That Summer I was homeless … “of no fixed address” as the media puts it. My addresses were American Express Offices in London, Paris, Vienna, Florence, Innsbruck and Munich.

I walked. I barged. I hiked. I trudged. I purged, divesting myself of familiar and comfortable mindsets and was launched into experiences I’d never had before. Untethered, I walked the “Pilgrim’s Way” from London to Canterbury along the North Downs in Surrey and Kent. I barged the Oxford Circle outside London for seven days with two people I’d never met before. I hiked the Alps for a week with a hiking Club in the Stubaital outside Innsbruck earning five “kasermandl” (little mountain trolls) certificates, in the process. I rented a villa for three weeks in Impruneta outside Florence and hosted Lorne Kennedy and Goldie Semple for a week. But mostly, I walked. And cried. And laughed at myself. And slowly, I urged myself into a semblance of normalcy. It took a long time – I was away for four months – but I got there.

I saw few performances while away. Gemma Craven in A.L.Webber’s “Song and Dance” in London is still in my emotional memory. An astonishing production of “Die Meistersinger” in a small regional opera house outside Innsbruck remains embedded in there too. But little else. I had made my mind up to stay away from theatres for the Summer and stuck to my guns … for the most part. I did succumb to some shows once back in Canada. How can one not when one is visiting cherished friends in Stratford and Niagara on the Lake. Those weeks were a transition back to my real world.

I returned to Winnipeg in the Fall, calmer, and ready to continue where I left off. But it didn’t quite work out that way. I hadn’t been cast in “A Tale of Two Cities” which opened the Company season because I was returning too late for the start of rehearsals, and I discovered I needed something to do. Fortunately, by now, I’d made something of a mark in the city and was asked to work at Stage West, the city’s only Dinner Theatre. For some reason I still can’t really understand, back in those days a Dinner Theatre production was rarely mounted without a “star” in the lead role. Dinner Theatre was considered the “end of the road” for aging movie or television performers. My last experience had been many years earlier in Seattle with

Howard Keel (who actually went on to a major revival of his career in the TV series “Dallas”) and now I was teamed up with Henry Jones. “Henry who?” you might ask? His picture is at the left here and for those of us “of a certain age” it is one of those faces you’ve seen so many times before but never knew the name!

The play was Alan Ayckbourn’s “How The Other Half Loves”, a farce of epic proportions following the consequences of an adulterous affair between a married man and his boss’s wife and their attempts to cover their tracks by roping in a third couple to be their alibi, resulting in a chain of misunderstandings, conflicts and revelations. Confusing? That was the whole point. The action centers around two dinner parties happening in different places at different times but with everyone on the same set on stage at once. Miraculously, audiences buy into the conceit and hilarity ensues.

I can use only one word to describe Henry … “laconic”. He was in his early seventies when I worked with him. Just like the characters he usually played in film and television he had a slow, drawling and deliberate delivery, was incredibly funny and had done his role in this play many times before. That was a danger in itself. His advanced years (and experience) made him somewhat cantankerous and impatient and that showed itself a number of times over the course of rehearsals (and a couple of times in performance) especially when one of us would “break”. “Breaking” is, essentially, an inability to maintain self-control in a scene and give in to laughter. It is a result of actual reality intruding or breaking in on the actor’s created reality, reminding us how ludicrous a particular situation was. (Think of those moments during any number of “The Carol Burnett Show” episodes on television.) It was VERY easy to break in this play.

Toward the end of Act One, one character, out of anger, has to dump a tureen of soup and noodles over the head of another. That “other” was me! The wonderful character actress, Miriam Newhouse, played my wife and, under the “right” circumstances, had a very low breaking point. She had a pixie-like face topped off with huge glasses which magnified the dangerous twinkle in her eyes when she was about to “go”. When the tureen was dumped over me the audience would explode. I would sit there, noodles dangling over my face, soup dripping into my lap, and slowly look up, aghast at what had just happened. This slow look would provoke the audience to a bigger laugh. We would then shift in our swivel chairs into the second dinner party and continue on for a mercifully short while to end the Act. That would make the audience laugh even more as I sat there, noodles dangling from my head and liquid dripping off the end of my nose as if nothing had happened. I would look over at Miriam sitting opposite me praying that she would maintain. Once I saw her eyes widen and her lips begin to purse, I knew it was over.

