LG: Which Theatre Centre location do you remember best, and why?
TW: The Theatre Centre location I best remember is the one that was on Queen between Ossington and Dovercourt (can’t remember the name of the side street it was on). That was the location I frequented (seeing shows) and I also performed in that space on several occasions. The most time I spent there was probably doing The Lorca Play and actually, I literally left my mark on the space. I use to throw myself against the back wall every night (as part of the show, incidentally) and by the end of the run the wall started to cave in a bit and there was a large dent in it the size of my torso. Sorry about that.
LG: You are featured in many movies, yet always return to the stage, most recently in Daniel MacIvor’s A Beautiful View. What possibilities does a theatre space provide in contrast to film, and what keeps you coming back for more?
TW: I guess for me it’s not so much that I keep coming back to theatre but more that I never really left. It’s just the nature of things that work comes and goes, and I have been doing theatre pretty consistently. Most of the theatre I have done in recent years has been on tour […] working with a couple of experimental groups who toured a lot, mostly in Europe. They are PME out of Montreal and STO UNION now based in Ottawa, two companies who, unfortunately, felt they had to leave Toronto in order to survive and thrive doing the kind of experimental work they were interested in. Anyway, I really enjoy working in film and theatre both and I think they somehow feed off each other. I really just can’t imagine feeling satisfied as a performer without doing some live performance.
LG: With this being the 30th Anniversary of The Theatre Centre I have been speaking to many artists, past and present, about the space for artistic growth that The Theatre Centre continues to provide by fostering companies in residence. When creating a new work, what benefit does a longer play development process have for you as a performer?
TW: I think it is invaluable to be able to work in the space you are performing in especially when creating a show. We were very fortunate to have that opportunity doing the Lorca Play at the Theatre Centre, and I think it was a huge benefit in that case. The Augusta Company had that opportunity as well doing some earlier work. You have the chance to use the space with its various flaws and advantages and you begin to feel relaxed and at home there in some way that can’t be measured. Also, you can concentrate on what you are making instead of thinking about transposing your show into another space just before you present it to the public.
LG: You will be performing in a remount of A Beautiful View at Tarragon Theatre next year, and although the play has an incredibly minimal style, how will changing venues effect the production? Having acted on many different stages around Toronto, how does the theatre itself contribute to each production?
TW: A Beautiful View was created as a show that could move. It was always going to be a show that toured and Daniel MacIvor very much had that in mind when he created it. Touring means that you have to constantly adapt to new spaces and you get pretty good at it. But it always has some effect on the show, I think. Sometimes it’s good and you find things. Sometimes you lose something. Often both. I am really looking forward to doing A Beautiful View again. It will be in a more intimate space and I am excited about that. Of course, Tarragon is a remount not a tour, so we will have a lot more time adapting to the backspace than you normally have in a touring situation.
LG: Could you share a memorable moment from working at The Theatre Centre?
TW: I worked with Paul Bettis a few times …most notably on the Freud Project which was a fantastic experience. He, actually, is another example of someone who considered the space as a hugely important part of the production as a whole. We didn’t do that show at the Theatre Centre (it was at Symptom Hall), but we were able to work in the space throughout the rehearsals of all three versions of that show and Paul took meticulous care about dressing that space and creating a house for us to play in. He was truly dedicated to his work in a very positive and fun way and he was able to draw people into his vision. It was a pleasure to go to work in the (late) morning. But I can’t talk about the Theatre Centre without mentioning other people who have passed away and who I associate strongly with it…namely Ken MacDougall and the beautiful and talented Mark Shields who costumed The Lorca Play (one of his many talents) and who was beloved by pretty much everyone who met him. I still miss them.
LG: Thanks so much Tracy.
TW: Thanks again…and long live the Theatre Centre!
