Tennille Read

Tennille Read is a Toronto based artist and graduate of George Brown Theatre School and Queen’s University’s Stage and Screen Studies. Selected theatre credits include: The Death of Mrs. Gandhi and the Beginning of New Physics (Everything but the Bard), This Hotel (Talk is Free Theatre), Hanger (Toronto Fringe Festival), Birth (Pandemic Theatre), Delicacy (Theatre Brouhaha), No Exit (Soup Can Theatre). Selected Film and TV credits include: Condor (MGM/DirectTV), Schitt’s Creek (CBC), Eyewitness (USA), The Escape (Spy Films), I Lost My Mind (official selection of the Palm Springs Short Film Festival 2017), Heroes Reborn (NBC), and Shadowhunters (ABC Family). Upcoming: Gray (Theatre Inamorata). She enjoys painting in her free time.

Twitter: @tennilleread
Instagram: tennilleread

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theatreinamorata/

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Transcript

Welcome to episode 94 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy features conversations with Canadian theatre makers of all stripes, from actor to director to playwright and more.

If you want to drop me a line, I would love to hear from you. You can find Stageworthy on Facebook and Twitter at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. And if you like what you hear, please consider leaving a comment or rating on Apple Podcasts, Google Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Comments and ratings help new people find Stageworthy.

My guest this week is Tenille Reid. Tenille plays the lead in Theatre Inamorato’s Grey, opening this week at the Commons Theatre in Toronto. Have you already talked with Courtney? I talked with Courtney last night.

You did? Oh, it’s last night. We did some interesting talking about her directing style and things like that. She used words like control freak and bossy.

Oh, not at all. Not at all. What’s always funny is the way that people perceive their own style, which is often completely different from how other people perceive it.

Totally. No, I find she’s a very gentle director. I would not say bossy at all.

She’s really good at talking to us as actors. She’s an actor herself, so I think she really gets it and knows how to be delicate about some things, but be firm about asking other things and being clear. So I quite enjoy the process so far.

That’s good. We’ve just had two weeks of rehearsals here and there. They haven’t been consecutive days, and that’s how we’ll be going until the end of the month, and then starting September will be every day.

Well, I mean, in September, you’re starting to get into, you’re starting to get into the performance mode. How long have you been working on it? You’ve been doing a couple of weeks of on and off rehearsals. Have you been attached to the project for long? Theatre Inamorata is a collective that I’m a part of with three other women, and we’ve been looking at this particular script, I think, for the last two years.

I think it’s been over two years. I can’t put an exact date on it, but it’s been a while. And Chris Venzola, who is writing it, he approached us with an idea of doing a picture of Dorian Gray, actually using chunks of text from all of Oscar Wilde’s work and putting together this very poetic piece.

And he had composed that, gave it to us, we read it, and we were inspired by it so much, and we also just wanted to hear Chris’s voice too, and shift things around quite a bit, because we wanted it to be a female-centered Dorian. And so he went back to the drawing board and wrote it in his own words, and some of the text still lingered, and it would be like that. We would go back to reading it and then giving him feedback, and then he would take it away and come back with something totally new, more advanced.

And so I guess, when was it? We had a few official readings with people from the outside to come in, and directors and other writers to come in and give it a listen. And especially over the last year, we’ve been stepping that up a lot more. And then finally, in the spring, we came to a script that was finally production-ready.

So when he started writing it, did he have the idea of women, like a woman Dorian Gray, or did he? He did. That’s why he brought it to us, because he knew we were very much about featuring female stories. And we love the story for some of the themes that it does present.

It doesn’t translate completely, but we’ve definitely focused on some really great gems of themes. And yeah, so he was the one who came up with that. That’s cool.

That’s cool. And I want to talk a little bit about you and theatre and things like that. What introduced you to theatre? What was it that made you want to do theatre? Great questions.

Yeah, I think if I were to go to the very beginning of my time, it would be Honest Ed’s. Okay, okay. And shopping there with my parents when I was like three or four and seeing those still photos that were in the hallways and staircases that would go all the way up.

They were all black and white. And they’d be showing all of these mirvish actors just emoting so much, like that one little capture of their huge performance. I was so stunned by, just astonished by how much emotion was coming through that photo.

So that was my first glimpse of there is theatre out there. And then growing up in elementary school and high school, we would go to the Stratford Festival, Shaw Festival. And the more I got exposed to that, the more I got hungry for that kind of performance, that kind of venue.