The first time we broke in rehearsal Henry went ballistic! He started yelling about us not being professional and how we had no idea what acting was all about and stormed off to the Green Room! That sobered us up a bit. Well, maybe not so much. His tirade and exit made us laugh all the more. But we had to get it out of our systems. For a performer, that kind of detour from the reality we had set up for the audience was a huge no-no. We collectively apologized to our Star knowing full well that he was right, pulled ourselves together and continued on with the rehearsal. It didn’t happen again … until one performance.

We were well into the run. Our houses had been spectacular, both in size and response, and we were riding a wave of adulation and favour both in the theatre and, frequently, on the street when people would stop to tell us how much they enjoyed the show. There is really never a time to get complacent in the theatre. Often one has to resist falling into a mind-numbing routine and playing it by the numbers. It’s hard to dredge it up eight times a week as a run goes on and on. But we bear responsibility to the audience to give them our best, so we are disciplined, we maintain and are always in control. We had not had a “break” since rehearsals.

The “soup” comprised a lot of noodles (for maximum visual effect) and a goodly amount of water. Since the tureen would sit backstage for a long while until required during one of the dinner parties, the water was initially very hot so it would be comfortably warm when it was dumped over me. It was our second show of the day at the end of a long week well into our long run. To save time, stage management had, on this particular day, decided to set up the props table for the evening show right after the matinee. This, of course, included the tureen. Between shows the backstage area was aired out with a door open onto the alley to make everything “fresh” for the evening show and to cool off the guys in the hot kitchen downstairs. It was late November!

The show was rollicking. We could do no wrong. The laughs were uproarious and sustained at all the right places. We got to the dumping moment and, as always, I internally prepared myself for the deluge. The shock of the now freezing cold water took my breath way and I let out a huge gasp and then a high squeal of surprise. There was a suspended moment and the audience went nuts. I looked over at Miriam as usual. She’d not heard that sound come out of me before. Her eyes widened and her lips pursed and I could see she was going to lose it. All I could think of was how Henry was going to react. Miriam started to dissolve and I followed, both of us very gradually turning chairs into the other dinner party, but not before the audience saw what was happening to us … which made them laugh all the harder … which made us laugh all the harder!. The real world had intruded upon the whole room but we had to keep going.

Through the dangling noodles I could see Henry’s face getting redder and redder as he became apoplectic. He stood up and screamed his remaining lines of the scene at the top of his lungs and the lights faded. The audience was still laughing and the applause started to grow. We all stumbled off stage in hysterics, but at the same time bracing ourselves for the deserved tirade that now came at us in the dark. He refused speak to us until the middle of the following week.

Henry died in 1999 at the age of 87. I celebrated his life by telling that story to some friends at a party. And it struck me how this path I’ve chosen to take in my life is made up of moments that, unbidden, get meaningfully lodged in the recesses of the brain for a reason. They remind us of the fragility and vulnerability of being an artist, always subject to external forces, sometimes beyond our control, against which we push in order to open pathways of understanding, both for ourselves and others during our short journeys in this place.

I’ve always considered performing to be holy in some ways. We are tasked with being guiding spirits at times, providing solace, stimulation, confrontation, confirmation, and while the words we speak or sing might not be our own, we use them to provoke responses, be they laughter or tears, to make us all aware of our frailty … complete with soup and noodles!

There’s nothing like double paychecks! While the “Other Half” contract was winding down in the evening at Stage West, I was in multiple daytime Company rehearsals at MTC for Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi” and Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”, which were to be performed on the Mainstage in rep through the early winter months, and for Christopher Durang’s double bill “The Actor’s Nightmare” and “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All For You” at MTC’s Warehouse Theatre! Could this get any more complicated? I felt sorry for Stage Management trying to organize my rehearsal schedule for all four plays. Because the Mainstage shows were being done in rep and because they were both huge productions, the rehearsal period was extremely long. And because my roles were very small, it was thought that doing two bigger roles in the second stage wouldn’t be too much of a chore for me. Seriously??

“Duchess” is an incredibly dark revenge tragedy which Richard had chosen to set in Mussolini’s Italy, making the atmosphere even more depressing (think “Garden of the Finzi-Continis”). At the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum was “Much Ado About Nothing” all light and sunshine, bright and funny. That was being directed by Louis Sheeder, a producer at the Folger Theatre Group in Washington and Professor at the Tisch School in New York. While I disappeared into the background of “Duchess” (and actually remember very little about) my role of ‘Balthazar – a singer’ in the Shakespeare got bigger and bigger as time went on. Louis had commissioned a lot of music for a production he’d done 6 years earlier in DC and this served as a foundation for the expansion of my initially small role. It was a lot of fun, very satisfying and my pipes were given a good work-out singing the Shakespeare Songs for transitions and within scenes for atmosphere. Above is a group photo of Peter Smith, Maggie Askey, Debbie Grover, Tommy Anniko and myself all looking hugely happy with ourselves, (except for Peter who was forever trying to get himself out of his murderous ‘Bosola’ mindset in “Duchess” for “Much Ado” performances!).