“Hmmmm, of course I guess it wouldn’t be right to say my favourite show was my own Enoch Arden?? I can think of others too, would that be better?” -Judith Thompson
“The First thing that comes to mind was Cute With Chris: Live. It was an audience composed primarily of Chris’ fans from his online show. People arrived in costume, and they cheered for him as if he was Bono. I’ve never seen anything like. It sort of blew my mind.” - Michael Rubenfeld
“A most memorable show for me in recent times was the production of Revisited by Christian Barry of 2b theatre. Besides being a refreshing, delightful and moving piece of theatre, it also introduced to me a smart new director and a powerful new company.” - Andy McKim
“I remember Julia Aplin coming on stage and tap dancing… I didn’t know she tapped… I hadn’t seen tap in a contemporary dance show, it just surprised and thrilled me. Those small moments which stick in your mind forever, you never know what they will be and how they will move you.” - Jennifer Goodwin
“BREATH(e) Steve Lucas takes me to a place I’ve never been but have dreamed about. My breath is taken away. Cheese-y of me to say so, but seriously. So beautiful. So simple. So transcendental.” Wendy White
“The most time I spent there was probably doing the Lorca Play and, actually, I literally left my mark on the space. I use to throw myself against the back wall every night as part of the show, and by the end of the run the wall started to cave in a bit and there was a large dent in it the size of my torso. Sorry about that.” - Tracy Wright
1) What does “space” mean to you? How does it factor into and interact with your work?
Well I have been known for doing a lot of environmental theatre. Maybe I did more in the past than I do currently but it actually seems to me that every time I step into a theatre; proscenium, deep thrust like the Patterson at the Festival, or an empty warehouse, I am involved in examining how the space will inform the play and the production or the story. So I always feel like there’s two types of spaces in the work I do…there’s the time and space of the story [and] there is the time - it’s today at 8 pm in Montreal, Centaur Two Theatre, and what that is with that space. I think a director works with time and space all the time and so has to be conscious of it as a very important element. I think one should make choices about a space as much as one can, and then of course you’re subjected to all the needs of a space and the particularities of a space.
2) How have you used the aesthetics or architecture of a space to compliment or amplify the experience of your piece?
It depends on the story, and how that story informs the kind of space to be used. It’s also the audience orientation; where will the audience be in the space in relationship to the performance? The experience of being in the round tends to demand that the actors move in circles. The experience of the thrust means the actor is always kind of pivoting. If you’re doing a soliloquy on a thrust stage you have to be always moving, reaching around, whereas in a proscenium stage you can be pretty much straight forward and everybody will hear you. I try to make sure that in choosing a space that it’s serving the craft needs of the play and the way that the story is being told at a functional level, through a denotative level, and then at a metaphorical level. I think that space becomes metaphor and audience orientation is a metaphor in how the director wants the audience to perceive the play.
The thing about when you’re in the round [is that] you see the audience across the stage. What does that mean? It means something. It’s pertinent to some plays and not pertinent to other plays. In Scorched for example we have one scene where one of the characters works in a theatre. We turn the theatre inside out from being a Montreal notary office or a Lebanese desert, into a theatre [again]. I think the playwright is using that [transition] to say that in order to investigate the secrets of our pasts, it requires us employing our imaginations, which is based on our memory and our well of experience. In a way, to understand the past we need to use our imagination as an active tool, and hence why this character works in a theatre. It’s fairly evident that the play takes place in a theatre - we break the illusion of the play. The other time we break that again is the tribunal. I have one character enter so one is coming forward in a courtroom scene and starting to speak to a tribunal, a war crimes tribunal, so suddenly the theatre becomes a law court.
3) How does the audiences’ received meaning of a piece change when the venue is changed? If you take a play from outside to inside, to a larger or smaller theatre?
Tarragon has two hundred and five seats and Centaur 2 has four hundred and twenty five, basically double the size. It has a much higher proscenium arch and a much higher ceiling; the set floats in a sea of blackness in Centaur 2, whereas at the Tarragon it’s right up against the wall. The [set] wall is as high as the ceiling of the theatre [at Tarragon], whereas [at Centaur] the walls only go up really about a third of the way and there’s blackness above it. So, interestingly you have a space where you have to pan, and it kind of permits tragedy.
