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George F. Walker’s “Love and Anger” is a dark play. Sometimes its billed as a comedy and while there are certainly comedic aspects to the piece, its underlying thrum is firmly based in the noise of corporate power and politics and the broken people who play within that world, intentionally or not. Since my own “corporate” life had been somewhat stalled with the closing down of LIVENT, I was tugging at the bit to get back on the stage, away from the fraught drama of business and budgets.

The “L&A” cast was a combination of in and out-of-town folks. We were being directed by the generous and focused Alan MacInnes, now firmly ensconced as Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Artistic Director. As per tradition, the first days were spent doing the dreaded “table work” panto, but I suffered through them, biding my time till we got to the “real stuff”. The cast was incredibly pleasant from the get-go. Blair Williams and Stewart Arnott were from Toronto and Maggie Nagle, Teri Cherniak and Lisa Codrington were from Winnipeg. Maggie and Teri were good friends and I loved working with them and watching their work. Maggie was “dangerous” on stage. She was always prompted by “the moment” which was, for me, exciting to play opposite. One never knew quite what was going to happen. The fact that her character in the play was mentally unstable only served to further unleash her spontaneity. It was a great relief when we finally got out of our chairs and hit the deck, ending the dry, academic chatter about what was happening in the play. The difference between the two approaches (particularly in this play) was like night and day. Sitting about, one could not possibly have known what kind of energy we would be called upon to exert in order to fulfill the demands of the script. Once on our feet, it was overwhelming!

It goes without saying that, as is the case with every good play worth its salt, there are subtleties which underpin the characters and the story. In the case of “L&A” they are so far beneath the surface that digging them up became almost a lost cause. Just playing the superficial elements at the required physical pace of the play was exhausting, leaving us all drained by the end of each day. Alan got nervous about ignoring these subtleties, but some of them bubbled to the surface almost automatically in spite of the insane pacing needed to tell the story. My character, John “Babe” Connor, was an “incurably evil” corporate mogul. Most of the characters were easily identifiable by a word or phrase, but playing those characteristics became a titanic job. “Babe” rants and raves and sermonizes as he runs about the stage from start to finish at a “level 10”. Maintaining that energy was debilitating. Add to this a couple of extreme physical interactions and I was done in by day’s end. At one point ‘Babe’ is kidnapped and subjected to a kangaroo court trial which has been convened to try ‘Babe’s’ evil. This scene ends the Act with a hell-bent-for-leather donnybrook which, while never getting totally out of control, always left me lying on the ground gasping for air as the lights came down. Once again, I found myself having to visit my chiropractor for a number of sessions during the run and experienced more “what have you been doing to yourself!?” interrogations. Was I getting too old for all this? But that fight wasn’t the hard part for me.

            I suffer from claustrophobia. Phobias are supposedly “a combination of genetic vulnerabilities and life experience”, but I can think of no incidents in my life that could have resulted in this fear. I was never enclosed in a confined space when I was small; neither was I bullied or abused as a child … nor at any time in my life. I can remember only three times when I unexpectedly experienced the effects of this phobia – once when walking up the narrow circular stairway to the lanterna at the top of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, another when hiking through the dark tunnel to get to the top of Diamond Head in Honolulu (both of which are documented elsewhere in these pages) and a third time when going through a slot canyon in the desert outside Palm Springs. The first I had to complete, the last two I couldn’t and turned back. None of those experiences were in my head when, during a staging rehearsal, I found myself being bagged and hog-tied as part of the kidnapping. A heavy burlap sack was thrown over the upper half of my body and secured in place by a rope around my waist. “Okay, this will only last for a few seconds” I thought. I was manhandled onto an old conveyor belt which passed through a small opening stage right, travelled around backstage and through another tiny opening on stage left.

As I was set down on the belt, I could feel the vaguely familiar panic start to bubble up. The sack over my head became a very narrow well into which I was falling deeper and deeper with no means of escape. (Even as I write this, I am starting to tense up.) I couldn’t see anything, and I couldn’t move my arms as they were bound to my sides with the rope. I was being buried alive! I began to struggle. My legs started to move uncontrollably, and I couldn’t breathe. The fact that this was just a rehearsal for a play had quickly receded from my mind and was replaced by the fact that I was now trapped, wedged into a horizontal crevice in a cave hundreds of feet below ground. There was no reason in my thinking. I was being irrational – I knew that – but couldn’t force myself back to reality. I was struggling now, searching for a way out. I managed to get my hands free at the bottom of the sack and worked my arms up so I could shimmy the ropes and the bag up over my head. I was gasping for air as I came through the other opening with everyone standing looking at me. This all might have taken thirty seconds from beginning to end. I guess I had been making noises behind the set and no one could figure out what was wrong.

The cool air – and the fact that I could breathe it – calmed me down a bit and I told folks that we were going to have to come up with some kind of alternative to what we had just done … if they wanted me to be alive when I came through the stage left opening. We ended up cutting a slit along one of the bag’s seams that I could stick my face through after the conveyor belt took me off stage and that worked. Knowing I was going to be able to breathe eased my anxiety and the issue was dealt with. That my mind had gone into crisis mode almost immediately shocked me. It was a visceral response over which I had no control, and I certainly didn’t like the feeling of being helpless like that.

