Jill Dowson was a petite woman and I could see how fragile she was. There were a dozen of us in the room but it was dead silent. She got up from the couch and started toward me. Unsure of how to approach the situation I began moving to her. As we met, and to my great surprise, she fell into my chest and began to sob, obviously overwhelmed by what she’d just seen in the theatre. The top of her head only came up to my chin. After a moment, she pushed away, hit my chest with her open palm, fell into me again and sobbed some more. Incapable of making my voice work, I just held her, slightly embarrassed, glancing at the others in the room for some indication of what I should do. It was massively affecting. She looked up at me, tears running down her face, and said “He wasn’t an asshole, you know. He wasn’t an asshole” referring to her husband whom I had just portrayed on stage. “I know, I know” I choked out and stupidly thanked her for being there. She gained some control as Bruce guided her away to be introduced to Arne and Cheryl. I didn’t listen to what she said to them. I just stared at her, trying to imagine what she must be going through. She apologized for being “so emotional”, thanked us for being “so good” and we went downstairs for notes. It was all more than a little surreal.

            The following day, there was an evening news documentary about the subject of our show which included a segment with Robert Cross, the constable at the center of the shooting and the part that Arne was playing. I had taped it. After rehearsal that night, Arne and Cheryl came back to the house to watch it with me. Cross was now living in Denver and breaking his silence for the first time since the Inquiry five years earlier. It was obvious during the interview that the man wasn’t well, alternating between teary outbursts and nervous laughter indicating the effects the incident continued to have on him. The doc included part of the first scene from our play. The synchronicity was incredible, all these elements rushing together at the same time just a couple of days before our opening! Even though it was very late, we decided to go up to the area in the North End where the shooting had taken place. We drove around a bit and finally found it. It was desperately cold as we walked up onto the dike we recognized from the TV footage. There wasn’t much said. We were all in our own heads, trying to imagine the moment of encounter, the argument, the struggle on the ground, the gun going off. We now had a physical context. It was good research … and very depressing.

            The opening was close to perfection. In the course of the previews we had stopped “playing” the scenes and were now fully encased in the trajectories and intersections of our characters. There seemed to be an ease to it all, as folks remarked afterward. There was no escaping the tension for anybody in the room. One could feel them listening very hard, leaning forward in their seats. Bill Harrar’s dialogue anchored us firmly in our reality and it was glorious. Right after the performance I had to do a CBC interview. My head was still on stage and it was difficult not to get defensive as the interviewer kept trying to lead me down a political path regarding the Inquiry, asking if my opinions had changed during the rehearsal process. It always amazes me that even an experienced reporter still manages to come up with the most innocuous and vapid questions. “The Inquiry happened FIVE years ago, sweetheart! The issues then are STILL the issues NOW! How do you THINK my opinions have changed?!” I yelled inside my head. I should have said it out loud. I managed to avoid getting too controversial and was happy to escape to the party when we wrapped it up.

            There were a number of political figures standing about in the lobby including some of the folk who were intrinsically involved with the Inquiry, notably lawyers Harvey and Marty Pollock. I didn’t have the guts to go up to them. The compliments were fast and furious and made us feel we’d accomplished something. As was the case with opening night of “Live With It”, I left about midnight, stepping back into the real world, the frigid night air and a bit of a blizzard hitting me in the face as I waited for the bus home.

            In the days that followed, the critical notices poured in with varying degrees of play and performance analysis. It seemed that none of the writers could avoid the cultural implications of our venture, and during the audience “Talk Back” sessions after the Thursday night shows, emotions would spill out in the discussions dragging us back into the upheaval created five years earlier. There was a lot of back-and-forth about whether “Truth” was being presented on stage and if the use of conjecture to flesh out the motives and rationales of the characters was justifiable. For me, those exchanges only served to reaffirm the power of Theatre and how, well after the fact, an examination of the human condition could still be important and provoke such responses. I left the sessions feeling full and satisfied that we had done our jobs for the playwright … and the audience.

