We were on a train and it was night. Our coach was very small, antique, as one might see in a Railway Museum, painted a dark forest-green and very dimly lit. I was with Keanu and some other people from the “Hamlet” cast. Among them was Roger Honeywell, who was taking great pleasure in jumping up and down on the banquettes that lined the walls of the coach. Keanu had been stuffed into one of the overhead baggage racks and we were all aware of the fact that he didn’t have any legs below the knee. It was something everyone accepted. The only way he could get around was with a skateboard on which he steered himself using his hands.
It was also a fact that I was Keanu’s caretaker, the one designated to get him from place to place. At some point, everyone had left the train for a rehearsal and I was left with Keanu. He had pulled himself into position on the skateboard, ready to come down from the baggage rack. A very steep ramp had been set up from the edge of the rack to the floor of the coach. But the angle was too great and he came careening down the ramp smashing into the wall opposite. He had torn a long strip from his shirt and his back was now oozing blood.
“Oh God” I yelled! “Keanu! Are you alright?” He crawled along the floor and through a door at the end of the coach into another room and lay there moaning. There was a bathroom to the right and I ran in, grabbed a handful of paper towels and soaked them in warm water. I dashed back to where he lay with his back to me. I told him this was going to hurt and lifted his shirt to start daubing the huge bloodied scrape. He yelled and I took his face in my hands. The right side of his face was stone cold. “Keanu! Are you alright? Can you close your right eye?” In something of a haze, he said he was okay, but I could tell he wasn’t. He was a mess!
We were back at the theatre now. I was standing outside his dressing room, knocking on the door, asking him again if he was alright. The coldness of the right side of his face concerned me a great deal. I didn’t know what to do. I thought to tell stage management, but at that moment the door opened a couple of inches. He was looking directly at my face, now full height. He said, rather distantly, “I’m fine, I’m fine” and closed the door. I knocked again, he opened it again, just the very few inches, repeated that he was alright and closed the door.
That was where the dream ended.
When I woke up, I was struck by the persistence of the dream’s vivid detail and wrote it down. There was no difficulty remembering what had happened and the particulars flowed from my pen. There is a mysterious meshing of subjective and objective experience in dreams. You are at once the performer and the audience with no delineation between the two. There is no sense of understanding as the dream is happening, just a totality of perception on all levels. It wasn’t until later in the day that I began to wonder how and why this small wave had washed up on my subconscious beach and hadn’t vanished into the shoreline’s sand as dreams usually do. It affected me very deeply.
On the surface it was obvious that the old train coach was the “Hamlet” production itself, the antique “vehicle” transporting us all. Keanu’s physical state in the dream was as I perceived him during the rehearsal and performance process – seemingly without foundation and with little to stand on. The skateboard represented how he traversed the geography of the play, with minimal control and requiring assistance at times to avoid pitfalls and collisions. In the dream I was helping him when he needed a pathway toward some secure ground on which to achieve his goal.
But it was the dressing room door that baffled me. Could it be that, in reality, its partial opening was indicative of the man himself? While he and I had established a relationship over the course of the production, there was a point beyond which one could not go. With the support of the cast he had achieved his full stature and had flourished, but there was no further pathway into seeing who the man was. I began to think that this might apply to Hamlet himself, how his father’s death had cut him off at the knees and that merely “skateboarding through life” had kept people at a distance, never allowing them to get close enough to provide anything substantial or meaningful to him. He loses everyone in the course of the play. It saddened me to my core.
That afternoon, he was brilliant, clear and intentional, filled with a wonderful energy. That night, his performance was very “young”. He was trying to play over being tired from the matinee but the result was a very fragile man trying to keep his wits about him. It was surprisingly affecting. He came off after the first acting yelling “Acting, acting, acting! I’m seventeen years old! I was twenty-three this afternoon, now I’m seventeen!” But he settled down for the rest of the show after I reminded him to stay in the moment. Remembering the dream tempered my approach, as if it had been a lesson for me to stop trying to do more and be more than he needed. I accepted the warning.
We were still rehearsing “The Fruit Machine” during the day. Director Anne (Hodges), sensitive and responsive to our needs, knew how far to provoke and how to “handle” us. I was finding myself getting very frustrated with the details ‘The Psychologist’ must deal with in the play – the hooking up of the patient to the “Machine” and the turning of dials and pressing of buttons. For the longest time, I had to mime all this activity because the actual prop was still being built. But working with Arne always brought me out of my head and back into the reality we were creating for each other. Once again it was a case of things getting so very real in some of our scenes that I found myself bursting out laughing after they were over. My other character in the play was a one-eighty from the controlled, humourless scientist. His appearance was on the sidelines in a back alley, drunk, hurling loud, expletive-filled homophobic diatribes in counterpoint to poor Gene’s character as he tries to deliver a serious disclosure speech to the audience. Once I was off-book, I could let loose, yelling the abusive language of my extended speech at the top of my lungs. Arne was on the floor the first time he watched the scene and I could only think of the contrast between my daytime and nighttime performance jobs and how much I loved working in The Theatre!
