An Update from Eric Coates, Artistic Director
In my first professional gig, I was fortunate to work at the Stratford Festival in the extraordinary company assembled by artistic director John Neville during his tenure, 1986-89. As a young actor, I enjoyed the windfall of being on stage with some of the most accomplished actors of the generation. Many of them—Goldie Semple, Susan Wright, Nicholas Pennell, Peter Donaldson, Richard March—left us far too soon, but they each made an impact on me that has endured. Goldie’s generosity, Susan’s ferocity, Nicky’s precision, Peter’s wisdom, and Richard’s wit are all part of an aspirational roadmap that would serve any traveler. In addition to his crisp tenor, Richard March played a mean piano and he combined these skills to co-host a weekly cabaret, along with his pal, Don Adams (no, not of Get Smart fame). Each Thursday during the long performance season, company members gathered in the Chalmers Lounge of the Avon Theatre to hold forth with music, interviews, and wildly inappropriate comedy, marshalled by Richard and Don.
On such a night in 1987, Scott Wentworth, as charismatic in person as he is onstage, stepped to the microphone and, instead of launching into his catalogue of Sinatra standards, introduced a guest—his father, all the way from Baltimore. Although the cabaret sometimes featured local civilians (a representative from the annual Pork Congress stole the show one night), the notion of bringing one’s aging parent onstage had not yet gained the traction that it enjoys today, thanks primarily to Ravi Jain’s Brimful of Asha, in which he and his real-life mother, who is not an actor, engage in a ninety minute debate on his right to self-determination regarding matrimony. In retrospect, I must have been expecting Wentworth Sr. and Jr. to perform a sugary, inter-generational duet, designed to send us into a whirlpool of nostalgia, so I was intrigued to see Scott set up a narrow, midriff-height table as his father, Harry, a sweet-faced senior citizen, approached the stage. On top of the table, a clear plastic cup, about the size of a large apple, was fixed in place. Inside the cup were several buttons, each connected to an electrode and wires that trailed away, presumably to some sort of electrical hub. He stepped onto the stage, looking comfortable enough. It was clear that, like his son, he was familiar with an audience. In his right hand, he held a tenor saxophone. His left hand carried nothing because his left hand wasn’t there.
As Scott tells the story today, Harry played saxophone in a jazz trio in the early 1950s. The nights were spent working the jazz circuit while he worked days in a paint factory where, in 1953, his left hand was severed in an accident. Shortly before the accident, he had bought a new saxophone which, like all saxophones, requires a musician to use both hands in order to access its full range. Scott’s mother, whose 98 years are a testament to the kind of Yankee can-do attitude that informed her actions at the time, immediately traded in the new saxophone for a trumpet, which only requires the fingers of one hand to operate its moving parts. The fact that Harry didn’t play the trumpet must have seemed like an incidental impediment to both of them because within a year, he was gigging professionally on the new horn. He didn’t give up the saxophone, entirely, but with only one hand, he could no longer wring out its full poetry.
Harry stood alongside the little table and placed the rounded end of his left arm inside the plastic cup. He explained that each button corresponded to a valve on the saxophone—valves that he couldn’t access while playing one-handed. A professor in Edmonton had invented the device, specifically for amputees and Harry happened to see it featured on the television show That’s Incredible! (prior to this, I maintained that this show was named for its unlikely popularity, but that’s a subject for another time). He successfully sought out the Edmontonian inventor, made the trip to try out the gizmo and had now arrived in Stratford for its debut. By touching the buttons and sending an electrical signal that tripped a switch and closed a valve, he could play two-handed once again. The din of the Chalmers Lounge settled to hush and Harry played the saxophone. Whether or not he played with the bravado and virtuosity of his youth is immaterial. Whether his son sang along with him or not has escaped my memory. Whether he played one song or five songs doesn’t matter to this story. What matters is this: he played all the notes. And in that moment, an artist returned home.
Across the spectrum of performing arts, as prevalent among indie artists as among large organizations, there is a pressure, applied both internally and externally, to create online content—to move live theatre onto a different platform, using different tools that require a shift in perspective from artist and audience, alike. GCTC’s friends and supporters have been very generous while we sort out our next move, relative to several factors, including, but not limited to, financial resources, existing skills, creative impulse, and, most importantly, our mandate:
To foster, produce, and promote excellent theatre that provokes examination of life in Canada and our place in the world.