And then so I started doing it in school. And then it just kind of continued in various ways until I came to be here. So when you were doing it in school, you were doing like the extracurricular? Yeah, extracurricular or community theatre.

I started to branch out into the community in high school. There was a group called Queensville Players. I grew up in Newmarket, north of here.

And they did two productions in two consecutive years. And I was involved with both of them. I think West Side Story was my first musical, probably my last.

And Princess Ida. Well, yeah, no, actually, that was a musical too. But it was more chorus singing.

When you were, I guess, because there’s only so much theatre that you can do in the school, because they do like, you know, one big show. Right. Well, we did Sears Drama Festival as well, because, you know, it was something a little bit broader, but you’re right, it’s limited.

Yeah, so you’ve got to sort of like branch out if you’re really starting to get the bug. Yeah. At what point did you decide that this was what you were going to do? Like, because you go from like, it’s sort of like a fun thing to do.

And then at some point, it’s like, somebody suggests that you could do it, quote unquote, for a living. And at what point did that happen for you? It happened officially quite late. I mean, I guess it was 10 years ago, up, like after university and doing, I did stage and screen studies at Queen’s, and so dabbled more and more with theatre there and film, and came to Toronto and did it very unprofessionally, it was just amateur.

Right. And then I decided after traveling a little bit, and coming back here, that I wanted to do it officially, but start with a theatre conservatory training. So I went to George Brown College, their three-year program at the age of 30.

Oh, wow. Okay. How long ago was that? Well, that’s going to be… Okay.

Were they at the Young Centre then? At the Young Centre, yeah. Because I was at George Brown at the River Street Studio. Oh, cool.

Way before. Okay, yeah. No, so I’ve been out of the gates for five years.

Okay, yeah. So yeah, so eight years then, I started. And yeah, that was my turning point of like, I want to do this.

I want to be good at it. I want to be informed on that world in a greater capacity. And then after graduating, it’s been exploring that more and more in the professional world.

What was it like going to George Brown out of your 20s? Yeah, right. I am so grateful that I did do it a bit later. I don’t think I would have survived if I was younger.

I think I did a lot of growing up in my 20s. I got to travel quite a bit and live elsewhere on my own. And find myself that way.

I think if I had just been out of high school and went to theatre school, I would have just been floundering to figure out who I am because I’d be playing all these different characters or being told to play this because of whatever they were trying to get out of me. But it would make my identity or how I identify with myself very confused, I think. So I enjoyed it.

Because when we were… I mean, my entire class was pretty much all like… We were all like 19, maybe 20. And Peter Wilde, who was the head of acting at the time, always used to say, I wish you would come back to me when you were 30. Right.

Like he just… He wasn’t teaching when I was 30 in there. I know, right? But he like said that to us all the time. You’re all so young.

I wish you’d come to me when you were 30. And we were all like, what are you talking about? You know, we didn’t know. Right.

Um, did you… Did you… Like that program can be pretty intense. Yeah. Did you find… I mean, you were saying about how like you would have floundering.

But I’ve also heard in the last little while, some criticism of the program in recent years, in terms of how people are treated. And did you find that going in a little older, maybe gave you more of a backbone? Definitely. To that? Definitely.

Yeah. Um, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I got so much out of that experience because I could get past some of the harsher criticism.

So I didn’t have to deal with the harsh criticism so much. Like it was, I guess my end goal was pretty strong. And so I could take what I needed.

Right. And then move on from that. Um, I mean, that being said, I did develop insomnia during my second year, because of how intense it was.

And those long days, you know, sometimes 12 hour days. Yeah. Six days a week.

If you… Did you do period study? Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah.

So like, well, I mean, period study was an intense thing. But like, I remember always, like, even when we weren’t in school, we were at the library. Like, as soon as vocal mask was introduced, it was like, okay, so I go to school, and then I go to the Metro Reference Library.

That’s like, and on the weekend, I’m at the Metro Reference Library. So it was like, so encompassing. It was really concentrated.

And I found myself like, I’d go home, and it’d be around 11 at night, maybe, maybe midnight and trying to fall asleep. And it’d be like a montage going through my brain, flashes of the day, because I had no time to really digest it. Yeah.

But I got better. I’m fine now. I actually, twice when I was at George Brown, developed like a crick in my neck where I couldn’t turn my head.

