I returned home from Freiburg to Montreal and the tail end of Expo ’67 with Sgt. Pepper dominating the airwaves, hungry to explore theatre further. Bought a specially priced $10 student season ticket to the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. Productions like Faut Jeter la Veille (Dario Fo) and Le Marquis qui Perdit (Ducharme), in contemporary parlance, “blew my mind”, augmenting in my imagination the possibilities of theatre. My fate was sealed, a life in the theatre was ‘incontournable’. The TNM season that year was performed in the Theatre Port-Royal in Place des Arts. Nearly 40 years later on the very same stage, now called Theatre Jean Duceppe, I played the Yankee capitalist in the Compagnie Jean Duceppe’s remount of Charboneau et le Chef.  On that same stage in 2005, I directed Trevor Ferguson’s Le Pont for the Duceppe company.

Fall of 1967, switched my McGill studies to languages and started participating in McGill Players’ Club productions in the Sandwich Theatre, as it was named then, of the Student Union. The Players’ Club programmed one-act plays at lunchtime throughout the school year, and fellow students could drop by, eat their sandwiches and watch the show. I started acting, directing and tech’ing shows for the Club. It was a deep dive into a theatre sand box, playing, experimenting, learning by doing. First show I directed? A one act play by, yes, Fernando Arrabal. Central conceptual image, -a children’s playground balance-beam. At the end of that year, at the AGM, to my surprise, I was elected President of the Club. Without asking, without any forewarning, the outgoing President, Ginette Kuchinsky (sp?), whom I barely knew, nominated me. In front of 30 or so fellow students, I was too shy, too scared, to turn the nomination down. Imagine my surprise when the members elected me as the incoming President for the next school year.  It was politics. The other candidate was the chosen representative of the snobby British-accented theatre clique whose arrogant comportment manifested a presumed divine right to anything/everything to do with theatre. (A reflection of all theatre across Canada at the time, and perhaps the genesis of my personal antipathy to all Brit snobs.)  It was more an anti-Brit vote than a pro-Sprung one. Ginette, I have no idea where you are now, but your nomination that day was some weird hand of the Muse. It decided my life. Thank you in retrospect. (Luck? Fate? Inevitable?)

If I was going to run the student theatre club starting in the fall, I figured I better know more how theatre works. With the help of Janet Amos, who had been starring in some of our student productions, and was destined to became a highly respected T.O. actor/director and early member of Theatre Passe Murielle, I got a summer job as an Acting ASM at the Red Barn Theatre in Jackson’s Point Ontario. Peter Boretski and Jennifer Phipps were the Artistic Directors. it was “summer stock.” We rehearsed and staged a new play every week for the entire summer in a shambling, century-old barn that seated over 300. An Everest of a learning climb. Paid $25 a week, I ended up knowing how to build flats, hang lights and to tell the difference between a Leko and a Fresnel. Something few current Tech graduates from the National Theatre School of Canada, I can attest first-hand, are capable of doing. The houselights were run by a museum-worthy porcelain resistance dimmer, a huge wagon wheel of a contraption that could get red-hot during the show and caused the ancient fuses in the barn to burn out, mid-scene, blacking out the action on stage. The fuses were the size and shape of a package of lifesavers. We quickly ran out of spare ones. Wrapping aluminum foil around the burnt-out fuses and reinserting them, hot wired, into the fuse box got the lights functioning again. This was one of the many skills I perfected that summer. I even ended up playing the Villain in the melodramatic pot boiler, Murder In The Red Barn. (Type casting?) Back to McGill at the end of the summer with a grounding in the rudiments of theatre that ensured that the 1968-69 school year was a crazy-bursting Pinnate of productions. I was part of a cohort of theatre nuts that overdosed on plays to the detriment of our studies. *

* A generational cohort that included Dixie Seattle; Fiona Ried; Sharry Flett; Tom Rack; and a slew of other actors and directors who went on to make significant contributions to Canadian Arts.