It is worth noting that Jill Dowson returned to see another performance, this time with her son, Mark, in tow. It was another tearful meeting afterward. Mark stood by stoically as his Mother hugged and hugged me telling me that, seeing it again, she had noticed so many things she’d not seen the first time. She told me that many of my gestures were so much like her husband’s … the way I took off my glasses or put my hand to my mouth in thought. I don’t know where those gestures came from but they had always felt natural as I was doing them. I was happy that my reality aligned with hers.

The production limped to an end with houses getting smaller and smaller. I don’t know what I expected of the run; perhaps there would be sold out performances with our patrons marching out into the streets demanding political action to challenge the cultural norms with which we’d become much too comfortable. But, of course, none of that happened. We closed with a single-show run-out to Portage La Prairie, a small, depressing, in-the-depths-of-winter town just outside Winnipeg. Why that had been scheduled I have no idea. It was an academic performance in a space half the size of what we were used to, and a sad anti-climax to the whole experience. “InQuest” was delivered into Time and Space now.

            There was no down time as I immediately headed into a couple of weeks of workshopping yet another new play, this one possibly-maybe-perhaps being produced by the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre somewhere down the road. WJT Producer Kayla Gordon had organized the workshop through the Manitoba Association of Playwrights. One never knew if these best-of-intentions projects would ever result in anything concrete, but we’d try our best to make things work stoically ploughing through draft after draft of a new piece. Sometimes it was just spinning wheels; sometimes there was an exciting glimpse of hope and possibility in the material. This workshop started out differently. Joel Greenberg (an old friend from University days in Montreal) had created a loose script/outline-of-sorts for a play centered around the politics of Canada’s rejection of a ship filled with European Jewish refugees following the Second World War.  For some reason, Joel had “withdrawn” from the project and a Toronto playwright named Jason Sherman was to be using Joel’s material as the take-off point for something new. Kim McCaw was the Director and Dramaturge.

At the initial reading of Joel’s script, the cast made the observation that the piece centered too much on the politics and not enough on the people involved. We (as actors) wanted to know more about the political and civilian characters as human beings and how they were affected by the circumstances in which they found themselves. Because none of us were familiar with his work, Jason came in the next day with one of his own scripts (“Three in the Head, Two in the Back”) in order for us to get a sense of his writing style. His play was very challenging to read. The repetition of words, very fast but at the same time hesitant and disjunctive, reminded me of “Mamet-speak”, seemingly very conversational, lots of interruptions and overlaps, difficult to control, but utterly exhilarating once one found the rhythms. The reading was also to get a sense of the format Kim wanted to go for, scenes switching back and forth in time and place, from stylized recounting to actual documented conversations, edgy and real. Having just come out of the ultra-emotion of the “Inquest” process, my mind was up for this kind of unsettled creative upheaval and I found myself thriving on it.

            Watching Jason work was astonishing to me. Based on our comments and observations following a reading session, he would go off to his hotel room and, overnight, write small scenes of only a few pages using a word or a phrase someone said that had caught his attention. He would distill, intensify and expand those tiny inspirations into clear, logical and focused exchanges between two or three or four characters. He did that day after day, always mindful of the dramatic elements and the relationships of the characters. At the same time he managed to juxtapose the politics and humanity against each other in short episodes creating the remarkable subliminal effect of seemingly disparate characters in different times and places having conversations with each other! I was playing Frederick Blair, the Director of Canadian Immigration Services at the time, who was solidly against allowing Jewish immigrants into Canada following the war. I was also playing a fictitious character named ‘Landau’, a Jewish refugee who, upon applying for immigrant status, has been told he must give up his religion. Talk about opposite ends of the spectrum! Moving between these two characters, very quickly in some cases, produced, for me, an internal battle in the playing that allowed the elements of ‘Landau’s’ humanity and ‘Blair’s’ political pragmatism to subtly inform each other. Keeping one personality “in check” while playing the other was very difficult, but it produced a personal tension and a conflicted depth to my characters … and it was utterly glorious to perform!

