Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (6 page)

The job of stage manager in summer stock at that time bears little relationship to what a stage manager does in a modern theatre. It was my job to build the scenery, a skill I had learned from working with Russ and likely the reason I was offered the job in the first place. But it was also my job to hang and focus the lights and operate the lighting board during performances. It was also my responsibility during performance to operate what we laughingly called the sound system and to manually operate the front curtain. Props and prompting, important in weekly stock, were generally handled by an ASM (Assistant Stage Manager) who had been in the rehearsals. I had not, at least not until the tech rehearsal.

The company performed in the Port Carling Town Hall, the same building that the Straw Hat Players had used for so many years. The upper floor of the building was a long room with a flat floor and a stage with a curtain at one end. There was almost no wing space and certainly no control booth at the back as is now standard in most theatres. All technical operations were performed from the wings stage left. The lower floor was a large empty space that could be used for building and painting with two dressing rooms, one for men and one for women, on each side of the stairs that led up to the stage. There was no air conditioning, only a large fan that was far too loud to operate during the performance. The theatre itself was at street level which provided one advantage: in the case of a power failure a vehicle could be brought up to the back of the house and the headlights would illuminate the stage.

The resident director for the season was to be Leon Major. A brilliant, talented, intense, chain-smoking young man, Leon was the first of what I liked to think of as the Big Three of undergraduate directors who went through University of Toronto at that time, the other two being Kurt Reis, still spelled with a
C
, and me. Kurt and Leon, both senior to me, were intense rivals, apparently despised each other, and had a low regard for each other’s work. Leon went on to a very successful career, directing at Stratford, founding the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, being the Artistic Director of Toronto Arts Productions, now CentreStage, before becoming a highly regarded opera director in the United States. Kurt Reis went on to found his own acting studio and to act in film and television. William B. Davis became the Smoking Man.

The problem for me in the summer of 1957 was that I knew nothing about lighting, or even about electricity. I didn’t know an ohm from a watt. Before I could undertake the job I needed a crash course in both electricity and theatre lighting. Leon regularly worked with Wally Russell as his technical director and Wally agreed to bring me up to speed. By the time we moved to Port Carling I more or less had the skills that I would need for the summer.

Once again we were doing weekly stock, performing one play at night while rehearsing the next one during the day. The schedule was efficient and Leon was a master of it. On Tuesday, the first day of rehearsal, he would give the cast his cuts; there were always cuts, and he would block the play in one day. On Wednesday, they would work Act One, Thursday, Act Two, Friday, Act Three, a run-through on Saturday, and a tech and dress on Monday, opening Monday night. And none of this rehearsing from 10 until 6 as is common now. The rehearsal day would end by 3 p.m. so the cast had time for a swim and to learn lines. This was pretty much the schedule in weekly rep in Britain when I began directing there a few years later.

From Leon I learned how a director can use a half inch ground plan and a bunch of sugar cubes to plan his production. If you are going to block a play in less than five hours you had better be well prepared. Leon would initial each sugar cube to represent each character and then work through the play moving the cubes to represent the physical movement of each character, noting each movement in his script, so that he could more or less dictate the moves at the first rehearsal. It’s a useful technique, one that I adopted for several years. The director can work through many possible patterns in his study without wasting valuable rehearsal time. Of course, every once in a while, early in the blocking rehearsal, an actor might say, “Gee, I don’t think I should go to the window on that line, I think I should go to the door.” And she’ll be right. After that one has to improvise like the dickens. After directing thirty or forty productions, I found I didn’t need the detailed prep; I had a repertoire in my head and could be more elastic in rehearsal.

An actor’s time, both in rehearsal and outside rehearsal, had to be used to maximum efficiency in weekly rep, a requirement, alas, that seems quaint in today’s theatre. Directors now are apt to spend days muddling through different blocking ideas. Amelia Hall, who was the director of Canada’s longest running weekly stock company, the Canadian Repertory Theatre, writes in her memoir,
My Life Before Stratford,
how important it was to schedule the actor’s rehearsal time and to keep strictly to that schedule. She was shocked once when she showed up for a rehearsal in another company at the appointed time and had to wait a whole hour! Only an hour? That would be timely in today’s theatre. Of course, actors now are so used to film when the actor’s time is the least important consideration that we have become used to waiting not just for an hour, but many hours, sometimes even days.

