This actor loves tragedy
David McNally looks forward to his role in Death of a Salesman
PREVIEW
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Opens Friday, March 1
Max Bell Theatre
Apparently, you can’t get too much of a good thing. When actor David McNally is done playing Biff in Theatre Calgary’s production of Death of a Salesman, he’s heading back to his teaching job at Red Deer College, where his play analysis class will dive into the Arthur Miller classic all over again. He must really like this play.
"Everyone knows it, and we all love it as actors, and anybody who’s involved in drama in university or high school has usually had a chance to look at it," he says, "but it’s rarely done (onstage)."
The play may be ubiquitous in an academic setting, but there are still a few people out there who have no expectations of it whatsoever – among them the students who will have a chance to see their instructor perform the play this week. McNally says he does his best not to impose his own hard-won understanding of the play on his students.
"I’m more interested to see what the students are finding in the play," he says. "As they have questions, I’ll guide them to things that I’ve discovered along with the cast throughout the production, but I’m interested to see how they take it. And that’s true of an audience as well. When you perform it for an audience, every individual out there has their own personal view of what the play meant to them."
While many audience members tend to project a critique of corporate America onto the story of the aging salesman Willy Loman, McNally says that director Ian Prinsloo has a different emphasis in mind with this production.
"What he's focused on in terms of the production is the family values," says the actor, who previously worked with Prinsloo in last season’s Dangerous Corner. "We look at it more in terms of Willy and his family, and how that relationship brings him to where he goes and what he does."
McNally says that the first week of rehearsals was devoted to the Loman family, and focused on the relationships between the family members in each scene. A total of 11 actors help to tell the story of Willy and his wife Linda and their two sons, Biff and Happy, who struggle with their father’s expectations. McNally describes the relationship between Willy and his sons in tragic terms.
"I love teaching tragedy, I love acting in tragedy," he says. "Comedies are great, and I’ve got to do a comedy every now and then.... But when we see a tragedy where there’s a deep impact on us, a profound learning goes on. That’s why the Greeks focused on it. They knew that their society needed to progress, and just to satirize it all the time wasn’t going to do that."
While teaching full-time in Red Deer, McNally actually lives in Edmonton, and still finds the time to travel the country performing for various theatre companies and appearing in an impressive list of film and television projects.
"The more acting you do, the more international you want to become, because you saturate yourself in certain markets," he explains. "I want to keep expanding in terms of where I can work and who I work with. As an artist, I think that’s really important, that you work with a lot of different people in collaboration."
It’s a good thing that his family supports his theatre habit. McNally’s wife and his four children, ranging in age from nine to 16, have all been bitten by the bug.
"I took my youngest out to shoot an industrial (video) in Leduc last month," he recalls. "She... shot for all of two hours and made 600 bucks. She loves the business." |
