Sometimes, I become aware of how vast this Journey is, how decisions and options have dictated the paths of my Life, accidentally or on purpose. I know that each choice made in the moment has affected the next choice made in the next moment, whether it is taking a breath or a step, or looking somewhere for a split second and going in that direction. It baffles me that I am mostly unaware of those intuitive choices but that they affect everything that happens to me. On stage there are set parameters (movement, dialogue, story line, character) within which one is pretty well confined, and “being in the moment” gives only an impression of spontaneity. I’ve resolved, at times, to become more aware of “being in the moment” in daily life, but the complexity of each decision or the choices within those moments are not at all like being on stage.

That being said, it was at this point in my career that I became overwhelmed by the immensity and variety of those choices. It is only from this perspective, so many years later, that I marvel at the choices I made back then. I find the “what if” factor playing out in my mind. “What if” I had stayed working my way up the management ladder at Lincoln Center in New York? Would I have reached the top and be running the place now? What if I’d never moved to Winnipeg? It’s a fun game to play but irrelevant. But there were a lot of moments when I applied those “what if” questions to choices BEFORE I made them. With no secure footing ahead of me, I took time to figure out what to do. Should I stay in Winnipeg? Was there enough work to sustain me practically and artistically? I needn’t have worried. Word began to circulate that I was “at liberty” and, fortunately, offers began to flow from a variety of sources.

UNfortunately, the initial offers were not the ones I wanted.

First out of the gate was the Director with whom I’d done the “Pinafore” tour. He wanted me to come to Alberta to do a school tour of “Don Pasquale”! “Don Pasquale”?? As a school tour?? The subject matter is rather adult and cutting it down made no sense at all. So I passed on that. He came back again a short while later with another school tour in Alberta, this time of “Pirates of Penzance”! Once more, no thanks. Then, amazingly, AGAIN, with a remounting of “Pinafore” on yet another school tour, again for Manitoba Opera! Would no one rid me of this troublesome director?? On the surface, the choices were relatively easy, but it was very hard turning down work like that! It wasn’t the last time I was to hear from him.

Then, everything happened at once!

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra was in touch next to book a good number of Kids Concerts for me to host and narrate. I loved doing that kind of work. With a program set, I was given free creative rein and control of the information and how it was to be presented to the young people. It was a teaching experience and I had great fun pointing out what to listen for in the great music the orchestra then proceeded to play.  Sometimes, I was just being myself, but sometimes (most fun of all!) I took on a character, like being Johannes Brahms in the “Mr. Brahms Is In The Building” concert, mixing interesting “personal” anecdotes and a lot of humour. When one gets Symphony Musicians and Maestro (Bramwell Tovey) to laugh out loud during performance, you know your material is working!

MTC wanted me to play piano and sing at opening night parties for the season. That was back in the day when I had kept up my piano skills and felt confident faking my way through standards and show tunes – just as long as folks were chattering away and not paying too much attention to me. It was just a slightly formalized extension of what we used to do in MTC’s Upper Bar almost every night after shows during the Company Seasons, except now I was getting paid to do it! Great fun!

Manitoba Theatre For Young People (“MTYP”) booked me for a new adaptation of “The Little Prince” being penned by Robbie Paterson, but more on that later.

Allied Arts Theatre School asked me to teach some evening Acting and Improv Classes. My teaching experience during all those Portland years would now come in handy. Approaching the craft of Acting came very easily, but, if truth be known, I’m not very into Improv. In fact, I don’t like it at all … probably because I’m so miserable at it.  Oddly, I can tell when it’s working and when it isn’t. The unfortunate thing about Improv (at least for me) is that the focus always seems to be on getting one’s audience to laugh. I guess that’s okay purely as entertainment; after all, who wants to spend an evening sitting through an improv about someone contemplating suicide? But practically speaking, what’s the point? (I was to learn later that there were some powerful practical applications for improvisational exchanges.) I’ve been known to walk out of a rehearsal when the director announces “let’s do an improv on this scene”! “Where are you going?” is usually the question as I get up to leave the room. “I think I’ll take some time to learn the lines the playwright wants me to say” is my cocky comeback.  I get shunned by the cast for a while but feel my time has been much better spent on the script rather than trying to make up things to say that have already been said much better by the writer. (And while I’m venting, I also have great trouble with what is called “table work”! This is time spent sitting with the cast and director at a large table dissecting the play and characters for hours and hours on end!  Discussions go on endlessly, cerebrally, pretentiously, and all can think of is the time being better spent “on one’s feet” doing the play and asking  relevant questions as we go along. For me, I get much more information and make more discoveries from “doing the play” than from merely talking about it.)  But back to Improv.

I remember being persuaded by a friend one evening to attend a performance of a local Improv Group. They were well-established, young, avid and irreverent, but just slightly out of the acting community mainstream although I had worked with some of them before. They had a huge following, mostly University students. The house was packed but we found a couple of seats dead center about five rows from the stage. The “games” that comprised the evening began well enough. I found some of it amusing, some of it silly, but their energies were always aimed at making the audience laugh, which they did, long and hard at times. I started to get a bit bored as it all started to seem the same after a while.

