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by Gordon Pinsent

  Some in our field are continually faced with threats to their potential that seem impossible to overcome and, because of it, they will quit their dreams, leaving them on someone else’s doorstep. They walk away, reluctantly falling in step with the going throng, content to walk in ruts that have been created by others, instead of remembering that the most important voice they heard was their own, and to know not to stop listening to themselves, and to never return their natural gifts for giving to someone else’s store. Never being a tenant of their own talent, but owning it; being the landlord of it. And lifting it high for all to see and to hear in a voice distinctly their own.

  Am I the only one concerned, at times even distressed, by the fact that there does not seem to be any thread between young talent today and the actors, writers, and directors who built the highway they drive on? Years from now, others will be in the same spots as we are now. They won’t be related to us; they may in fact bear no resemblance to us. And if they see no sign left by us in the best work we do, they could conceivably have the notion that they are the first ones here. But not if our footprints are deep enough, and our example clearly drawn!

  When I was doing publicity for Away from Her, my stops included a visit to an Alzheimer’s home for seniors in St. John’s. While I was there I noticed a local politician who had been running for an upcoming election, in search of votes perhaps, bending down to a wheelchair, to speak to an elderly patient.

  “Hello, my dear,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”

  “No, I don’t,” the dear woman replied, “but if you go to the desk, I’m sure they’ll tell you!”

  To leave those footprints, we need to know who we are. To leave those footprints, to set that example, we have to acknowledge what we already know to be true. If that truth is hiding under The Ledge, we need to extricate it, and the sooner the better. Because it’s a profound but simple truth: It is better to be happy. It is better to walk with your head held high, and not with a victim’s walk. Because I still think that the Creative individual is the most glorious individual in our society.

  * From “It’s a Desperate Thing,” by Gordon Pinsent.

  making them wait

  You’ll work and play and scratch and bite

  You’ll learn to kill with sheer delight

  You’ll only come alive at night, when

  you’re in a show

  Welcome to the theater!

  You fool … you’ll love it so.*

  OVER THE YEARS I‘VE BEEN FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO get a lot of stage work. And despite my giggling debut in Winnipeg as Sebastian in Twelfth Night I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of Shakespeare, too. And loved doing it – loved being onstage. There’s something about that peak – when you’re up there – because it’s the true reason why you got into the business. And when you get up there it comes and slaps you in the face, but it’s quite a lovely feeling. So when you see some strange new wonderful character waiting to be played, something odd happens. It sort of takes you over. And it gives you a sense of how it might be, to inhabit someone else’s personality, someone else’s character, in the human comedy. A rare and unique opportunity to enter into someone else. And you go with it.

  Doing an experimental play, or a play that’s has never been done before, can give you a sense of comfort. Because it’s never been done before, there’s no precedent. You are originating the role. No one is comparing the way you play the role to the way Brian Bedford played the role. Maybe the buck stops here, but it also starts here, which can make for very exciting theatre.

  At one point in my career I was so focused on doing film and television that one day I realized I’d given up a lot of stuff I adored. Musicals, for example. I had gone to the Royal Conservatory in Toronto for singing lessons so I could play leads in musicals. I did Guys and Dolls in Winnipeg, Anne of Green Gables in Toronto, The Music Man in St. John’s. Music Man went very well, I think, and yet, not one telegram of Bravissimo! from Robert Preston, so I’m not positively sure. It was one of those deals where your understudy does it in the main body of the rehearsals, until you arrive, fur top coat and white fedora, with your pair of Prussian wolfhounds on a leash, shouting, “I’M HERE!” And then you do not do as well as your understudy, who has now become a hero to the other kids. And then, before you leave town, you have the nerve to suggest you wouldn’t mind doing Man of La Mancha next. As in, as if. And with all of it you are reminded once again how gorgeous it is, how great it can be to arrive on rehearsal day and really enjoy the stuff you’re doing. And that the other stuff, the TV, is getting in the way of that pleasure. But invariably you come back to earth and do another series, so you can afford to play hooky every once in a while and run away to do a musical. Or even just a well-conceived play.

  After all these years my memories of being onstage at the Manitoba Theatre Centre and Theatre Calgary and the Vancouver Playhouse remain surprisingly vivid. I can still hear the audience murmurings when we premiered Bernie Slade’s play A Very Close Family in Winnipeg. And I still remember working with Ted Atherton in Calgary in a play by the Aussie writer David Stevens called The Sum of Us. It was a four-hander, just four actors, and Ted played my gay son. Every night he had to push me onstage in a wheelchair, because by the third act I’ve had a stroke, and he had to deliver a speech to his father, me, and every night I would silently respond to his speech, right on cue, with tears streaming down my face. And one night after we’d taken our final bows he turned to me, his eyes shining, and said, “Gordon, how do you do that?” Which, of course, was music to my ears, and very generous of him to say.*

  It’s not all love letters and roses, of course. When I went back to Winnipeg to do one play I got a bad review, and I was feeling pretty down about it, until a woman sent a note to me backstage which read, High station in life is earned by the gallantry by which appalling experiences are survived with grace. So that saved me for a long, long time. Did my performance in the play get any better? Probably not. But I felt a lot better about it. When the play finished its run, I took the woman’s note back to Toronto and stuck it on the fridge. I was in love with it for a while, and in time it had company – another note from another sympathetic theatregoer, after I received a decidedly unsympathetic review from a Toronto critic. The review in question all but demanded a strong reply, but the sympathetic Toronto theatregoer urged me not to take the bait. “Never wrestle with pigs,” he advised me. “You both get dirty, and the pigs love it.”