The next time we got to that part of the play, Stage Management stopped to make sure that I was going to be alright with the slit they’d made. The actors who were tying me up now knew to keep the rope above my elbows so I could adjust the sack and find my way to air. It all sounds like a tempest in a teapot, but the depth of my panic was overwhelming and very real. What was only in my mind turned into something physical which only fed what was in the mind. It was a vicious circle that spiraled way past control and into a kind of madness. I had never been in a position to experience that feeling again … and hope I never will be – unless I’m dead.

The show was great! The audiences, small though they were, loved it, and so did the critics. We toddled along enjoying each other and while there were some “improvements” that slipped in for one reason or another and had to be dealt with, we came through it all relatively unscathed and I remember the experience fondly (for the most part) as an excellent piece of theatre work. Long live George F. Walker!

It was hard to believe that some business and artistic decisions being made thousands of miles away by people I really didn’t know were affecting my daily life in a major way. The on-going fight between Producer Cameron MacIntosh and American Actors Equity about the use of non-American performers (i.e., the original London cast) in their production of “Oklahoma” had come to a head, and the production’s planned sit in New York was cancelled. Trevor Nunn, the show’s Director, had gone to New York to plead the Producer’s case, telling Equity that the Brit cast would be replaced with Yanks three months after the opening. But that was a no-go for Equity, and it was gone. I was miffed. It had been a huge feather in our caps and had opened our New York door even further. But Sam didn’t seem too concerned. That was probably one of his best qualities. In spite of his micromanaging from time to time, he was always of a mind that everything would work out … and it usually did. One just had to move on, persevere, and we would be looking at positive times once again. I held my breath.

In order to get to officially saying “Yes” to Rainbow’s “Crazy For You” for the upcoming summer (see “Greasepaint – Part 48”) there were a few hoops I had to jump through first. It was strange to be back in the Rainbow Stage environment. After so many years “away”, I felt a bit edgy walking into the MTC Rehearsal Hall to audition for ‘Bela Zangler’. While there were friends sitting behind the table, it was still a little irksome that I had to go through this charade. While Robbie (Paterson, who was directing) had told me that he wasn’t going to do the show without me, the fact that I had to present myself after all these folks had been seeing me on stage month after month in Winnipeg … well, it rankled. I knew them and they knew me, so what was the problem? Larry Mannell from Toronto had already been hired to play ‘Bobby Childs’ and had come into town for the day. I ended up considering it an opportunity to get to know Larry better and for us to do some “bits” together. True to form, Robbie turned the experience into anything but an audition. Larry and I had some great fun with each other, sounded super singing together and made the folks in the room laugh out loud at our antics. Essentially, it was all a fait accompli but “appearances had to be kept up” – a “rule” I’ve never been able to get my head around, even back in the old days in Portland where it was maddeningly prevalent. Now I was greatly looking forward to starting down this road back at Rainbow with new management under Ken Peter and a fresh vision.

Before heading off to Oregon to do “Damn Yankees”, I fit in a few days doing Musical Theatre Adjudications at the Winnipeg Music Festival and a few more recording my “Christmas Carol” reading on CD. My friends, Olaf and Clinton at DaCapo Productions, had approached me about doing some studio days to make a fully produced recording of the performance and I’d jumped at the chance. I’ve never had any difficulty recording commercials or narrations – they had a particular purpose. But the distance between performing something “live” on stage and making a recording of it is vast. In live performance, the material is in the mind and mouth, and in front of an audience it flows without a problem. Doing the same material in a studio is like you’ve never done it before. There is that microphone hanging in front of you sucking away the energy, the clarity, the spontaneity. The fact that you have the script – which, in this case, I’d subliminally committed most of to memory over many years – on a music stand right in front of you means nothing. Perhaps it’s the antiseptic studio atmosphere in which to recreate an audience experience for yourself, or a tension from the painful awareness that what you say now will not immediately disappear into time and space but be set down forever. Who knows.

It took three days to get the fifty-minute reading recorded. Nolan Balzer was my engineer and a sweetheart of a guy. We started recording right away and I thought it went pretty well. But Nolan was listening with different ears. When it’s only a disembodied voice you’re hearing out of some speakers, one picks up on nuances … or lack thereof. After the first uninterrupted read-through (which was set down for posterity) we began again … in earnest. The stopping and starting was, initially, alright, but it went on and on and on and started to get demoralizing – a breath sound here, a swallow there, an indistinctness here, a vocal stumble (a “furble”) there, a needless pause here, a tempo thing there … it started to drain me, and we had to stop as my mistakes increased. Something that had been so easy and fun sitting in the chair in the attic at Dalnavert had now become a rubble-strewn mountain to climb. But I guess when you’re putting something down for posterity, it has to be perfect and that’s what a very objective (and, at times, obsessive) Nolan was striving for. The final day was a relief as we dealt with bits and pieces. I had listened to some playbacks but there were still all the “production values” (the sound effects, the music, the ghost echoes, the transitions) to be added, the “magic” that gave the recording life. At that, Nolan was a master. There were no deadlines and since this was a test piece for him as an engineer/producer at the studio, he worked tirelessly for a very long time. I wouldn’t hear the final product until I got back from doing “Damn Yankees” in Oregon.