Meanwhile, rehearsals for “Sister Ignatius” and “Nightmare” proceeded apace across the street. “Nightmare” concerned the dreams performers often have about being on stage with no idea what play they are in or what they are supposed to say or do. It was directed by Don Scardino, another New York director, and a friend to this day. A gentle, sweet, sensitive man, Don guided us through the minefields in both plays. I was playing ‘Henry Irving’, the grand English Actor, and remember still the response I got every night at my initially improvised entrance. I would come in at the back of the theatre and work my way to the center aisle through the last row of the audience, jostling, making as much commotion as I could to draw attention saying “Excuse me. Pardon me. Sorry. Excuse me” all the way along the row. Just as I reached the last seat, would jump out into the aisle startled, imperiously look back at the nearest lady in the row, draw myself up and exclaim “Madame!! You must NEVER touch an actor!!” The audience would dissolve. Great entrance!

“Sister” wasn’t quite so easy. I must mention that back then, parallel to my professional life, I lived a firmly Faith-based existence. At one point during the play, which is a savage but very funny criticism of the Catholic Church, my character, ‘Gary’, has to nail a baby Jesus doll to a cross. I hated doing that every night. Absolutely hated it. Don and I had many conversations about that moment. He had played hundreds of performances as ‘Jesus’ in “Godspell” on Broadway and had some comforting insights about his own faith and balancing actions that might viewed as less than “faith-full” while on stage. It helped but I never really settled in to any sense of acceptance about that personally hateful moment. Eventually, many years later, I came to realize that a special part of me was an ability to feel one way and act another when required. The challenge of trying to separate my personal truth from a truth I had to play on stage was overcome incrementally over a long time but ended up being strangely satisfying. Both Warehouse shows ultimately, exhaustingly, went very well, and just after the New Year, we opened the Rep on the Mainstage and plodded our way through the two months of the runs.

It was during this period that word began to circulate about Ouzounian leaving MTC and taking over as Artistic Director of Centerstage in Toronto. To the Company, this was devastating news. We had experienced three and a half years of wondrous work and had become a close-knit Family. The future looked very uncertain. As the thought of Richard’s departure set in, two things happened to me.

The first was realizing that work wasn’t going to be the automatic slam dunk as it had been for the years previous. One tends to get complacent when the silver plate is extended year after year. I had to start thinking about how to get the time ahead in order. Fortunately, I had developed a good reputation in Canadian West and, as I discovered, opportunities began to present themselves rather quickly. Even before the season ended, I had auditioned for and been cast in a number of productions. I had even auditioned for Stratford, but because of conflicts, that never worked out. It turned into a case of birds in the hand versus the bush.

The second thing that happened was driven by ego. At the encouragement and urging of a lot of people, and with some degree of trepidation, I threw my hat into the ring and applied for Richard’s job. That was crazy … and scary. Of course I’d never been in Management and had only a performing background to offer on my application. But I did know the Manitoba Theatre Centre and they knew me … in spades. To make that part of a long story short and to spare you any anticipation as to the result, I didn’t get that job; but not before a LOT of great meetings and wonderful conversations happened. Even as it was happening, I viewed it all positively both as a character building and learning experience.

“Much Ado” had been booked into the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and our last weeks as a Company were, unfortunately, spent far from home. At least we were all together when the end came. Richard had come into town for the closing and, after toasts and hugs at an Italian restaurant across from the Arts Center, simply and sadly, it ended. The following morning, everyone flew away in different directions, and while we would see each other in times ahead, it was the end of an Era.

I landed back in Winnipeg and hit the ground running.

(One promise I made to a couple of posts back was to find a photo of Richard Ouzounian who subbed in as ‘Lady Bracknell’ in “Earnest” after dear Maggie Askey broke her hip. With the help of Brian Paul I attach at left said photo. I hope The Boss doesn’t mind. I include it here with great love and respect, and this is a wonderful memory (for many of us) of a great performance, short though it was! )