Leon was a formidable note giver. He would perch on the stage, clipboard in hand, cigarette dangling from his mouth, ash everywhere, and tear off each page of delivered notes, crumpling the paper and tossing it over his shoulder. I am embarrassed to say I mimicked this technique sometime later. I guess I always tended to copy my heroes. In public school, the alpha male, Gar McGuiness, always walked with his head down. So, of course, I started to walk with my head down. If Leon threw his delivered notes over his shoulder, I guessed I should do the same.

In those days, directors normally designed their own lighting and Leon was no exception. It was my job to execute his design on a lighting board that not only predated computers, it predated electronics. The large resistance dimmers were operated with cumbersome manual handles that could be linked together to create groupings of circuits. My long lanky limbs were often needed, legs included, to reach from one end of the board to the other. In between light cues, or sometimes at the same time, one would do sound cues, some manual and some recorded.

I’m astonished now to watch a technical rehearsal and see how a sound cue is a computer file triggered by a flick of the finger. In 1957, playing a recorded cue was more complicated. The cue, whether music or sound, would be somewhere on a 78 rpm disc. The specific point on the record would be marked with chalk. Before the cue was to be played, the operator, me, would set the needle of the record player on the cue point. One would then hold the record still and turn on the turntable so that it revolved underneath the record without the record itself turning. At the precise moment when the cue was required the operator would release the record so that it would begin playing at correct speed and volume with no start-up sound.

This technique failed me only once. We were doing an old chestnut called
The Ghost Train
. The play, for me, was an elaborate dance as I moved from sound cues to the lighting board and back again, often using knees and feet to operate the board while simultaneously releasing a record. The climax of the play on which everything depended was the arrival of the ghost train itself as it lurched by, an effect created by light and sound. Especially sound. On the first night, everything was going swimmingly, not a cue missed. As we came to the climax I set up the record of the train; at the precise moment when the cue was required I released the record, and: Nothing! Not a sound. I have seldom been more embarrassed for actors on a stage. What were they to do? Well, troupers that they were they pretended they had heard a train. I wanted to hide in the tiniest hole I could find but, no, I had to go on stage as I was also an actor in the piece who appeared after the train had gone through. I couldn’t look my colleagues in the face. I was mortified.

The next day we fixed the amplifier and there were no further problems. But it was hard to hold my head up for quite a while.

Arch McDonald, a successful radio actor, and his partner, Celia Sutton, a costume designer, ran a summer lodge for show business people just outside Port Carling. Among the regular clientele were the great Canadian dancers Lois Smith and David and Laurence Adams. It was quite a grand place, it seemed to me, and these successful artists would lounge in front of the fireplace every night listening to Frank Sinatra records. Boring. We only listened to classical music.

Some of us from the Port Carling summer theatre company had room and board for the season at the Lodge, the men sharing small digs tucked under the verandah while the women shared real bedrooms inside the house. My roommate was the gay designer Wilf Pegg who always slept in the nude. Why was I not sharing with Cathy who was also in the company as an actor and ASM? Well, you might ask. Cathy had a room upstairs with one of the other actresses from the company. Unmarried men and women simply didn’t live together in those days nor share bedrooms, publicly at least.

Still it was a great learning time for me and by the end of the summer, returning to university, I had no idea I would actually be running the company the next year.

1957. Spring. A young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of . . . London, England. And some love along the way.

While New York was interesting, for a young Canadian theatre artist London, England, was Mecca in the late fifties. I was determined to go and in the spring of 1957 I somehow managed to arrange a two week trip. I have no idea how I found either the time or the money. I had all that studying to do for my summer theatre gig as a stage manager/electrician. Did I pay for the trip myself from my earnings as a child actor, which were quite modest by today’s standards — I was a radio actor, after all — or did my father foot the bill? However it was arranged, I was to fly there for two weeks and stay in a furnished flat in South Kensington, in the same building as Canadian actor Eric House, who was acting in
The Balcony
by Jean Genet.

But first there was Sherry. Sherry Grauer, now an established painter and sculptor, was the daughter of Dal Grauer, the head of BC Hydro. She lived in Vancouver and was my mother’s goddaughter, if an atheist can have a goddaughter. She came to visit my mother in King in the spring of 1957. My goodness, she and I got on well. We talked and held hands and snuggled in the recreation room, nothing much more than that, but clearly we were both taken with each other. We figured out that if I travelled to London from Boston I could visit her on the way in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was a student at Wellesley College, which was then, and still is, a college for women only.