Yikes. Yeah. Like, and it was like, in my second year, I think around period study had happened, and in third year as well.

Like, just sort of like my head tilted to one side, and I couldn’t like move it. It was insane. But you know that, I mean, it’s a stressful program.

That conservatory thing is so amazing. But you don’t have time to compress at the end of every day. No, decompress.

Yeah, absolutely not. And I mean, the upside is that you have this group of people that you’re doing it, you’re in it with them. And I was lucky.

I really loved my class. We got along very well, and everyone was very supportive of each other. And so that helped.

When that happens in theatre school, that’s like so, it’s a gift. It is. Because that doesn’t happen with every class that people gel like that.

In some classes, people just don’t get along. Yeah, it’s true. And I don’t know if it had something to do with like the age span.

Like we had some who were just out of high school, and then we had some who, you know, already had an undergrad under their belt. And then they had me. Yeah.

30. So something maybe about that kind of balance helped. But they were, and I’m still in touch with lots of them.

And I just find them a lovely group. Yeah. Did you graduate with a larger class? Or did you? We had, oh my God, it was like 19, I want to say.

Oh my goodness. They would have been freaking out with like 19. I know.

We went into our third year with like, I think 14. And they were like, we don’t know what to do with you. I know.

Yeah, we had a big class. But I think it spoke to how tight we were as an ensemble. Yeah.

Because it’s like, how can you cut people when, you know, that many people are, we’re keeping each other buoyant. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Absolutely. So how long after you left school, did you get involved or like help, like join up with theatre in Amortada? In Amortada. In Amortada.

It’s okay. Everyone gets it. I’m sure everybody transposes the thing.

Yeah. It was the summer after I graduated, Michelle Langell, who was in going into second year at George Brown. She had this idea to group us, myself, Leslie Robertson, Hillary Carroll together, and just start thinking about a place that we could do our more female center.

And so, you know, we started so keenly. We had a website and we got Twitter. And we, you know, we read a bunch of plays.

And the more we researched stuff that we wanted to do, the more we found that there wasn’t much that we wanted to do that was out there that either hadn’t been done already quite, you know, quite recently, or it just wasn’t landing enough for us. So we started writing on our own. We worked on a play for a full year called Behind about our experiences as servers and like how women navigate that world.

Yeah. And so we worked on it for like a year. We were all in it.

We were meeting maybe every two weeks with different drafts or different scenes. We were all collaborating. And it never panned out.

It just, it was almost like too many hands in the pot. And great ideas kind of got snuffed out by other ideas. We lost sight, I think, of what it would have been, you know, so we stopped that.

And then Chris came along with his idea. And Michelle decided to take a script into her own hands. She started writing on her own too.

She’s a strong writer. So it made sense that she would be the one to do that in our group. Yeah.

So that would have been five years ago. Have you been working on Grey for five years? No, just about like two years. Okay.

Okay. We were doing, we had done smaller projects. No, like nothing that was like a full, fully mounted show.

We did some little workshops. One was Ibsen’s Ghost. It was a J.M. Barrie one act.

We cast it with all women and it was satire anyway. So it was easy to like play on that satire for the full female cast. And then we did On the Table, which was an evening of scene readings with females instead of females in men’s roles.

So we did like High Life and Glengarry Glen Ross. And a bunch like that. I can’t remember all of them now.

And we had people come and it was like an evening of food and playing and discussion. And just to get a broader idea of like what women were going through of all ages in the industry and giving them a chance to like read something that they normally wouldn’t go out for. And also just like building our community.

That’s kind of what we’ve been doing for the last five years since we haven’t done a real like a real show. Yet we do have a beautiful community around us. We’ve been doing these fundraisers annually.

We’ve been calling them Virgin Burlesques. And basically it’s tagline is you never forget your first time. And the first year we did it, there were, it was Michelle, myself and Hilary.

We did our very first burlesque. Okay. Guided by a professional burlesque and a jagger.

We created our own routines. Us being actors, they were very story-based. Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah.

But it was incredibly liberating. So much fun. A lot of people came out for that.

We also had other like prizes and other acts as well throughout the night. Kind of in that original sense of a burlesque where it’s like a variety show. Some song routines and comedy.

And we’ve been doing that for four years now. And each year we bring in two or three new virgins to pop their cherries and do a burlesque. And it’s been a lot of fun.

