ferry, and then walking a good distance at the other end may not have appealed to all theatregoers. The valiant attempt lasted only one summer.
My foray into the working world having been cut short, I jumped at their offer to be an apprentice in the new company. And so, moving back into my room at the Sir Daniel Wilson Residence for the summer, I began the regular treks to Centre Island to work under the mentorship of designer/builder Russ Waller. Many of the major actors in Toronto worked in the company: Austin Willis, Kate Reid, Jack Creley. Andrew Allan directed some of the productions. Then in the twilight of his illustrious career, not that he was old, only that the world was passing him by, the great radio producer, Allan gave me my first but not last view of a director belittling an actor, embarrassing him in front of the company for no apparent reason other than the failure of his own career. “Are we going to do that again tomorrow night?” he would ask with withering sarcasm. John Clark, the victim in this case, was as far as I could see a talented young actor who was very kind to me and had done nothing to deserve such abuse. On the other side of the ledger I have nothing but praise and appreciation for Russ Waller. While I had been around theatre from an early age I really knew nothing about how it worked, how a play got on the stage. Russ taught me to build and paint scenery, to create and read a ground plan, and to set up and strike a set, all skills that I would continue to use for the next few years.
Returning to university in the fall of 1956, once again I was not cast in either of the first two Robert Gill productions at Hart House. Was rejection becoming a way of life? I was able to continue my working relationship with Russ Waller who designed and built the set for the first Gill production that year, Dark of the Moon, and I began my relationship with Donald Sutherland as we both worked crew on the show and rattled the thunder sheet together. Academically, I enrolled in my philosophy major and joined a small group of University College philosophy students who would study together for the next three years. Among our number was the future leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, a charming and thoughtful young man, Ed Broadbent. Ed was one of those people who seemed to be genuinely interested in you.
But I was not to be denied as an actor in the fall of 1956. Kurt Reis cast me as the lead in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, a University College production that would play in Hart House Theatre when it was not being used for a Gill production. My role was challenging, that of a young dissolute doctor who is attracted to the uptight minister’s daughter, wonderfully played in this case by Aileen Taylor who would later act in the first play I directed and work with me at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal. By the end of the play her character has become dissolute and mine respectable.
It would be so interesting if one could go back in time and see oneself in such an early work, or even to understand what one thought one was doing as an actor. Was I any good in this? I have no idea. I remember I thought I was pretty terrific when I came offstage and felt the tension through all the muscles in my back. LAMDA (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) would later disabuse me of the notion that tension and good acting went together. In the play, my character, John, kisses three different women: the uptight spinster, Alma, a hot Spanish woman, Rosa, and his new young love, Lizzie. I am puzzled when I look back on this production for I dreaded these kissing scenes. From my current vantage point as an oversexed senior, I would give anything to go back and kiss those three attractive young women night after night. What was I thinking? The character clearly enjoyed these experiences. I was playing the character. Shouldn’t I have enjoyed them also?
Recently I read William Shatner’s memoir, Up Till Now, and he talks about his first sex scene in a movie and his terrible fear that he would get an erection. If it were me, I would be afraid I wouldn’t get an erection. I mean, wouldn’t it be embarrassing to be rolling about with some lovely naked woman and to be seen not having any response at all? Alas, since I was not an actor during my romantic lead years I never had to deal with that issue.
The Method, the degree to which an actor identifies with a character or merely represents a character, was a heated topic in the fifties. Many of us thought that if Marlon Brando’s inaudibility was a sign of the Method maybe we were better with John Gielgud’s verse speaking. I don’t know if I had really taken a position on this subject at the time, so when Nadine Ragus, who clearly had a position on the subject, playing the hot blooded Rosa thrust her tongue inside my mouth in a fervent French kiss, I didn’t know how to react. The audience couldn’t see our tongues. What was the point? But give me the chance to replay that scene now . . .
Was I afraid that if I enjoyed the kissing I would be disloyal to Cathy, my girlfriend at the time? I know I hated it when she had to kiss someone on stage. Was I afraid I would be abusing the actors in a personal way if I enjoyed a sexual contact with them? Nadine’s active tongue would seem to have absolved me of that guilt. Or was I just shy?
As they say, youth is wasted on the young.