Directing, acting, crewing, lighting… we had to do it all. We even slept in the theatre. And we wanted more. It was the late Sixties. Anything/everything was possible. Drugs, Sex and Rock ’n Roll.  Anti-war plays. (eg: Viet Rock) Demonstrations. We hired US draft dodgers and deserters as technicians to welcome them to Montreal. The McGill Administration building was occupied. McGill closed down for the day when 15,000 Thousand demonstrated on Sherbrooke Street past the McGill gates for a “McGill Français”. Life had purpose. I had the studio theatre in the student union building hopping day and night, facilitating over 50 productions playing to a total audience of over 12,000 during the school year, in a venue that seated only 100. We even toured one production to York University. I directed, acted and designed lights for many of the shows.  The first major production I programmed as President was Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance an anti-war play by, yes, - John Arden. I hired Peter Moss, then a student from the National Theatre School to direct. His first professional gig.*

  *Peter, despite having mediocre talents as a director, went on to a career in theatre and TV. Working for Robin Phillips at Stratford and then running the Young People’s Theatre in Toronto. Also to directing for TV, including a dismally inadequate adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s St Urbain’s Horseman for CBC.

John Arden’s play called for a prop Gattling Gun, the 1880’s American-designed proto-type of a machine gun. A bit of an impossible item for a student theatre group to re-create realistically. From the small Montreal war museum in La Poudrière on Nun’s Island, after a few phone calls, I was able to borrow a genuine 1915 Vickers machine gun with tripod for the run of the play. Mention “McGill” and it opened a lot of doors in Anglo Montreal. (In those days.) Two hippies in a borrowed rusting, beat-up old Chevy arrive to pick it up. The aging janitor of the museum even offered a belt of ammunition to complete the picture. As we are loading the machine gun and belt into the trunk, with a few still-functioning WWI bolt-action Lee Enfield rifles included for good measure, the janitor says, “Careful, eh, those rounds in the belt are probably still live .” (I kid you not!) It is Montreal in the days of the FLQ bombings.  We are driving back to McGill through the centre of town, a beaten-up Chevy, long-haired hippies, with a genuine machine-gun and live ammunition in our trunk. Of course, we are stopped by the cops. Hauled out of the car, hands in the air, they checked our ID. -McGill students, valid licence. Grumbling, they let us go…“Get dhat car off the road, hein, les boys.” Never bothered to open the trunk. --Ya, they never checked the trunk! What if? The imagination boggles. (Luck and more Luck?)

One of the highlights of that ‘68-’69 school year was the “fore-play”, Festival ‘69, four student productions in venues around the campus. To publicize the event, we convinced the editor of the McGill Daily to design/print the front page of one issue as a spoof mock-up of the soft-porn Montreal publication, Midnight. (NB: Owner/publisher of the rag at the time was Robert Lantos, future Canadian film mogul.) That issue of the Daily caused outrage around the university, in the McGill Senate too. But, hey, the entire festival ended up selling out. See the front page of the McGill Daily that features the long-haired greaser, Randy Roddick, my fictitious alter-ego. (Note the reference to the Roddick Gates, the Sherbrooke St. entrance gate to McGill Campus and say Randy Roddick slowly -ya, we were over-sexed.) The article gives a peep into campus life of the period.

Another stroke of youthful arrogance was our production, Éveriste Galois, about the famous Parisian 1930’s anti-monarchist student rebel and mathematician. My first main-stage directing attempt, and my first time tackling a new script. Wish I still had the poster for that production. It was a full-colour rip-off of Delacroix’s 1830 iconic “La Liberté guidant le peuple” painting of a full-breasted rebel carrying a tattered tricoleur at the barricades. (The same image that inspired the marketing graphics for the mega-musical, Les Miserables, many years later.) We ran late March, 1969, the same week the McGill Français demonstration took place along Sherbrooke Street.  De Gaulle’s impudent “Vive le Québec Libre”, shouted provocatively from City Hall two years ago, was still echoing in the ears of Montreal, still triggering teeth-gnashing in Québec Anglos. Before the show started, I had one of the actors come on stage and announce that the McGill administration had issued a decree that God Save the Queen be played before every performance. (Of course, bullshit!) The Moyse Hall audience stood willingly. A few bars in, the recording elided into the Marseillaise. Grumbling in the house as the McGill audience found themselves standing for De Gaulle’s national anthem. Half way through the play, as the 1930 Paris students were rioting in the script, I had actors storm in from the back of the house carrying fake rifles, fleur-de lys flags, one on a motor-bike, yes, it was running, and shouting in French, pretending to be rioting Montreal students taking the audience hostage. (Luckily cellphones had not been invented so the audience could not phone the police!)   OMG, the hubris of our generation, or the “hutzpah” as the Gazette reviewer called it, trashing the production. My first major directing gig, yup, neither a box-office nor critical hit.