“Hamlet” progressed into its final week. Keanu had found a quality level below which he never went. He said he had trouble “facilitating” the soliloquies and was obviously still working on them. He found himself crying during one delivery of “To Be” and it was breathtaking. But he couldn’t explain how or why he’d come to that emotional point. Being too deeply in the moment does have some downsides. The house was full every night and the responses at the final curtain were massive and long. The after-show autograph sessions continued unabated. One night, Brent, the security guard who stood watch at the stage door, got himself scratched by a couple of ladies he had stopped from coming into the vestibule at 1:45am. Keanu had been signing posters and programs for two hours. And it went on night after night.
I was now taking my laptop to the Theatre to work on MSI payrolls, grabbing unoccupied moments to complete budgets for new projects that were being added to our roster almost daily. It was distressing how that part of my life was infringing on my focus during the shows. But I had no alternative. “Phantom” in Singapore was about to begin. Sam was away for a couple of months putting the orchestra for that major contract together and I would arrive home after the show to find dozens of phone messages on my machine. My worlds were, yet again, colliding.
As he’d become more comfortable with his infrastructure, Keanu was now taking big risks going down tracks he’d not, to his way of thinking, investigated fully enough. Sometimes these digressions worked and would result in something fresh and exciting; when they didn’t work and he had backed himself into an acting corner, he would “kill the take”. That was fatal to a performance. He would simply lose interest in anything that came after the self-created road block and on those nights he was unapproachable. Everyone was aware when that had happened and he became the “Moody Dane”, all of us having to tiptoe about and talk quietly when he was backstage.
Just before we closed, I asked him out to lunch and I reserved a table at Amici’s, an upscale Italian restaurant just around the corner from his hotel. I arrived first and made sure that our table was out of the way in the back of the dining room. I didn’t want folks staring or wandering over while we were eating. It was a marvelous couple of hours! The first hour we talked about the play and he prodded me into giving him my insights on his performance. There were only three shows left but he was still immersed in “process”. He asked about how to keep it spontaneous every night. He said he wanted to do it for the audience as well as for the rest of the cast. I told him that each audience was seeing it for the first time so had no comparisons. He shouldn’t be worrying about that. As for the cast, it wasn’t his responsibility to come up with something new every night just to surprise them or keep them “interested”. The challenge was to keep himself interested. As was always the case when we spoke, he nodded and I could always see him filing the thoughts away.
We talked a bit about my working on “The Fruit Machine” and, surprisingly … and touchingly … he asked if I wanted him to run lines with me on Sunday afternoon! We never got around to that, but I certainly appreciated his offer. No one bothered us in the course of the meal. It was private and comfortable, two friends sharing some food and talking about things that mattered in the moment. That night his performance was, well, luminescent! He was fully charged and filled with honest rumination in the soliloquies. I had suggested at lunch that a final challenge might be for him to play “attitudes”, layering in Hamlet’s unspoken feelings (subtext) about the people around him, perhaps adding another dimension to those relationships. The audience would certainly see it in his subtle, almost subliminal physicalization toward the character he was playing opposite. Maybe I was just projecting, but to my eye he did it and it was wonderful! I was watching backstage with Robert Benson and he leaned over to me whispering “The anti-penultimate performance … mystical!” He was referring to the theatrical tradition that Magic surrounds the third-to-last performance of a run and, judging from the performance we all gave in response to our ‘Hamlet’ that night, it held true. “I did everything you told me” Keanu said putting his hands on my shoulders as we stood in the dressing room hallway after the show. He was very pleased with himself … and so was I!
At final the matinee he seemed to be saving himself a bit, as if storing up energy for the last time ‘round that evening. Food was brought in from DeLuca’s between shows and we sat around in the Green Room, rather quietly, tacitly appreciating each other. At the half, Bob Benson had pulled me aside. “Hurstie, a word in your ear. Do you think The Lad would be embarrassed if we applauded him in the final call?” His question surprised me. It was coming from a well-heeled and very experienced senior artist who had seen a great many Hamlets in his career. It was obvious that he too was affected enough by Keanu’s work to make the suggestion. I said I thought it would be a wonderful expression of our feelings for him and the work he had done. And that’s just what we did.
That night, the play’s ending found most of us with tears running down our faces as he speaks his final and, that night, particularly resonant words – “the rest is silence”. A moment later, it was over. At the end of the curtain call, taking Bob’s lead, we all stepped back, turned to face Keanu, and, much to his surprise and obvious pleasure, we applauded him. He applauded back to us and we were refilled with all the care and support that had driven this cast and it’s ‘Hamlet’ over the past months. Afterward, there was a catered reception upstairs in the Board Room and Upper Bar to which a great many people went.
For me, it was a case of slowly and sadly closing up my station and taking down the photos and notes that had accumulated around my dressing room mirror. Earlier in the day I had asked Keanu if he would sign a poster for me. Just before I was leaving he handed it back to me. He had written “Dear Richard, I humbly thank you, Sir. My love, Keanu”, a reference to a line he says to me on stage. We hugged and he said he would call. I missed him almost instantly as I walked out the door. I would miss helping him. I would miss him psychically and I would miss watching him work each night.