As soon as Jason arrived on any particular morning, he would be besieged by the actors for copies of his pages, all of us anxious to see what he had come up with overnight. He never disappointed. The words he wrote for us to say were luxurious and marvelously insightful, always defined, unambiguous and immensely satisfying to speak. Sometimes a scene didn’t work or seemed extraneous for one reason or another. Without compunction, Jason tossed it. This happened over and over again. If it didn’t serve the storytelling, it was gone. His commitment to the process was profound. As time went on, we’d each amassed a very large pile of paper (photo above – I still have it all) but had finally produced an hour-long series of scenes (the top script) that hung together cohesively and was something we could put before an audience as a “maybe-First-Act”. It had always been part of the plan that a “presentation” of whatever material was ready be held at Rosh Pina Synagogue in Winnipeg’s North End. We rehearsed the draft on our feet for a couple of days creating some simple blocking and digging up some basic props, and got more excited and comfortable with each run. On the final day of the workshop we left the studio and headed out to see who would turn up to view our work.

I’ve always had a strange feeling entering a synagogue. There is a part of me that responds in a deeply visceral way, as if I had found sanctuary and was somehow “coming home”. Perhaps it takes me back to my University days and singing in the band in which I was the only gentile. MarkGoldmanJohnnyBacklerHarold PrussinandMichaelLebner left an indelible mark on me, so much so that their names come into my head as a single word half a century later! Performing and travelling with the guys and spending time with their families and girlfriends filled me with a sense of tradition and closeness. I’d be invited to Friday night dinners. They would always start with beautiful Sherry Rubenstein (Michael’s girlfriend) lighting the candles and saying the Shabbat prayer. The quiet and mystery in those moments stay with me to this day. Because of those experiences, I had actually considered converting to Judaism back then. So my arrival at the synagogue only intensified the importance of what we were about to share with whatever audience turned up. We spent a bit of time adjusting our blocking to the space in the afternoon, headed out for some dinner and returned in time for the half-hour.

The presentation was to be in the basement “salon” where we’d rehearsed that afternoon and which held about two hundred people. By the time we returned the room was already packed and had been for some time. I went out for a cig and noticed that there was a lineup of cars for blocks down Mattheson Avenue waiting to get into the synagogue’s parking lot. There had been no advertizing … this was all by word of mouth! At five to eight the decision was made to move the reading upstairs to the much larger gymnasium rather than turn away what seemed to be a very large number of people. The 200 people already seated downstairs were asked to fold up their chairs and take them upstairs.  Picture two hundred people in their 60’s and 70’s schlepping folding chairs, overcoats, hats and purses up two sets of stairs! It took forever! Of course, once the gym had been designated as the new space, the “latecomers” were directed in there; thus the folks who had arrived very early for “good seats” and who were still trekking up from downstairs were now in the back of the house! There was no end of complaints over that! We ended up with almost 400 people squeezed into the hastily set up gym.

Kayla was over the moon. She had never expected this kind of response. The presentation went extremely well and the reaction was exceedingly positive. The audience was completely involved in a story that was very familiar to them. Jason’s clear and authentic characterizations were a joy to play. As the villain of the piece (‘Frederick Blair’) I got no mercy from the house. At one point Blair makes the head of the Canadian Jewish Congress decide on the spot which 500 on a list of 1000 Jewish orphans would be allowed into the country. In the silence following his demand, a voice in the audience yelled “you bastard!” They were rapt and you could hear a pin drop from the beginning to the ending when my ‘Landau’ sings the “Shema prayer”. I could see people wiping away tears. It was a profound night of theatre for all of us, but it would be two and a half years before we got to play it again.