Spending 24 hours a day in the theatre was more compelling than studying in the library. My German courses, after a year studying in Freiburg, were easy on me. Other courses ended up neglected.  At times, I was lucky. Some of my professors took pity on me. I managed to get into a course on documentary cinema given by John Grierson, the legendary founder of the National Film Board of Canada. Landing Grierson as a faculty member was a plum recruitment for the McGill English Department, his teaching credentials based entirely on his experience, his achievements. He was charged with a knowledge and driven to pass it on to the next generation. An enlightened hiring that the moribund business culture of McGill today would never consider. While the films he screened were fabulous and fascinating, a lot of them NFB ground-breaking greats, like, Ladies and Gentlemen Mr. Leonard Cohen, I had little time to write the course essays.  One of Grierson’s teaching assistants had been a student of my father’s at Brock University. As Grierson was flipping through my miserable attempt at an essay, about to fail me, she mentions to him that I was running the student theatre group and doing some good work. “Ah, he says, and scrawls a “B” across the essay and tosses it aside.

In the summer preceding my penultimate year at McGill, I pulled off a minor miracle founding my first theatre company. In honour of Michel St Denis, whose theories on actor training had guided the founding of the National Theatre School of Canada, I named the company Theatre XV, after St Denis’ Compagnie des Quinze, the company he founded in 1929, in Paris, dedicated to the theories of Jacques Copeau and “total theatre.” With the help of a sympathetic English professor we secured the use of Moyse Hall, the main theatre at McGill, at rock-bottom rent for a summer season of five plays, each running for two weeks. I somehow sweet-talked the McGill Alumni Society into supporting the company, as a kind of dry run for the immanent (1971) Sesquicentennial of our august university. The President of the Alumni Society was hoping, if we could make our summer season a success, this would be an argument for a celebratory festival of plays next year. “Consider a revival of My Fur Lady” he said to me as, he handed me, hesitantly, five crisp one thousand dollar bills.*  

*My Fur Lady (1957) was perhaps the most successful show ever to come out of McGill, an original spoof musical that ended up touring Canada and launching the careers of both Galt MacDermot (Hair) and Brian Macdonald a director/choreographer whose creative imagination and theatre craft I was in awe of in the 1980’s when he was directing G&S musicals at Stratford.

My personal student bank account ran Theatre XV’s business. Imagine the butterflies in my stomach as I skipped with glee from the Alumni office down University Street to deposit five one thousand dollar bills into my bank on Sherbrooke. -Picture the teller, after a sceptical glance at this shoddily-dressed hippie, walking the bills to his boss to make sure they were not counterfeit. The season featured the North American professional premiere of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming and a mixed company of actors that included, by total serendipity, David Mamet, whose acting skills were limited, but whose writing skills were good enough, later, to win a couple of Pulitzer Prizes as a playwright, to say nothing of a healthy Hollywood career.**   

**In 2000, shooting his movie, The Heist, in Montreal starring an “A” list of Hollywood actors, Mamet cast me as the Swiss pilot, perhaps as a thank you for the summer of 1969, or more likely he thought in a quid-pro-quo for being cast in his film, I might, as the Artistic Director of Montreal’s Infinithéâtre, produce one of his plays. Played a short scene with Gene Hackman, even got paid a bit extra to teach Gene a few words of German, even though we ended up shooting the scene in English, when Mr. Hackman could not remember the German lines. The defunct Mirabel airport stood in for Boston with me sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing 727, pretending to taxi down the runway. David Mamet would shout “action”, then, as we played the scene for the cameras with Hackman “heisting” my plane, Mamet, totally disinterested in what we were doing, lying on the tarmac, cellphone glued to his ear, was talking to the producer of his next film, about how many millions he was going to need for the shoot. Lots of grumbling off-scene from Hackman, Delroy Lindo and Danny DeVito about the ‘absent’ director.  After the film shoot, Mamet had his agent send me a random bunch of short plays. WTF? Nothing appropriate for Infinithéâtre. I do remain a fan of Glen Garry Glen Ross, which we programmed, starring Heath Lamberts, as part of the 1987 Canadian Stage Company inaugural season.