There were a lot of people hanging about the stage door waiting for him, but this was a night he wasn’t coming out anytime soon. I found out later that he had signed posters and cleaned up his dressing room till 2:30am and then headed up to the party. He didn’t leave the theatre until after 4:00am.
It was into “Fruit Machine” tech the following day. I was still a bit melancholy; but I cajoled myself into this new mindset and the still much-too-contemporary sound of the play. I forced myself away from the notion that what I was doing now was inconsequential when compared to what I had been doing over the past months. I eventually weaned myself off Shakespeare and immersed myself in the newness of Drader. The play was only an hour long but the tech was a pig, there being more sound and lighting cues than in a full-length play! I found that I had no perspective on the piece as I was never off stage and couldn’t judge how things were going because I was always in the middle of them. But opening went very well and once into the run, which was short, I was again in the hefty midst of budgets, contracts and payrolls for MSI.
“Phantom” had settled into rehearsals in South East Asia and dealing with the details was taking an extraordinary amount of time … not that I had much else to do. They were a week into rehearsal when I got a message from Sam informing me that I had made a major error in one of my payroll calculations for the first week. I HATE making mistakes. It consumes me, eats at me and affects everything else in my life … everything! I had miscalculated the musician’s per diems. I had assumed that the weekly rate was 300 Singapore dollars. In fact, I had confused the Singapore rate with the Hong Kong rate which was 300 Hong Kong dollars PER DAY! When I heard the message my entire body went numb. The skin on my head felt like it was peeling back from my scalp and my ears started ringing. It was a palpable physical reaction to, at least in that moment, devastating news. I ran to my desk and checked my payroll readout. Indeed, I had made the error and the only thing I could think about was all our musicians not having enough money to eat or pay hotel bills. That certainly wasn’t the case but it rattled though my brain for a half hour until I started thinking rationally and began the extended process of making the corrections. That involved creating a new doubly-corrected payroll as I had already sent off the payroll for the current week. It also involved middle of the night phone calls to the Really Useful Group in Australia to explain what had happened. My relationship with Elaine Minor, the General Manager at RUG, had been built on the clarity of my calculations and explanations of money conversions – from US (for the American Producers) to Canadian Dollars (for the Canadian Musician’s pay) to Australian dollars (for the Australian Producers) to Singapore dollars (for the billing of the local Presenters). Yeah, that’s how complicated it was! In the end it was dealt with, but the frazzle lasted for days inside me. If nothing else, the time differences between here and the other side of the world were the most frustrating thing because it took hours to respond to someone when I needed to take care of something right away! My impatience (still a work in progress but improving) with the circumstances and with myself led to a lot of sleepless nights!
I fled Winnipeg following the closing of “Fruit Machine” for a much needed rest in New York … if anyone can call NYC restful. This would be my only chance to clear my head. It was a busman’s holiday actually. We were about to take over the orchestra contracting for the Canadian Tour of Hal Prince’s “Showboat” in Vancouver and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” in Toronto and I took this chance to put faces to the voices I already had been and now would be working with in the months ahead. Both of these productions were brand new and I was struck by how clean everything was, a definite contrast to the shoddy sets and costumes of long-running Broadway shows about which no one seemed too concerned anymore. With “Showboat” and “Kiss” (both being produced by Garth Drabinsky’s Livent Inc.) everything was pristine and the casts were still original and obviously enjoying themselves on stage. Whenever I watched theatre in New York, I would always think about what I had going back in Canada. The opportunities I’d been afforded over the past ten years had been incredible and I wondered, once again, what I would be doing had I not taken Richard Ouzounian’s offer to leave NYC and come back home and work at MTC. It was a whirlwind trip topped off by one of my last Equity Council Meetings in Toronto.
Once home, I went into overdrive with the demands of Samwork and plotting out my oncoming season. Sam had been playing with the idea of having me travel as Orchestra Manager with the “Music of the Night” Company. This was a huge concert Tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Music featuring Michael Bolton. It would mean nine weeks on the road with no chance of performing and it was difficult to extricate myself from Sam’s intentions. But I managed, insisting that with all the other shows on our plate, my absence from home base would put us in potentially precarious positions with all the demands I knew Producers and Company Managers would be making of us. He finally saw my point and we moved on.
Meanwhile, The Manitoba Theatre Centre was in the process of creating the much anticipated (at least for the actors in town) Resident Acting Company! Its premiere season would comprise three productions (“Romeo and Juliet”, “Our Country’s Good” and “Mr. A’s Amazing Maze Plays”) running from autumn into the New Year. Stephen (Schipper) had asked me to touch base with him before accepting any other offers. Prairie Theatre Exchange was trying to seduce me with a play by Frank McGuiness called “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me”. It was a dense, character-driven piece of theatre for three actors playing hostages in Lebanon. I wanted to do both, but that wouldn’t be possible. Which one to pick?