Well into the evening, one particular game had to do with a member of the troupe going offstage and the remaining folks asking the audience for a subject to have the offstage person guess. The subject (and I remember this so distinctly) was “two eggs in a frying pan”. The member returned to the stage and there ensued an innocuous, meandering back-and-forth banter that I had trouble following but which went on for a long time. Finally they stopped and the guesser said “two eggs in a frying pan”. What!! WHAT?? My hands went up in disbelief! It was as if water had been turned into wine before my very eyes, as if someone had levitated into the middle of the air before me. I could feel my eyes widen as I frantically thought through the exchange trying to understand how he had guessed the subject. The audience started to applaud and I turned to my friend, profoundly baffled and confused, and said loudly, to overcome the noise of the clapping, “HOW DID HE KNOW THAT??!!”

As I started to speak, the applause stopped. It didn’t peter out. It just stopped. And my question rang out through the now silent room. This provoked a huge laugh from the audience and, like a mob of meerkats hearing a noise out on the veldt, the Troupe, as one, snapped their heads in my direction. Oh, Lord! The leader of the group started slowly walking to the edge of the stage, shielding his eyes from the stage lighting looking for … well … me. “Who said that?” I could feel all heads and eyes in the theatre turn in my direction. He looked right at my face, bent forward and, squinting a bit more, said “Oh my God, is that Richard Hurst?!” With great delight his fellow meerkats proceeded to fall over each other as they scrambled down to the edge of the stage. I tried to make myself invisible, sinking as far into my seat as I could. For the next five minutes I was the helpless target of their skills. I was schooled in the finer points of their craft and how it worked and made the brunt of their sly but good-natured humour. The audience loved it! Me? Not so much. I’ve not been to Improv performance since.

I’ll tell you a story about one of my own experiences doing Improv in a moment.

Stage West (where I’d done “How The Other Half Loves”) hired me to do some temp work in their office typing up memos, doing some payroll and answering the phone. This was a great job because I could keep my ear to the ground about the town gossip (and there was a LOT of it) from a Management point of view and what shows the Company was considering and how I might fit in. Another great bonus was getting free food from the theatre’s kitchen on Matinee Wednesdays! The choices of productions for down-the-road changed almost daily. At one point I was being considered to play opposite Sandy Dennis in “Two For The Seesaw”. But that didn’t come to pass. The Stage West office was where I learned how to use a Dictaphone, stop-start pedals and all, a skill which I’ve never had occasion to use again … thankfully!

Prairie Theatre Exchange wanted me for a production of “After Baba’s Funeral” and this is where it started to get complicated because of conflicting dates with other gigs that were also in play. Pitting one engager against another was perilous but, thankfully it all worked out for the most part. I hated turning down the innovative and adventurous Kim McCaw, PTE’s Artistic Director, because of scheduling, but we would work together a number of times down the road.

It was about this time that word began to circulate about the tenuous hold the new AD had on the reins at MTC. Staff was not happy as conditions began to deteriorate and the atmosphere became morose. He had even asked people to sign “loyalty oaths” which prohibited them from working at or involving themselves with other theatres or projects in town. That did not go over well. Production and Marketing people in particular were affected. One could sense the tension just walking into the building – which I had to do on occasion to pick up mail. Everyone seemed to be hanging on by threads and there were some departures of folks who had been there for years. This was certainly a situation to watch in the time ahead.

Aside from all the offers, I found myself creating more personal chaos by initiating some projects of my own. With Larry Weckwerth, Music Director at my church, we had designed a wonderful Concert Series called “Music At Augustine”. As part of that series, I had put together a Vocal Recital called “The English Tradition”. Creating a program of music I’d sung over the years was challenging and fulfilling at the same time, and with a deadline of a late Fall presentation, managing the series and performing in it took up some more “free” time. Additionally, commercial voice-overs continued to take up a LOT of time as did taking and printing head shots for actors in town.

And then there was The Police Academy.

The Academy (housed in a former elementary school) was the training component of the Winnipeg Police Department. It taught embryonic police officers all the skills required to become fully fledged guardians of the public. It taught them about firearms and ballistics, maintaining law and order on the streets, keeping a good shine on their shoes and how to perfect the wonderful swagger that came with the very heavy gun belt around the waist (I was to discover years later how heavy it really was and how it actually does affect the way one walks while wearing it). It also taught them public relations, how to deal with people in all kinds of situations. Some of those situations were domestic disturbances or “a domestic”, where people in their own homes were causing trouble requiring police intervention.

There was only one way to duplicate those situations. That was with … you guessed it … ACTORS! A number of seasoned performers in town were hired once a year for these intense sessions to portray individuals in conflict in a home environment. I only took part in one session. Not being all that great at improvising, I worried that I wasn’t going to come up with the “right” thing to say, but some friends who were old hands at doing this told me it was “a piece of cake”. I also worried that I wasn’t going to make it real enough for these young trainees to get a true impression of what it might be like in the outside world.