Other plays that summer included a credible production of Joe Orton’s Loot directed by Elsa Bolam, who would go on to co-found the Centaur Theatre with Maurice Podbrey and then later her own Geordie Theatre, a successful Quebec touring young-people’s company. Actor Michael Mawson was in the Loot cast, having just graduated from NTS. Michael would go on to be a respected acting teacher to subsequent generations of actors.*** 

***I hired Michael, thirteen years later (1983) to direct the inaugural production of Midsummer Night’s Dream in High Park. Having conceived the idea of an outdoor amphitheatre for the Bard to bring Shakespeare “to the people”, I had enough on my hands just making sure the venue was ready, the tech snafus at a minimum, and that we had good pre-show publicity. I cast the play, put the design team together, and then asked Michael to do the directing. Hélas, he was not up to it. Half-way through rehearsals, at the request of cast and crew, I had to take over. With the help of R. H. Thompson choreographing the movement, we ended up with a boffo production that cemented the Dream In High Park as a major T.O. summer event still thriving 40 years later.

I directed a decent production of Ionesco’s The Chairs. A two-hander, chosen to keep the budget down as I was having a tough time paying the actors. Still a minor favourite of mine from the “Theatre of the Absurd” period. Summer, McGill, Moyse Hall…it was a hard slog. When the audiences did not turn up in sufficient numbers to pay the company salaries, I had to scramble to raise extra funds. Struck a deal with the fabled Mother Martin’s Restaurant to produce a nightly comedy show for them. Intended to replace the restaurant’s long-running and highly popular precursor to the Jest Society, that had featured future Royal Canadian Air Farce stalwarts, Roger Abbott and Don Ferguson. Easy Come, Easy Go, the name of the compilation of skits we assembled was directed by Lazlo Barna.* I managed to bargain a nice weekly fee from the restaurant for our show,  allowing me to pay the comedy cast and leave enough of a surplus to cover the actors back at McGill.

*Lazlo went on to become one of Canada’s most important left-wing producers of TV documentaries and engaged drama. Thanks to him I met his cousin, Judit Kenyeres, my partner for years and first wife.

In the Spring of 1970, now no longer the President of McGill Players’, but still with clout in the organization, I got my first paying gig directing Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in Sandwich Theatre. The musical director, Jay Birdsong, an American “Refuge” working under a pseudonym, made up for a lot of my directorial inexperience. McGill at the time had a superfluity of serious musical talent. We had a great cast. While Luck was part of the package, I also made a few right decisions directing. We replaced the Sandwich Theatre bleachers with tables and chairs, to create a ‘speakeasy’ atmosphere and everyone got one beer with their $2 (at the time exorbitant) ticket price. Smoking was permitted. Give them free beer and let them smoke! My nod to “peoples’ theatre”, something that I would take considerably more seriously in years to come. David Sacks, who played the Street Singer was positioned at street level in front of the Student Union building, as a panhandler pestering the audience for cash as they arrived. Frank, the building Superintendent got into the act by pretending to be a bouncer, trying to kick the panhandler out when he staggered into the theatre and continued his audience pestering. While this was happening, stage hands wheeled the cast in on dollies, one by one, each actor ‘frozen’ in a statue pose. As they are manhandling the motionless statues, assembling them in a tableau around the stage, the crew commented on the characters. “Oh, ya, MacHeath, he is the star of the show … a murdering gangster… this is Polly, she’s a tough chick…” etc. (my nod to Brechtian “Verfremdungseffekt”, -the so-called ‘Brechtian alienation’ effect.) When the deployment of the frozen cast around the stage was complete, the three-piece orchestra started playing the opening song, the panhandler who was about to be kicked out by the Building Superintendent, started singing the opening song, “Oh, MacHeath he has a knife and…”, the cast unfreezes and the play begins. Allow me to claim is was a really great production. Look carefully at the cast list in the program and you will find Fiona Reid, TV’s future Queen of Kensington and for years a star on the Stratford and Shaw stages, was the Stage Manager doubling as a ‘whore’ (sic!). For the program, we “borrowed” an (unattributed) image from George Grosz’ iconic ‘20’s Berlin drawings. Really embarrassing was that in our program we actually forgot to credit Kurt Weil for his music.  Oooops… McGill Players’ Club never paid royalties for any of the shows they produced. I was pursued for years by the Brecht Estate for royalty payments for that production. As I was no longer a member of the club executive, legally I was off the hook. Hey, Brecht “borrowed” characters and plot from the original Beggars Opera and never paid John Gay any royalties either. Nor did he ever properly compensate Elizabeth Hauptman for her translation into German of the Gay script, nor for her contributions to the play itself.