As much as I adore the directive to provoke, I have to focus immediately on the imperative of excellence. Throughout GCTC’s history, whether the work was large or small, unpopular or a hit, a world premiere or a trusted chestnut, we have worked collectively to achieve excellence. Throughout my career, I have been working towards this slippery goal, and I can confirm that it gets harder, because a deeper investigation continually uncovers the complexity of live theatre and its component parts, not the least of which is the audience. When a production moves from the rehearsal hall to the theatre, there is a seismic shift that’s triggered by all aspects of the environment: sound, light, the physical set, the size of the room. We anticipate this change and relish the final stages of rehearsal wherein we adjust to accommodate the play itself to all the newly imposed factors. The introduction of an audience, however, into that very same space, and its subsequent effect on the production, well, as Norman and Stoppard might say, “…it’s a mystery”. When we haven’t achieved excellence, the audience, whether they are consciously aware of it or not, tells us that the production hasn’t worked. But when it does work, and the audience tells you so with every breath and every suspended silence and every outburst of shock or laughter, it’s as though the play, like Harry with his saxophone, has come home.
The pandemic has taken our audience from us. Without you, we cannot achieve our mandated excellence because you are as essential to the process as every other aspect of production. I believe that eventually, we will all be back in the same room, sharing the mystery of live performance. In the meantime, I hope that you can empathize with our particular quandary, which forces us to figure out how, or even if, we can achieve excellence in live theatre through digital distance. Although I can say, categorically, that it’s not going to happen before July rolls around, I will hold off on any other predictions until we all have a clearer understanding of possibilities next autumn and beyond.
Since the pandemic roared into being, I have made several critical errors. Notably, upon opening Daisy by Sean Devine on March 12 and subsequently closing it on March 13, I announced with confidence that we would back in action on April 7. Then, in my continued determination to lead with decisiveness, I contacted all of the artists for our scheduled production of Unholy by Diane Flacks, to break the bad news that their show would be postponed until October, for which I offered specific rehearsal and production dates. This, of course, triggered a domino effect on other scheduled productions in our planned 2020/21 season and I spent more time than I care to recall contacting a season’s worth of artists and laying out the new plans, which, of course, were all for naught.
Pandemic Lesson #1: hurry up and wait.
Pandemic Lesson #2: look at your operation from the outside and reassess its role in this context.
Re-opening GCTC according to our original plans for 2020/21 is simply not possible. However, rather than rushing to create digital content that might serve as a temporary solution, we are looking at the possibility of offering work in different formats and disciplines, possibly outdoors or in lobby spaces where the chance of virus transmission by HVAC systems, for example, is lower. And since none of our planned programming fits ideally into this model, we invited artists throughout Ottawa to meet and discuss approaches to partnership, wherein GCTC can share its resources across disciplines, hopefully creating opportunities for the independent artists in our community who have been hit much harder than those of us working for an institution.
We are approaching this idea—the idea of adapting art to suit the situation rather than vice versa— collectively at GCTC and, to date, have scheduled upwards of thirty meetings with local artists and smaller companies, to hear their ideas and learn how GCTC can support their work as part of our own strategic plan. We are roughly three-quarters of the way through these initial meetings and our assessment team, which includes representation from each department, will meet internally in early June to determine which proposals created the strongest interest and how we might weave these works into upcoming seasons. The driving imperative, in addition to excellence, is to create space for Ottawa artists who need time and resources to recover and grow. If we are able to stick to this plan during a time which seems inherently designed to thwart any prescribed course of action, it will be thanks to your support and the knowledge that you are as eager to return to an intimate exchange of ideas as we are. For my part, I am looking in both directions: forward to future seasons and backwards to lessons I learned as a young actor who was lucky to work with some of our greatest theatre artists. I’ll harness the generosity that I see all around me in my colleagues. I’ll commit to excellence with all the ferocity I can muster. GCTC’s team will keep working with its accustomed precision and we’ll rely on each other’s wisdom to maintain it. And, in the face of setbacks and hurdles, may wit see us through.
Sincerely,
Eric Coates