I had long since been cast in a role for the MTC Production of “Hamlet”. Well, it wasn’t actually a role, but rather the possibility of a number of roles, designated in the contract as “As Cast”. Being “As Cast” was the potential kiss of death. It was, and still is contractual bullshit for “we’ll hire you but can’t tell you what role or roles you’re going to play because we haven’t decided yet but you have to agree to this now otherwise forget it!” Once signed, the contract bound you to whatever they wanted you to do. You could end up carrying a spear across the stage or as background in a crowd scene with nothing to say. I decided to swallow my pride and signed the contract. After a bit of wrangling it was decided that I would play two small roles – ‘Voltimand’ and ‘Lucianus’. Okay, not roles that stand out or spring to mind when one thinks of the characters in “Hamlet”, but they had some good stuff to say and there would be no great pressure coming down on me. As much as I wanted something bigger this would be fine … I had something else in mind. The start of rehearsals was a few weeks away. In the meantime there were other things to take care of.

Music Services remained a constant source of trial and tribulation for me. As Sam was off drumming up more and more work for the company, I remained mired in the day-to-day details that needed intense focus. The touring and regional productions we had going on at the time were a never-ending source of frustration. “Phantom” was about to take off on a nine-month (!) tour of South East Asia. On a particular Friday afternoon, one of its Tour Managers called me from Hawaii (where some of the orchestra was settled in for a two-week stint) informing me that all the Immigration Forms for the Musicians travelling to Singapore (the Tour’s entry point) had to be in to her office by the following Tuesday!! WHAT?? The final roster hadn’t even been decided by Sam and the Music Supervisor, Jeffrey Huard! Sam was on the road and only sporadically available. Huard was never available. This was NUTS! I simply decided to throw it all back into LIVENT’s disorganized bailiwick, yelling at the Tour Manager that they had created this mess, there was nothing I could do about it, and they would have to clean it up from their end. As it turned out, they (we) were given a two week extension by the Immigration authorities and, between me, LIVENT and our Orchestra Manager on the road, we solved the problem. But this just summed up the kind of bother that landed daily on my desk! Never a dull moment!

I fit in a short teaching schedule at Ken Peter’s Dance Studio; did some narration sessions for CBC; confirmed “Beau Jest” for the Jewish Theatre later in the season; discovered that MTC was thinking about starting a Rep Company for the following season and put in my two cents worth on that; booked the “ Christmas Carol” reading for its seventh year at Dalnavert; finally (and graciously) extricated myself from the National Equity Council after ten years; and found myself once again enfolded in the arms of the Winnipeg Symphony, this time playing George Frederick Handel … for adults. Since the successful Brahms concert earlier in the year, there had been extended discussions with the WSO about my approaching the Manitoba Arts Council for a Senior Artist Grant to develop the “Composer Concerts” format. MAC had been very excited about the idea. We had discussed it to the point where Bramwell (Tovey) and I would actually be marketed by the WSO to other Symphony Orchestras in North America. The grant would be for me to travel to do the research and then, with Bramwell, develop the scripts for the concerts. To this day, I am sad that nothing ever came of this project. It was original and had limitless possibilities. A program for both Adults and Young People inserting accessibility to classical music through educational entertainment (“edutainment”) into a Symphony Orchestra’s season was ripe fruit just waiting to be plucked. But, as they say, “best laid plans …”

Since my roles in “Hamlet” were so small, I decided that I needed more to do and, taking my heart in my hands, I had approached the director, Louis Baumander, to ask if I might volunteer as Keanu Reeves’ “repetiteur”.  While not infringing upon a Director’s bailiwick, a “repetiteur” is a tutor or coach who acts as a sounding board or offers observations as a performer goes through rehearsals or learning sessions. While I was no huge Shakespearean expert, I thought I had enough stage experience and smarts to offer some help if in no other area than learning lines and being at his disposal when he needed someone to sit on book for him. The vast majority of his career had been playing in front of the camera. This would be a departure for him and while he had done some stage work early on, I thought I could assist in easing him back into a theatre approach and regimen. It was really pushy of me but, the night before the first rehearsal, Louis got in touch and told me that Keanu was grateful to have someone do this for him and that he would “avail himself of my services”. Wow! I was beside myself!

At 10:00am on December 12^th, 1994, we began work on The Keanu Reeves “Hamlet”.