But my career was soon to take an unexpected turn, leaving the kissing issue and other personal acting issues behind. David Stein, later known as the writer David Lewis Stein, had undertaken to direct a one-act play for the UC Players’ Guild that would be entered in the same one-act play festival where we had done Purification the year before. David had worked with Kurt Reis on some of his productions and wanted to try his hand on his own, but feeling a need for someone with more acting experience he asked me to work with him to which I readily agreed. Directing was new to me and I was anxious to give it a shot.
Well, it’s not strictly true that directing was new to me. At age twelve or fourteen I used to roll up my sleeves and act like a director when my younger cousins and I would present little plays to our uncles and aunts. We called ourselves the Ragged Shirt Players in counterpoint to our grown-up cousins, the Straw Hat Players.
Needing a play of a certain length I recommended The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan, a play in which I had played the young Taplow years before with the Straw Hat Players. Central to the play are the crotchety headmaster, Crocker-Harris, and his younger wife who is getting it on with a younger teacher. We had the good sense and good fortune to cast Ray Stancer and Aileen Taylor as the two leads. Casting Aileen may have been a bit of a cheat. I’m not sure she was actually registered as a student though she spent a lot of time on campus and could often be seen in the Arbor Room, the canteen at Hart House, having coffee with Peter Gzowski, who was then editor of The Varsity. But, whatever, I learned an important lesson about directing. If you get the best actors at least half your work is done.
For whatever reasons David lost interest in the project as it went along and I became the sole director. I took to directing as a dog to a bone. I loved being in control; I loved the intellectual challenge and I discovered I had a good spatial sense. It was easy for me to create stage movement that was both natural and varied. The production was an unqualified success. Robert Gill said it was the best directed undergraduate production he had seen. Well, with that accolade what was I to do but become a director?
Gill did finally cast me one last time, in the final production of my second year, The Tempest, in which I played Ferdinand opposite Cathy’s Miranda. Ferdinand is not an easy role and I’m not sure I did anything with it other than convince myself and others that my decision to switch to directing might be a rat
her good idea. The surprising performance, to me at least, was Donald Sutherland’s excellent performance as Stephano, surprising because so far as I was concerned he hadn’t been much good in anything else I had seen him do. A raw talent, people would say. I agreed to the raw part. One day during tech rehearsal we were sitting together in the house and Donald said, “I know I can act.” I was struck by his assurance since it would not be Donald Sutherland whom most of us would have predicted to become a successful actor. Ray Stancer, now the Toronto lawyer, more likely. But I have seen this self-assurance about acting a few times since, when a young person knows they will be a successful actor whatever anyone else may think. Brian Cox, perhaps. R.H. Thompson. Diane D’Aquila. I auditioned both Robert and Diane for the National Theatre School. I figured I might as well accept them. They were going to be actors whatever I did.
Yet Sutherland’s self-assurance at the time was belied by a conversation I had with him recently. Apparently he was not decided on his future; in fact he had dumped the question entirely in the lap of critic Herbert Whittaker. If Herbie gave him a good review he would be an actor, otherwise not. Well, the rest is history.
Campus life was to involve me in other ways throughout my four years. In 1957 I was asked to debate the proposition “Resolved that Faubus was right.” Orval Faubus was the governor of Arkansas and stood on the front steps of a Little Rock High School to prevent African Americans from entering in accordance with the new civil rights laws. I think the debating society had been turned down by every potential debater in the college before they got to me. No one wanted to defend Faubus. I guess they had no trouble getting people to take the opposition side, but no one would take the government position as the “pro” side in a debate. Well, why not? Attacking the proposition was just too easy so I agreed to defend the proposition. Debates at the college were set up like a mock parliament with those supporting the motion sitting on one side, both the debaters and the audience, and those opposing the motion sitting on the other. When I entered the hall it was packed. Everyone was sitting on the opposition side, no one, that is, no one, on our side, only the other poor sod who had also agreed to defend Faubus. I presented what I thought was a rather intelligent argument, that we had to define “right” from Faubus’s point of view, not our own, and went on to present a picture of life from that point of view and show that in those terms Faubus was “right.” After the official debate the floor was open to speakers from the audience, the audience crammed into one side of the hall. Well, Stephen Lewis got up — yes, that Stephen Lewis, who later became leader on the Ontario New Democratic Party and Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. Eloquent as always, he proceeded to lambast me and my arguments and defend civil rights in general and African-Americans in particular.
Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir Page 5