And can I ask what was it that drew you to burlesque as a form of like to do it regularly, but also to perform it for the first time? What was it that made you want to do that? Yeah. I mean, the simple answer is that sex sells. Well, there is that.

There is that. It really sells. The more complex answer would be that, I mean, we were very much interested in our own sexuality, sexuality, really owning that and body types, owning the different body types and the beauty of all of them.

That’s been a big part of our group. Kind of leveling that field. It’s not just one ideal.

There’s so many ideals. And so that played into the idea of burlesque because we are all different body types. It was a way that we could express our sexuality or sensuality, but also get kind of crafty with it.

And I did my first burlesque on my birthday. It was my birthday. And so I made my routine.

I called it Sad Birthday Girl. And I came on with a cupcake. And my deal was that I got stood up on my birthday.

So I was going to take things into my own hands and tease the audience. That became that. It’s interesting because burlesque is actually an art form that does embrace so many different body types and looks and things like that.

So I can definitely see that. Has it been difficult to convince other people to take part? Hell no. We had so many people approach us after that first burlesque asking us if they could do one the next year.

Oh, wow. If we were doing it the next year. And of course we did.

And they would be contacted. That’s great. It got very… It’s really inspiring to see.

I think because I’ve only done two now. I didn’t do last year’s or this year’s. But to see the newcomers do it and their faces when they’re on that stage.

And each new moment getting closer and closer to an almost reveal. It’s not a complete reveal. I’ve never seen anyone more present than in that moment.

I’m sure that was what my face looked like the first two times as well. And I think there’s something really delicious about that that inspires other people to do it. The few times that I’ve been to a couple of burlesque shows and there’s a certain electricity.

The audience is so supportive of everybody. There’s never a, Oh, I don’t like that. But it’s like everybody who gets up there is like cheered.

Embracing. Yeah. Yeah.

Cheering. Yeah. It’s very inclusive that it doesn’t matter.

It just matters that you’re there and doing it. Exactly. Yeah.

The thrill of it. And I think the audience recognizes the bravery. And so their cheering is not just because of the entertainment, but also because they’re acknowledging that this is like, you know, it takes guts.

It really does take guts. Not everybody’s going to do it. So that’s great.

Moving back to that first project that you guys were trying to do. I’m interested in sort of like unpacking a little bit that collective creation that you were trying and it not quite working. Do you think, I mean, there’s been some time since you stopped doing it and maybe you have some perspective on it, but was it a lack of direction? Was it like you mentioned, like too many cooks sort of thing.

What was it that sort of like prevented that project from becoming anything more than like a start? Yeah. I still am trying to figure that out. Um, I mean, collective creation is just hard.

Yeah, it is. It’s, it’s, you do need someone in like a, not a director’s role, but a leadership role. Yeah.

Yeah. But then how do you, you know, like how do you even, how do you even go about writing like a scene even? Yeah. And like finding a unifying voice.

Because the way we had started doing it, we were each writing different scenes and then we would pick the kind of the best one. With the same like kernel of theme or idea or plot point. And it just gets kind of choppy after a while.

And we also, we also had, we wanted it to be like plot driven. And that was just hard for us. It became, I think we went from, I think it became a murder mystery, if I remember.

It became a murder mystery in a restaurant because we wanted to comment on all the sexism that happens in restaurants and being a server. But we needed the plot. And so that’s where the murder mystery came in.

And that was just hard for us to figure out. We couldn’t just, you know, make that, make that work. And we tried different ways too.

Like, I mean, us sitting down and writing was one way, but also doing some improv workshops. We did, we would take a scene, a kernel of a scene and riff off of that. And someone would write that stuff down.

I think maybe too, we just lost steam. Well, because a year to work on something that we were still not totally. It’s hard to keep that end in sight when you’re in the thick of it, feeling that creative, like that frustration, like to keep going.

It’s hard to do that with, with any project. There’s that, there’s that initial like, Oh, this is amazing. And then when it gets hard, you’re like, I don’t wanna.

Yeah. Like, this is hard. This is hard.

Yeah. This is hard. And also, I know for me, things were, other things were taking my attention away.

I was working on other projects and film and TV started knocking on my door. So I was going to go there. And so the time commitment became a bigger deal for me.

And then Hillary was talking about moving back to, to her home out West. And so that, that kind of also was in the works that was slowing things down. You know, things would be changing in the near future.