  Words to live by.

  In my salad days my family turned out to see me onstage whenever they could. My brothers refused to make a fuss over me. Don’t tell him too much. But my sisters were always there. All three of them. If I was in a play, they were there. And in their souls they were built for this. The whole family was. They had a great taste for better times, if they could only get to taste more of them.

  One of the many rewards of being chosen by Miss Charmion King to be her consort were the many privileged insights she would share with me over time. Over the years we did four plays together, two of which I wrote just so I could be onstage with her. About twenty-five years after The Madwoman Of Chaillot – we didn’t want to rush into anything – we did my play, Easy Down Easy, at the Gryphon Theatre at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario. Two years later we did my next play, Brass Rubbings, at the Factory Theatre in Toronto and at the MTC in Winnipeg. I specifically wrote Brass Rubbings as a vehicle for Barbara Ham, and the three of us had a lot of fun being onstage together. Jackie Maxwell directed the show, and having the legendary Eric House in our merry little band didn’t hurt the audience’s feelings or ours.

  The last show Charm and I did together left us with some wonderful memories, especially since the two of us were the only people onstage. We performed A. R. Durney’s wonderful two-hander Love Letters in Ontario and B.C. and loved every minute of it. Years later Leah and Peter got the idea of adapting it for television as a sixty-minute special by using well-known couples to read excerpts from it
, and using me as host to link all four couples. In addition to Leah and Peter, the celebrity couples who added their own lustre to the project were Debra McGrath and Colin Mochrie, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones, Carlo Rota and Nazneen Contractor, and Sheila McCarthy and Peter Donaldson. Peter had been diagnosed with lung cancer two years earlier, and he and Sheila both knew his days were numbered. So Sheila was especially happy to have this permanent record of them performing together as a loving couple.

  It was also around that time that I decided to revisit Easy Down Easy. Berni Stapleton, a Newfoundland actress I greatly admired, had become the artistic director of the Grand Bank Regional Theatre Festival in Newfoundland, and Berni wanted to present the play in her July Festival. As if that wasn’t flattering enough, Mary Walsh wanted to direct and possibly revamp it. We all knew the play needed work, and we all seemed to feel the same way about the work it needed. Before its premiere in Toronto two decades earlier I had written one of the roles specifically for Charm, as a way of getting to work with her again. Charm had done the play with me somewhat reluctantly, as she realized that her role, regardless of the stylish trappings in which I had dressed it, was superfluous. Cutting that role was at the top of Mary Walsh’s creative hit list, and I couldn’t really argue with that.

  “Gordon, I want to go for the jugular on this,” Mary told me. “I want it to be like a fast train. I want it to move!”

  I wished them well. Over the next few months we conferred mainly by telephone and occasional emails, and when July rolled around I flew to Newfoundland to attend the July 9 premiere in Grand Bank. The play was inspired by my hikes with Wally Cox in the Hollywood Hills, and Lewis, the central character, was loosely based on Wally. So it was fascinating for me to see what Mary had done with it. She had wanted it to move, and boy, did it ever! It was at least an hour shorter than it had been.

  After the performance Mary cornered me.

  “Well, Gordon,” she said, “what do you think?”

  “Well, Mary,” I said, “it moves like a train – but there’s no dining car on it!”

  After more tinkering Easy Down Easy was selected for the official grand re-opening of the famed and newly renovated LSPU Hall in St. John’s. The play ran eleven nights in October and in my opinion was exceptionally well received. Berni Stapleton got wonderful notices for her performance as Lewis’ enigmatic wife, Mary was praised for her “crisp” direction and I received the now-familiar “Canadian Icon” accolades. What’s not to like?

