A LIFE IN THE THEATRE
Sage Theatre
Runs until April 1
(Pumphouse Theatre)
Like the most iconic playwright in English literature, David Mamet was an actor before he penned his first play. Renowned for his engaging dialogue – "writing the way people talk" – Mamet’s skill has often been attributed to his long history with theatre, his intimate familiarity with the demands of the craft. Little wonder, then, that A Life in the Theatre, his portrait of the relationship that develops backstage between actors of separate generations, continues to see productions long after its 1977 première.
Currently being staged by Sage Theatre, this latest production will see two prolific Calgary actors, Stephen Hair and Joel Smith, taking the roles of a pair of actors at different stages in their lives who are united by a professional relationship. It’s a process of mentoring and eventual separation that Hair, 55, knows well from more than 33 years of professional theatre and two years spent at Mount Royal College’s Shakespeare in the Park.
"You try to pass on everything you know, but in the end you can never tell people what it’s actually going to be like to be my age, with my experience," he says. "Something like Shakespeare in the Park, you’ve got 14 or 15 twenty-somethings, just starting out, and part of the process there is mentoring, letting them pick your brain, and they do. They’re little sponges, they’ll soak up everything you can possibly think of."
Inevitably, these mentoring relationships lead to the departure of the younger actor and the more immediate distance that develops between professionals who become peers rather than mentors and students. In A Life in the Theatre, this departure sees the rising star of the younger John (Smith) contrasted with the declining career of the older Robert (Hair).
"It is like a father-son relationship when you’re a little kid and you realize for the first time that your dad isn’t Superman," says Smith, 27. "There’s that point in this play when John and Robert’s relationship reaches a point where John realizes that John is a person, he’s got faults like everybody else. So how much can he really learn from him?"
While the issue of a changing relationship is extremely relevant to theatre, it is by no means native to the stage. As empathetic to the theatre as Mamet is, his play would not have survived for decades as an in-joke for theatre professionals, familiar and honest though Mamet’s vision may be. In fact, Smith sees the play as an opportunity for audiences to understand the players as well as the craft of theatre.
"I think people often take a look at people on the stage and wonder what happens behind that stage, and think that these people aren’t really people, or they look at them in a different way," says Smith. "But we’re all just regular people. I look at politicians with a certain mystique, you think there’s something different about them, but in fact there isn’t."
"New people come in and the old people are shunted out," adds Hair simply.
But while the play affords a more universal attraction, it is, at its core, the product of a playwright intimately connected to the world of theatre and it is, therefore, a very attractive project for actors. Though it was Smith who approached Hair last season with the prospect of mounting the show, Hair says that doing the play is the fulfilment of a long-standing desire to play a part that speaks directly to an area as close to his own heart as it is to Mamet’s.
"I think it’s because (Mamet) is a man of the theatre, a man who knows us as we are, that (the play is) full of truths," he says. "Virtually everything he says about theatre in this play you go, ‘Holy shit, he’s absolutely right.’ He’s not trying to shoot holes in who we are – he’s not taking pot shots. It’s a humanism and soul that he tries to bring to actors because people see us up there and think of us as that bigger than life thing. And Mamet says, ‘Yes they are special because not everyone can do this, but they’re just people.’" |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.