As I quickly discovered, the baby cops were more nervous that I was. In fact, they were “sweating bullets”, no pun intended. The actors had been given a loose outline of an actual documented disturbance from the past, but the officers had no idea what they would encounter as they entered our “house”. We were to start improvising the conflict and, at a signal, the trainees would knock and enter. The “incident” (as the officers called these events) was being taped but also watched live in another room by both the trainers and other actors waiting for their “incident”. The pressure was high for everyone.

The first scene between me and Pat Hunter, a good friend who was playing my wife, concerned a husband who had been taking money from this wife’s purse. She had called the cops to have me put out of the house. The signal came and we launched into it. We began yelling at each other and once we had reached the hammer and tongs stage, the police knocked at the door, entered, and we were off to the races. There were a couple of interesting mental observations I made as all this was happening. On one hand, we were taking this very seriously merely by listening to each other and creating the reality with what we were screaming at each other. That was the “in the moment” awareness, particularly for the cops. We were being ourselves and not playing “characters”. On the other hand, I was also aware that this wasn’t real. The cops were not going to arrest me, but they had to believe what they were hearing and seeing and deal with these out-of-control people. The technique used in every situation was to separate and diffuse. It always worked – or at least we LET it work! Once the combatants are away from each other, there is no way for the conflict to continue. The officer I had to deal with was a young lady who spoke very quietly. Patty had a huge hulk of a man towering over her. There was never any sense of intimidation or aggressiveness by the officers, but rather an effort to calm us both down and then to mediate. Even though the exercise went on for only twenty minutes, I think we succumbed to their technique a bit too easily.

Afterward, Pat, who had done this many times before, told me that I was too much of a “teddy bear”, that I wasn’t angry enough and didn’t create enough of a threat. There was too much of the poet in me. Thinking back to my somewhat flowery diatribe about “compassion” and “our marriage vows to love, honour and obey”, I guess she was right. We laughed about for a long time afterward.

There were a few more “incidents” and they became easier the more I did. We even had some breaks where we would watch other scenes on the closed circuit TV in another room. Some officers who had completed their exercise watched with us and it was very interesting to learn what had been going through their minds as they were experiencing the conflict. Not one of them thought it wasn’t real! Talk about suspension of disbelief!

In my final incident I was paired with an actor I’d worked with a few times before. He was tall and thin, very fastidious in the way he dressed and rather elegant in demeanor. In the scenario, we were friends who had bet each other fifty dollars on the outcome of a hockey game. My team had won but he’d refused to pay and wanted me out of his house. I refused to leave until he had given me the money and he had called the police. By now, I was feeling very much at ease with how to escalate the exchanges that preceded the arrival of the police.

We started the scene and I was suddenly faced with … Jed Clampett!!! Somehow we were now in the depths of the Ozarks! My scene partner was talking in a reedy voice with a drawl so thick I could barely understand what he was saying. I was in an episode of “The Andy Griffiths Show”!! He was yelling at me as the knock on the door came. In walked two hulking policemen. I mean they were HUGE! I thought of asking if we could stop for a moment to get back to some kind of reality for these guys but it was too late. So, on we went, me trying to keep my wits about me and my partner screaming at me in a Southern twang at the top of his lungs! The cops stepped between us and, by their sheer physical presence (they weren’t allowed to touch us) and repeating “Sir, Sir” over and over again, got us apart and into chairs on opposite sides of the room. Despite their size, I could see their hands shaking. They managed to calm us down a bit but, in order to continue the challenge for the officers, we would launch into the argument a few more times. There were points, despite my partner’s “character”, when it actually felt real, as if nothing else existed for those few moments and, to tell the truth, that was a great feeling. Eventually the tension was diffused through the calm of the cops and, having come to an impasse, the scene ended with my exit, yelling that I would “see you in court!”

Afterward I asked my partner what the hell he thought he was doing with the accent and all. “Just mixing it up a bit” he said. Actors!!!

I did only one of those sessions but have never forgotten it. The difference between these scenes and doing an improv in a rehearsal situation was that, other than the loosest of contexts, there were no limitations. There was no proscribed end-game, no real resolution. We used our own words and our own voices (for the most part), we weren’t playing characters (for the most part) and were told when to stop based only on the assessment of the officer’s performances by the trainers. I mentioned before that I could find no practical uses for improv. I discovered that these training sessions were one use – and an important one at that. There are medical drills, firefighter drills, disaster aftermath drills, where real people were put into fabricated dire situations and told to react in order to test a response unit’s reaction and readiness. That works for me.

I have a friend here in Victoria who constantly asks me to come and see her Improv group perform. I have managed to avoid attending for a while now. Perhaps remembering these experiences from long ago might give me a different perspective.

I said “might”