My visit to Cambridge was quite lovely, and quite chaste. While we did roll around on the grass as I recall, and she did seem to like to cuddle, she confessed that she thought mingling tongues to be rather gross, though she used a more contemporary expression. A far cry from Nadine Ragus as Rosa Gonzales. In this situation I would have been a much more willing participant, but that was not to be. Nevertheless we had a great time talking about music and philosophy and travelling downtown in Boston wondering why we couldn’t find Pak Street, our ears not having adjusted to the Boston accent before we finally discovered there is an
R
in Pak Street. Leaving her when I departed for London was quite emotional, not knowing when we would see each other again, and, for me, wondering what all this meant for my relationship with Cathy.

Ahead of me though was a long propeller flight from Boston to London, with a stop at Shannon Airport in Ireland. In the fifties when one announced that one was going to London the reply invariably was “Oh, how nice, are you going by boat or are you flying?” — the implied suggestion being that boat was much the superior way. When was the last time you heard that question? The flight may have been long, but it was civilized. There was decent food and enough room in economy even for my long gangly legs. At Shannon Airport we were treated to complimentary Irish coffee, in other words, coffee laced with Irish whiskey. When I finally arrived, jet-lagged and exhausted, at my cousin Barbara Chilcott’s flat in London, Eric House was waiting. He cheerfully announced that if we hurried we could see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Unable to deny my thoughtful host, we spent the next hour hiking to the palace and standing watching parades of costumed people until I finally let slip, “I hate militarism.” True enough, but probably not the right thing to say at the time and for years Eric never let me forget it. Eventually, we got to my new digs and I was able to begin my recovery and prepare for a whirlwind tour of London theatre.

And what a time it was to touch down in London. It was less than a year since John Osborne had, according to Alan Sillitoe, “not just contributed to British theatre but set off a landmine and blew most of it up . . .” with his play
Look Back in Anger,
which was still playing. Jean Genet’s surrealist play set in a brothel,
The Balcony
, was playing at the Arts Theatre Club, so structured to avoid the still active British censor. And coincidentally, J.B. Priestley’s play
The Glass Cage
, written for and performed by my cousins Murray and Donald Davis and Barbara Chilcott, was playing at the Piccadilly, a large theatre just off Piccadilly Circus. Unfortunately a little too far off to catch much passing trade and the play had only a short run.

Of course one did the normal tourist things, going to St. Paul’s and the Tower, the galleries, and the amazing new Royal Festival Hall. But what was most astonishing to a young theatre person from Toronto was the long list of thirty or forty plays all being presented in the city at the same time. Heck, one could just decide of a Wednesday, say, I’d like to go to see a play tonight, and have one’s pick of comedies, dramas, musicals, or classics. In Toronto one was lucky if there was one professional production to be seen, never mind a choice.

I must have been a very obvious tourist, much as I tried not to be. I couldn’t walk through Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square without an enterprising photographer taking my picture and trying to sell it to me. And London taxis everywhere. Rather than figure out the city’s complex geography, I would just hop in a cab and ask to be taken to whatever theatre I had chosen for that night. My constant worry with this system was that one day the driver would simply take me across the road and wonder why I hadn’t walked. Oh, did I mention that I was, and still am, a constant worrier? Restaurants were a puzzle. One would walk into a restaurant and be told to sit anywhere, but all the tables were occupied, and, no, not by Banquo’s ghost, but by real live diners. It seemed the idea that one would have a table to oneself was a North American indulgence that a crowded city still recovering from a brutal war could not afford. Forget about a good cup of coffee or a hamburger. Get used to plain cooking and miniscule portions of meat. But I loved it all. I was at the centre of the world. Curiously, when I returned to London three years later to study at LAMDA, not one photographer tried to sell me my picture, not even on my first day. What were the signs, I wonder, that revealed my transition from tourist to student?

The evenings I spent with Eric back at our digs after the theatre were an unexpected bonus on this trip. We had long discussions about theatre and life. He was really old at the time. Well, thirty-five seemed pretty old to both of us. He asked me about my love life, though he didn’t share information about his, which, I gathered from my mother who had been his confidante, was quite, well, complicated. When I told him about Cathy and Sherry, he asked me who I preferred. I told him Sherry, but of course I married Cathy. For a smart guy I’m not always the brightest light in my own universe.

When it was time to return to Canada I dressed as usual in my sports jacket, tie, and flannels and prepared for the long flight back. How I was seen in Boston and London gave a good indication of the importance of my native Canada on the international scene. In Boston people said, “Oh, going home to England, are you?” In London they said, “Oh, going home to America, are you?” To Americans I seemed English and to the English I seemed American. Still, near invisibility was to have its advantages. When I returned to England to study and then to work no visa was necessary. I was a “British subject” and entitled to study, work, and even vote in the Motherland.