So it was not as motivated to keep going. It’s hard to keep that sort of thing together. I knew some, some guys a few years ago and they were like, we’re animators and we want to learn like film with people.

So they like had these auditions and they got a bunch of actors together and they were like, all right. So what we want to do is we want to like, like every couple of weeks, we’ll get together and we’ll like create a, like a short film, very short film, but we’ll write it each week, like in a week. And then, then you guys will come in and you’ll do it.

But because it was so open-ended, they were like, okay, so let’s get your schedules. Nobody was available because it was like, oh, I’d like to do this, but this, that and the other thing. So that sort of, that great idea that they had just couldn’t work because without a specific end goals or deadline, it’s hard to herd the cats.

Um, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Having, I mean, deadlines always help and we would make deadlines for ourselves.

Um, and we would meet them. It was just, you know, a little bit of not believing in ourselves as writers, you know, like we were actors primarily and, um, to review our work, we’d be so critical of it. Like we’re painting a really bad picture of our creative process, but there’s so many factors, right? Like that feed into, uh, why, whether it will keep going and succeed or keep going and be really bad or just stop and, or even just be good, but not flourish.

You know, it’s hard to make that, that transition. I mean, I was talking with, with Courtney about how theatre schools still aren’t talking about production, which is such an important part of, uh, the theatre landscape right now. Like nobody talks or teaches you how to do like producing.

Yeah. Um, just like nobody really talks to you except okay. Vocal math doesn’t count cause you’re not allowed to write your own thing.

Right. Um, but nobody talks about writing. Nobody like tells you how you’re going to create your own, your own work.

And so to go from like the process of just being an actor to, to having to then write a thing, that’s a difficult transition. It is. It really is.

And I think, you know, you, well, I went to theatre school thinking this is where I go to be good enough to go to Shaw or Stratford and, um, and then I’ll work there for eight months of the year and, um, I won’t have to worry too much about creating my own work. And then that doesn’t happen. And then all of a sudden it’s like, well, here’s what I have to do then.

Yeah. Um, and it’s another, it’s like, you know, another learning curve wasn’t expecting. There’s, I mean, there’s, again, there’s only so many spots at Shaw and Stratford and they can only take so many of us.

And yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to decide, to realize that, oh, there’s this whole aspect that we sort of didn’t talk about when I was in theatre school, that was like, they would acknowledge fringe, but it was like a thing that you might do if like, you couldn’t do that. Like if you didn’t get any of the work, you know, it was like, maybe you could do fringe.

And it was like, and now it’s like, now it’s like this massive engine. It can be wonderful. Yeah.

And it can make careers. It can make things happen for people. So it’s like a missing facet.

Exactly. I think, I think there are some theatre schools that might touch a little more on that kind of creation. I feel like I might be getting this totally wrong, but I feel like Humber does a little bit of that kind of integration.

Humber probably does. And good on them for it. And it’s something that needs to spread to other schools.

Yeah. Because we’re still operating as though it’s not a thing we need to know. Yeah.

Which is a problem. Yeah, definitely. So are you playing the role of Grey in Grey? I am.

Awesome. What’s that? I mean, approaching that as something that I guess you have to take the original and ignore it for the moment. For the moment.

Yeah. I mean, I have read the book a couple of times. And luckily that’s been, it’s been a year since I looked at it.

So it’s nice and tucked away in the back of my subconscious. Yeah. Because it is a different story in some ways, right? And so I’m trying to just work off of the script that we have at hand and the clues that other characters say about me and my own arc, letting that kind of form everything.

It’s a great role. It’s really good. The language in it that Chris has juxtaposes both a little bit of heightened text whenever Dorian speaks to the statue.

But then in reality, when she’s amongst her friends or other people, she really can’t find words. She has no vocabulary. She comes from this small town into this big city and is very naive, but hungry for experience.

And so she can’t bridge that gap yet. And I find that very fascinating. And we were talking about that in rehearsal the other day, because I find sometimes I can be so tongue tied.

And I know that my brain has these massive, wonderful expressions and things going on, and I just can’t get it out. And so I relate to the character in that sense of like, in the privacy of my own imagination, like heightened texts, like to the moon and back. And, yeah, it’s an interesting character because she is lacking something.

And so it fuels her to keep wanting more, to experience more. She’s so hungry to create something that will impact either something or someone. And she never quite finds it.