During this same period I started writing articles on theatre for the student newspapers. (Journalism/McGill Days).  Which lead to me writing reviews for the Montreal Star. (Journalism/Montreal Star).

Threepenny Opera

Graduating from McGill with dismal marks, but a fistful of nice reviews from my first major critical success, TheThreepenny Opera, I made a fateful career decision: I would give theatre, as a potential life choice, one trial year. Totally aware I had no professional training in my chosen craft, although I had snuck into a few tech courses at the National Theatre School. Knowing only, as the Sage says, how risibly little I knew. It was the summer of 1970, barely any theatre across Canada at the time. Stratford? Shaw? From Montreal, the two Brit-centred fortresses seemed like another country. After Threepenny, Brecht’s conjunction of politics and entertainment gave purpose to what I had once dismissed as a profession steeped in self-indulgent narcissism. Having breathed the energizing air of campus radicalism, peace, love, anti-war and the evils of capitalism, and being a charter member of a generation that believed the world could be changed, Brecht’s ideas, left-wing social commentary integrated into sublime writing, gave theatre a purpose. I decided I had to see the work of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s theatre company in East Berlin. Professor Trudis Reber, in the McGill German department, had been a respected actress on the stages of West Germany. She still had a few contacts, including Boleslaw Barlog, the Intendant, (Artistic and General Director), of the Schiller Theater in West Berlin. Aware of, and impressed with, my McGill theatre escapades, she wrote him a letter with a nice reference and I was accepted as a “Hospitant”, an unpaid intern. 

Judit Kenyeres, my partner and I struck an agreement. We would head to Europe together, spend one year in Berlin for me, so I could test the waters of theatre, and then one year in London for her, so she could do a Masters in Special Education at University College London. That summer we worked our butts off saving money for the coming adventures abroad. While writing my reviews for the Montreal Star (Journalism/Montreal Star)as its second-string theatre critic, I was, at the same time, taking calls with IATSE, the stage hand union. (Much more lucrative!) Often, I’d work the stage set-up backstage for the union and then run out front and take a seat to review the show. No wonder my review of the touring production of Fiddler on the Roof mentioned the dilapidated state of the set.(LINK!) After a show, when I arrived at the Star building on (then) Craig Street, to get to my desk to write the review, I had to run the gauntlet of the journalists huddled over the police radio waves listening for news of the latest FLQ bombings.

My decision to make a pilgrimage to Berlin to see the work of Brecht’s theatre company was made easier because I would have free room and board living with my mothers’ mother, my “Omi.” Dad, as an officer of in the victorious Allied forces had entered bombed-out Berlin in July of 1945. He had managed to locate his mother-in-law in the rubble and chaos of the defeated regime and eventually was able to make arrangements to have her travel to Canada and live with us. For three years, avoiding the worst of the “Hungerjahre”, the starvation years Germans endured after the defeat of Hitler, she was my nanny. I have memories, as a two-year old, waking up in the middle of the night, and waddling down the hallway to her bedroom. Omi had brought her Berlin feather duvet with her. I snuggled into Berlin warmth. * Omi offered her home to Judit and myself for our Berlin sojurn. We packed our bags and set off on our European odyssey.

 *Omi had one daughter who was married to an officer in the Allied forces, my father, and one daughter, my Aunt Ingeborg, who married an officer in Hitler’s Navy. I never met my uncle. His submarine was sunk off New York near the end of the war. Aunt Ingeborg, my mother’s sister, whom I did meet on numerous occasions, never recovered from her loss and eventually committed suicide. A story in itself.