Kayla and I escorted another Guided Tour back to New York and with our routine firmly set – me in front of the group and she bringing up the rear – it was smooth sailing all the way. Thankfully, the group wasn’t as large as it had been the year previous, so it became a lot more intimate. There were nine elderly women who, for some reason, latched on to me and started calling themselves “Richard’s Harem”. There were some “younger girls” who were very feisty and got the most out of their free time. In fact, on our last morning there, they got to the NBC studios at 30 Rock at 4:00AM to be “in front of the windows” for “The Today Show” with hopes of getting to be on-camera and meet some of the stars! It was all beyond me, but they accomplished both goals and the trip, for them, was a life altering experience! The new walking tour of the Upper West Side was a big hit (especially with a much smaller group) as was another Lincoln Center Tour and a Tour to Ellis Island. One night we went to see “Footloose” starring Winnipegger Jeremy Kushnier. Following the show we surprised our charges by telling them that Jeremy would be pleased to meet with them and take us on a backstage tour. They were over the moon about that! He even did a Q&A for a while and had photos taken with us. It was another great Tour but, because of my schedule which became more and more jammed, it the last we were to do for a quite a while.

One other thing I had to take care of before leaving was my “placement interview” for The Pam Am Games. After the last ridiculous experience at the Volunteer Orientation, I approached the new appointment with a degree of trepidation. But this meeting was with the Event Production Coordinator for the Games. It was for an Announcer position and the incredibly affable Jim Nicol explained to me the mind-bendingly-detailed scenario that goes on “behind the scenes” at these major sporting dos. The printed breakdowns consisted of down-to-the-second timings for every aspect of an event, and I sat bug-eyed at how complicated it all seemed. After showing me the long list of workshops and seminars that Announcers were supposed to attend before the Games began, I was quick to point out to him that I was away until late in the summer. He didn’t seem too concerned about that indicating that there would be videos of the sessions and they would be sent to me shortly after they happened. He would arrange to have me announce a couple of Goldeyes games (our local baseball team) as “test” events. Combined with the dress rehearsal and information “parties” for each event, it all seemed incredibly daunting, but he seemed quite confident that I could deal with it. I got the impression that my “reputation” had preceded me, and he told me that he was comfortable with my background and ability. He had actually turned down four people that morning. I would have an assistant and a music coordinator working for me. I would be missing a lot of prep, but Jim was excited about my being on the team … and so was I! What a thing!!

I loved driving long distances in my Jeep Cherokee. I’d had a mechanic install a stand for my new laptop which was now decked out with a GPS system, and had done all the programing for the long trip to Portland. The morning of my departure I pushed the “start program” on the computer keyboard and out came the little robotic female voice (who I called “Agnes”) saying, “Take Route 120 South to Perimeter Highway”. I was thrilled at the thought of having a companion who would navigate for the next three days! The trip was flawless. Aside from the experience of some white-knuckle driving through a sudden blizzard in Wyoming, it was only the we-own-the-highway-trucks that elevated my anxiety as they barreled past with no regard for anyone else. Then it was through Utah and Idaho and finally into Oregon.

At the motels (I enjoy staying in motels on the highway!) I would retrieve messages from my office machine at home. There were some tiny emergencies I had to deal with by phone, but these were minor intrusions I wouldn’t allow to mar my trip. While there’s a sense of freedom on the road, I started to get more excited and focused as the highway signs for Portland began to appear. As I moved off the I-84 and onto the 205 I was suddenly in a big washing machine. With four lanes of freeway and on-ramps every 500 feet, speeding cars came whizzing into the madness, squeezing into lanes on the already crowded road. The serenity of my trip was pretty well over, and soon I was in the serene Portland suburb of Lake Oswego at my old stomping grounds, the Lakewood Center. After some hugs and welcome kisses by staff and friends, I was into a costume fitting and back in the arms and aromas of my favorite place on earth – a theatre!

One thing I noticed right off the bat was a deference people seemed to be paying me. I’d not been around Lake Oswego for quite a while, but it seemed that my relative successes elsewhere in the world impressed folks. I couldn’t figure that out. I told them that I didn’t want any fuss made but I think that fell on deaf ears. Their special treatment was stressing me out and I hoped all the hoopla would stop soon. The other thing I had to adjust to – again – was the fact that most rehearsals were in the evening. Since this was a “non-professional” Company, folks worked during the day and had only evenings and weekends free. They had been rehearsing for four weeks prior to my arrival and we were to start tech rehearsals in two weeks’ time. I was to be fit into the already-sort-of-set blocking. I had all my lines and songs down pretty well and the trek began.

Our Director was a high school drama teacher I had known slightly when I lived in Portland. We’d worked together on one show years back and she had been a mainstay as a Guest Director at Lakewood for a long time. I’d not been directed by her before, and quickly discovered that we had different ideas about approach to the craft and … well, there is no “and”. It wasn’t pretty!