And to her demise in the end. Yeah. One of the things that Courtney was mentioning is the interesting thing about… So the company is a feminist company, and we have a play where a number of the characters have been transposed to female roles.

But some of the characters are not particularly nice to the other women. They do terrible things. Which can be a bit of a controversial idea as far as the idea of a feminist play goes.

And in a lot of cases, Courtney was talking about how sometimes it seems like we’re supposed to be creating things where we all get along. But that’s not really… I mean, the women have to be just as bad sometimes as men. And in this case, I think the story probably requires that they’re not good.

Um, do you have any qualms about the… I don’t want to say nastiness, because I don’t know, but like… No, there’s a lot of nastiness. Yeah, Dorian gets dark. Yeah, the things she does throughout, it’s unreconcilable.

It gets pretty bad. But I think… We kind of addressed this when we were working on that script behind the restaurant one. Because we wanted… We didn’t necessarily want to paint pictures of ideal women where everyone got along.

We wanted to flush out the different colors and characteristics of just a human. But a woman is that human. Right.

And so that’s kind of how I see this play too. I think it still can be feminist because we’re exploring feelings and motivations that everyone has on some level. And it’s that story that’s centered on a female that’s making it hold together.

It’s just human, I think, is what I’m trying to say. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman. It’s just we don’t see enough women playing all those colors.

So we’ve put a woman in this. And that’s really the problem, is really that we just don’t see women playing the same range as we give to male characters. Definitely.

And that’s one of the things that I think it’s important that’s being addressed here. But something that needs to be addressed more broadly by putting not just more women on the stage, but more women in the director’s chair, in the artistic director’s chair, on the board of directors. We need all of that.

And we’re really slow to get at that shit. Yeah, I know. Like there’s some shift, but there’s so much more room to go.

There’s a lot of room to go. And it seems like we’re really slow as a theatre world in getting there. Yeah, it’s unfortunate because it’s the same with minorities as well.

Like I remember, not that I’m a huge visible minority, but I am a mix. And I remember when I was a kid, I didn’t see anyone on stage like me. There was nobody who was like half brown.

And so even when I was talking about becoming an actor with my mom, she’s like, you can’t be an actor. You’re kind of brown. So it’s that embedded.

And I feel it’s sort of that embedded still with women in the role. Like it’s starting to be talked about. Of course, it’s talked about.

We’re talking about it. And we’re talking about it. There are initiatives as well.

But somehow it’s not enough. No, we’re talking about it. We’re talking about women.

We’re talking about people of color. We talk about these things a lot. And I don’t know.

I’ve seen so many panel discussions about people of color and how to bring more people of color into the theatre and to put them in those positions. But we’re just talking about it. We’re not actually seeing action or demanding action.

It’s very disheartening, I think. It is. It’s something that needs to be adjusted on every single level.

Even elementary school. Get those creative fluids flowing and nurture them all the way through. I don’t know.

I feel like it has to start from the very beginning. And we can’t back off of that. It just needs to follow through.

Otherwise, we’re not going to see the amount of female stories or immigrant stories even if you want to compare the two. There won’t be enough so that when a woman in her 30s wants to put on a play with a female story, there isn’t enough there. It had to start way back when.

No, I mean, there’s all the reluctance. Will people accept it and things like that? Which is so ridiculous that we have to have this same conversation again and again. But I guess on the good side, this play is happening, which is featuring you and a bunch of really talented women and playing characters that have so many different levels of darkness and goodness and just like they’re people, like you were saying.

So it’s good that this is happening. Is there anything that’s surprised you about the play so far? Oh, that’s a good question. Is there anything that surprised me about the play? I don’t know.

That’s fine. I mean, that’s a legitimate answer. No, nothing’s coming immediately.

Yeah, I don’t know. I think there are moments where when I really back off and see how dark Howl unraveled, Dorian’s journey goes, that’s not necessarily surprising. It’s more alarming for me, you know.

But in a good way, definitely a curious way of like, well, what motivates someone to go down that dark path? How strong, what started it and what’s continuing it? That’s interesting to me. That surprised me. I don’t know.

Have you found it? Have you had any qualms or difficulties in going that route? Not yet. I mean, we’re still early in rehearsals, so it’s still very… It’s not as deep as I know it will go. Like, if you think of it as a layering process, we’ve got the first two layers of maybe 20 laid down right now.