I remember I did a Barker play, and Barker commented on it, he said, “You know, the actors in my plays need more space over their heads”. I had done it at the Theatre Centre on Lippincott Street and it was probably just too shallow for what his plays were, not high enough above the actors head. There is something about that, [when] the actors have to exist as we do, in a world with a sky; there’s a sense of infinity above us, there’s a ceiling. The characters are taking on big issues [and] they need a little more space over their heads.
Looking at Scorched, there is a level of intimacy that we can choose at Tarragon [where] we can do things with facial gestures, a look. The actors are forced to pull up their horizon line. They need to reach out to the audience more, because if they get below a certain line they tend to lose their eyes very quickly. They’re sort of shielded, which breaks the means of communication. It’s a tool to be used, to take that away from an audience, but at the same time it’s a tool, not something to be unaware of. So as we open it up it’s interesting, we don’t have to push the volume in the place, but that actor has to be present, be aware of the back walls and also the side walls of the Centaur 2. One of the actresses was saying last night [that] when they moved from the Tarragon to the main stage of the National Arts Centre they had to really find a way to reach all the way around, not just staring straight forward, but they had to pivot their head to really catch that thrust audience, and make sure they’re reaching into that space - even though it’s a lovely intimate space, the theatre at the National Arts Centre, it isn’t the Tarragon.
It took the Tarragon performance values a while to adjust. That’s what I find is actually one of my tasks here. Theatre is just really hand made. I have to be here at this theatre to shape it a bit, to make this show fit in this space and fill the space and not get too big, not try to hard, but just find that perfect point where they step away from being Tarragon and they become Centaur 2. A pitch level of performance. Is it present? Yet not yell. Not push, because they don’t really need to. The audience is just that much further back, so the actors have to be aware, and what that does is it makes the story larger in it’s place in the world. It makes it larger. The people are smaller in a funny kind of way. They’re victims of the Gods.
I had to redirect a scene just because my light angles changed. The two actors were playing a bit too close together, so we couldn’t separate them by lights and put them in two different worlds. So the boxer stayed on one side, and I moved the other character, delivering a science lecture, to far stage right. I watched it the previous night and I thought that it was just way too far; my eyes were playing tennis between the two, it was too far away. By the time my eyes went to the boxer I’d missed him, and by the time they moved back I missed the lecture. So yesterday we re-blocked it again and we just put the lecturer in her original position by the slide projector and she stayed there relatively close to the boxer, and there’s a few moments that are sympathetic moments between them. It’s actually better than when it was at the Tarragon because you actually saw them both have the same thought at the same moment, and they’re twins so there’s all that thinking about being in each other’s brain. It strengthens certain parallels. That’s the way to do it, that’s good! It only took twelve weeks to get to that point. So that’s how the real space can open up a new meaning to the play, which I will use when we go to MTC, which is a thrust space. I’ll probably keep that blocking, and keep that in the scene.
4) What has been the benefit of having access to developmental space? Beyond the quality, how does it affect the style, tone or meaning of your work?
It’s very informative, because usually in devised work, and even when I write a play or adapt a play and direct it at the same time, I’m much more conscious of the presentation than a writer should be. A writer should really be focused on the words, and I’m doing the same thing at the same time, and that’s a good thing and a flaw I think. I tend to think about that, and therefore think about design, and therefore think about design in the particular space that the show is going to happen in. It may not change the moments of the show, because you know, I did a show at the thrust stage at Stratford, the Tom Patterson, it’s a very deep stage and it was a new script, and I was able to write in a kind of ping-pong thing. There were people down in one area, and people in another area, and people in another area, and because of the depth of that stage I could have three simultaneous scenes ping-ponging after each other or bouncing off of each other, and the actors moved that way in the space. So the space informed my dramaturgy.