  Was it hard for me to watch another actor play a role I wrote specifically for myself? Yes, and no. Because most of them don’t do it the way I did it. Charm used to watch me and say, “You’re making them wait, aren’t you,” and I woud say “No, no, I’m not.” But I was, of course. At times. I would take a breath, and take in the moment. And the audience would take a breath too. Or maybe hold their breath, if I took too long a moment. I had adopted the dumbest rule ever: Don’t let yourself get to three. And, Jump – the net will be there. (I’d borrowed that last bit from Julia Cameron.)* Okay – maybe not so dumb. Because we’re conditioned to threes. So instead of waiting for a full count, I would plunge in at two, which would sometimes startle the other actors and would always startle me. Because if you let yourself go before you get to three, you get a chill. You get a chill at the same time. And that was the point of it, of course. To keep me out of my comfort zone, so I couldn’t do it by rote. It becomes a natural moment if you don’t allow yourself to get to three. Because you purposely jumped in before you’re ready. You purposely played a trick on yourself. To prevent myself from getting into the habit, every night I broke the habit. And counted on my belief that the net would be there. That’s what all actors learn in time. Take the leap, and the net will be there. It just takes some of us longer to leap than others.

  I’m not doing many plays now because so many are co-productions. You do a play in Winnipeg and they expect you to do it again in Ottawa six months later. I like the fast ones. Get in and get out. With the wardrobe. Especially if you like the clothes your character wears, and look good in them; always get the wardrobe. But do the play in one city, in one theatre, and get out.

  There’s another reason, too. A couple of years ago I finally went public and admitted that I suffer – and that’s the right verb for it – from trigeminal neuralgia. Before they came up with medication to treat it, they used to call it the suicide disease, because the pain literally drove people to kill themselves. I’ve had it for at least twelve years. It’s very debilitating. It causes these excruciating stabbing, electric shock-like pains in your eyes. The pain is very intense. It feels like being bitten by a tiger, or what I imagine that feels like. Sometimes I have to take time off work because of it. And that’s why I’ve had to take time away from the theatre, because I worry that the pain will return while I’m in the middle of a scene or, worse still, a great Shakespearean soliloquy, and I will be unable to continue. But I’m getting used to it, and I’m getting better at handling it. It used to send me to the floor, and now it doesn’t.

  I’ve had several offers to do Lear, and an awful lot of people still tell me I should do Lear. The jewel in the crown, and all that. But when I think about it I always end up with the same question: Why? Why put myself through that? For the slim possibility of coming up with something a little different, discovering something in the character that nobody else before me has discovered? I guess it would be a great exercise. God knows, Lear is a wonderful piece.

  I love the thought of sitting with an audience, watching Chris Plummer do it, or Bill Hutt. Since Bill shuffled off this mortal coil we have been left without another of our voices. His was not a voice which will fade easily in our memory, made up of so many rich and glorious character portrayals on the many stages of this country. Now his voice will be heard in the memories of what he has left us: his Prospero, his Lear, his Tyrone, his Lady Bracknell, his Valpone. With his passing the theatre has lost one of its most faithful friends, and so has the oldest and the youngest of us, and the scenery is not quite as bright as once it was.

  But no, no Lear for me. Not at the moment. On the other hand, if a great new stage role comes along tomorrow, something glorious, something that makes me believe that my life will be unfulfilled and incomplete if I don’t do it, I will do what I always do. I will say Yes. And it will continue this way, until the only thing left for me to play will be a revival of On Borrowed Time with the Homeless Repertory Company of Allan Gardens. Because at the very end, I’ll be dragged offstage. And they won’t know if it’s me or the play that stinks. I’ll just go right off the stage and right into the holes. Because I won’t be stopping voluntarily. It’s just too great a love.

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  as I foretold you, were all spirits and

  are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  the solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  and, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  as dreams are made on, and our little life

  is rounded with a sleep.*

  * From “Applause,” with lyrics by Lee Adams, music by Charles Strouse, from the Broadway musical Applause (1970).

  * Aussie actors Jack Thompson and Russell Crowe played father and son in the 1994 screen version.

  * See Julia B. Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, 1992.

  * From The Tempest (1611), by William Shakespeare.

  chromosome 11

  AS AN ACTOR YOU’RE SIMPLY AT THE MERCY OF OTHER people’s perception of you. It can be a terrifying feeling. The rewards can be great, but there is no steady happiness in this business. There are peaks of joy and valleys of gloom. As you get older, you forget that it was an adventure at one time, that you w
ere able to take the falls. You think, “I know I’m good. I’ve had it proven. Then why is it not working now?” You feel you can’t take the falls. You say to yourself, “Gee, I need this. This is all I can do in life.” And you need it so desperately that just the thought that it could disappear is enough to scare you.

  Does that make me a member of an endangered species? Not today, no. Better to be an actor in the twenty-first century. It’s no secret that it has taken centuries for us to erase the ancient opinion that the actor belongs in one of two places in our society, on the stage or in the stockade. In the echelons of higher society, the actor would have been seated below the salt, and checked for silverware before leaving. In iron curtain times, in Prague, for example, many of the artistic calling were considered to be “non-persons.” And as far back as the Roman era, it was proclaimed, regarding the rites of marriage, that “if a daughter, grand-daughter or great grand-daughter should marry a freed man or a man who practices the profession of an actor or whose father or mother did so, that marriage will be void.”