I know for me, as an actor, I get very involved with the character and I usually carry the character’s vision, worldview with me throughout rehearsals. It just helps me step into rehearsal. Not to say I go around, you know, manipulating people like Dorian does, but there’s something about that character that stays with me.

And I think in a character like this that is so damaging to other people, I will definitely want to be able to make that like, okay, show’s over. Let’s take a shower. Sometimes it’s like working on something and you sort of want to carry it with you.

Other things, you just have to learn how to let go. Slough it off and just breathe some fresh air. Yeah, because you can’t carry all that stuff with you.

No, no. It’s nice working with this group of people. I’ve worked with some of them before, or I’m just really close with some of them.

Um, so I anticipate it won’t be difficult to like burst into laughing, uh, laughter, you know, at the end of the show because we have fun. Yeah. You know, I think that perspective of like as dark as it goes in the end, it’s fun.

Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we wouldn’t do it if it, if there wasn’t some of that.

I mean, rehearsal can get really difficult sometimes, but by the time we’re in performance, we should be like finding some fun in there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And there is some, you know, I, I, I would think a lot of performers have this where there’s something delicious about, you know, tapping into that goopy stuff and like. Everybody wants to play a bad guy now and then. You know, it’s like if you, if you give somebody a choice, you could be the hero.

You can have this really juicy villain role. Like you want the juice, right? You want the juice. You want the juice.

It’s delightful. And to, you know, that trick of being that villain, but still bringing the audience in, like making them like you. Is that Richard III thing? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. We were watching House of Cards. Oh yeah.

And it was like, why do we like Frank Underwood so much? Like he does nothing. He is a terrible person. I don’t like him.

And why do we go with him? Why do we enjoy him? I go with him because of his wife. See, that’s, that’s good. I mean, I’m always on her side.

But it’s like, what is it that makes us stick with him? And I said, it’s the Richard III thing. He always tells you exactly what he’s going to do. And he follows through.

And he also acknowledges the audience. Like his relationship with that, with the camera is very much drawing you in. And it is that Richard III thing.

I’m going to tell you, you’re coming with me. And the audience just goes. Yeah.

They want to know what’s going to happen next. It’s so intriguing. You know, especially when it’s someone doing things that are so manipulative.

Oh, I know. You know, the regular person doesn’t do that on a daily basis. No.

The hunger and like curiosity of like, well, what, what’s that about? Of course they want to watch. Well, I mean, that’s, that’s Dorian, isn’t it? That’s Dorian. Doing all of those, all of those things.

And yet also bringing the audience along for the ride. Yeah. Have you given thought to like, what is it about Dorian that brings the audience along for the ride? Are you like, that’s something you’re going to discover? I think I’m still discovering that.

I think, I think maybe there’s a bit of, at least because what draws me to Dorian a little bit is that that universal need to make meaning of something in life, to feel like we matter. Um, I think that’s a huge motivator for Dorian. Um, the fact that she never really grasps it, you know, that patheticness, I think that’s very sympathetic.

I’m very sympathetic to that kind of character. And I would hope that the audience, I feel like that might be what, what connects on a, a more visceral level, that empathy for someone who just can’t find it. Yeah.

But also those, those manipulative moments where you see someone quote unquote naive, take a plunge somewhere completely calculated. That’s, that’s, that’s fun to watch. It is fun to watch.

It’s one of those, like you squirm, you’re like, don’t do it. Don’t do it. But, or it comes out of the blue and there’s like that, you know, like, yeah, really? Yeah.

That’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun. Um, so the show opens, uh, September 21st.

That’s right. Um, when we’re, as we’re recording this, uh, you were saying you’ve got, uh, you know, some occasional rehearsals and then is it like two weeks of rehearsal in September? Is it? Yeah. I think that the last week of August is pretty intensive.

And then, um, the next two weeks in September and then we get into tech and then the show opens the 21st. That’s going to be pretty intense. Like doing this stuff with Dorian, like so intensely.

It’s one thing to do it like every once in a while. But to spend like two weeks of intensive time with it, that’s going to be, it’s going to be fun and a challenge, isn’t it? I think so. I think so.

I’m looking forward to it. Um, yeah, I, I see it as being a fun challenge. I really do.

I, I, I get to play this role that is that broad range and I don’t get to play that a lot. So I, I, this experience is like a feast for me and I’m gonna, I’m gonna, you know, try and keep that in as much perspective as possible. Nice.

Yeah. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing it. Oh, wonderful.

Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you.