I did a show in the backspace of Passe Murielle, many many years ago, it was called Mein and it was set in a box, a glass box that with a grid pattern, like being in a high office tower, and this guy was on the outside of the box and that notion informed completely where these characters were. It was going to be set in the corporate world, and the design of the corporate world informed this box of glass, the corporate buildings of downtown Toronto. But it was the high walls of the Back Space that became really informative by sealing the whole thing off - it looked like they couldn’t get out of the box. Of course they could, but it felt like they were sealed in, and the doors were hidden lines of the grid and so it was like they were walking on air. And that led to the kind of doors for the show, which were pivoting doors so they could push though doors and disappear very quickly. On the other side of the door was the same image, so it was just like they fell out the window. In the end a lot of imagery of the play was about falling, about the nature of ambition and the fall of ambition. So there’s always a sort of juggling act, because stories which are much more physical are told as much by image, as much by gesture as they are by word, so I am constantly informed by that. It’s very important to me, whatever the space is, you have to find some sort of connection between it and the work, it’s almost part of the authorial contract. That it has this connection with things because of the room that you’re in.
5) This is the Theatre Centre’s 30th anniversary so we were wondering if there was a significant memory or production that stood out for you?
I was pretty young when I started working there, and I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I will always think fondly of the Greek Disco downstairs at Broadview and Danforth. You had to get your show done by 10:30, because that’s when the Disco would really start to pump up. That too was a real time and space thing [and] we were very aware of that.
What I was really inspired by was the work and the people that were in association with the Theatre Centre. I learned a great deal about what was possible in theatre. Richard Nieoczym ran a company called the Actor’s Lab and did this piece about the Holocaust, about people being put on trains going to Auschwitz, and he did this kind of physical, high Grotowski-like physical piece, with a train lantern, this flashing train lantern they turned the lights on and off with, these army boots that pounded in the rhythm of a train, some kind of text and song, probably Jewish song they were singing, these people being transported. I remember it to this day, because using these very simple elements they struck this image of being transported to Auschwitz, and at the same time captured the pain and fear of these people. I was reminded yesterday when were doing some scenes from Scorched where people are talking on the phone and they’re miked, I remembered how in the 80s we didn’t know you could actually do that.
There were two people at the Theatre Centre, Richard Shoichet and Cynthia Grant, who had been to New York and had the opportunity to see work coming out of there: Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, etc, etc. So seeing that, they had brought back techniques that they had seen. There was a pay telephone, and I was Stage Manager on Mr. Shoichet’s show and the character’s talking at the airport were just talking over a mike on the pay telephone, and there was this remarkable intimacy. They kind of faced the wall and talked on the phone and you were inside their brain. As we were adjusting the levels of Scorched yesterday and going “that cues’ not working, that sound cues’ not working”…a character onstage is speaking on the phone and you’re watching a character onstage receiving the phone call, but with the intimacy of using a microphone, which now seems like nothing, was then an illumination about what technology and the meaning it could bring to the theatre. Cynthia Grant did that with her work. There was this remarkable shadow play, where the shadow grew and expanded, and the surface on which it was projected was spinning. So you got this whole magic realism moment of this character spinning in space, spinning into the cosmos which I could never could imagine you could possibly do, I wish I could figure out how to do it - I’d do it again.
Thom Sokoloski’s work informed me of LeCoq, which is now common currency, but then nobody knew what LeCoq was. Tom was the first artist that I encountered in that company with Dean Gilmore and Mark Cristmann among others, and of course they were all LeCoq based, and so they brought a level of theatricality in the body that again was a new thing. I remember Dean playing Shylock wearing a fur coat, and being lifted up [by] the arms, I think it was Mark that was carrying him, and it was like being a chariot, or a stagecoach, or a King’s carriage, being propelled around the stage. I loved it. Being in that world and seeing those kinds of shows was fascinating to me, and illuminating-you can do that? Thankfully the doors were opened for me. I’m not sure if we had not gotten together and started the Theatre Centre what I might not have seen, or experienced which has informed my work. Being very simple, Nieoczym’ work or Thom’s work, all three or all four people’s work was very simple but strikingly suitable to the dramatic moment, and had another meaning other than just telling the story. There was a level of metaphor which was very remarkable.