If there were a campfire at Theatre Northwest, the actors and crew would be gathered around it burning for the story of the latest TNW play.
One of the most lauded casts ever assembled for a TNW production is now at work, almost ready to show the world the Governor General Award-winning show by master playwright John Mighton.
This Toronto writer is, in actual fact, a mathematician. Like Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice In Wonderland (seen by TNW audiences this past December), the mathematical mind can sometimes tell a story more powerfully than a lifelong student of writing. There's the same rigour in seeing a formula through, the same creative zeal, but the freshness of doing something outside your personal zone.
Mighton has done it time and again - stepped out of his award-winning math career to write wildly successful plays. This one is called Half Life and actors from all over Canada flocked to Prince George for this telling of the tale, and each one has a pedigree set in lights.
"Three things attracted me to this project," said Chris Ralph, a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada who is more at home on stage than in any house. He sometimes coaches Canada's parliamentarians on how to orate, and he runs Ottawa's largest performing arts learning centre The Acting Company.
"I've worked with Jack Grinhaus (TNW's artistic director) before and he is a terrific director. That's the first point," said Ralph. "I also enjoyed the idea of working in a place I've never been, and I love it. Being in Prince George is like a paid vacation. I've never seen cars that stop 100 yard back to let you cross the street, and bus drivers who talk with you. It's a wonderful place.
"The third thing was the script. John Mighton is a remarkable Canadian playwright, and a remarkable Canadian. This script is both very funny and very moving. Not many writers can achieve both. This is the first time I've done anything by him, and I couldn't wait to be in a world he created."
Linda Goranson is a favourite of TNW audiences. This beloved Canadian actor reached global audiences with her vivid portrayal of Ann in the film adaptation of the Sinclair Ross short story The Painted Door. It earned an Oscar nomination and during the televised mega-event Goranson was seated beside another nominee that year, Sally Field, who won for Best Female Actor and proclaimed to the world "You like me, you really like me."
Well, Prince George really likes Goranson who has been in four previous TNW plays plus the Miracle Theatre production of Miracle On South Division Street.
"I love it. I just love being in this space again, and I adore Prince George," she said. "This is a really beautiful play. I said yes as soon as I was offered it. I knew I'd get to work with actors from all over Canada; that's how they do it at Theatre NorthWest. You never know where you're going to learn. I thought I would learn something from working with Jack on this gorgeous script. I get to play someone who has dementia and her reality is shifting. She meets someone she thinks she knew when she was young, a great love, but is that really who this is?"
The story looks aging straight in the steely eye. It's a scary view, for some, but those who've walked into that forest often discover the wonders of nature up close in a way younger minds can't grasp.
Goranson, for example, is a venerable veteran of the stage and screen. She takes on a regular diet of live theatre in amongst her television and movie projects, everything from Owning Mahoney (with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, John Hurt) to The Gate (with Stephen Dorff and Kelly Rowan).
"I did an episode of Schitt's Creek that was on last night, and a movie called Don't Talk To Irene (with Geena Davis, Scott Thompson) that hasn't come out yet," she said. "I had to actually dance in that movie, and I'm the worst dancer in the world, but that's exactly what they wanted."
Goranson was once in a film that has direct Prince George connections. She was in Gross Misconduct: The Life of Brian Spencer. Goranson portrayed Irene Spencer, mother of the infamous local hockey player who grew up in Fort St. James. In 1970, when the local CBC affiliate switched from showing the Toronto Maple Leafs game to the Canucks game, Spencer's father Roy, Irene's husband, drove to the CKPG station where he forced the crew at gunpoint to go back to the Maple Leafs feed so he could see his son play his first NHL game.
Later that same night, Roy Spencer was shot to death by police outside the TV station. His son would later die by gunshot as well after a drug deal gone wrong following his bumpy NHL career.
Another Half Life cast member with celluloid connections to this area is Alec Willows who first got the notice of the nation on television projects like The King of Saturday Night and the CBC series Air Waves in the 1980s. It was then, that he was cast alongside Bruce Dern, Helen Shaver and Gordon Lightfoot in the western movie Harry Tracy: The Last of the Wild Bunch. It was filmed in Barkerville.
Furthermore, Willows was in the TV series Nothing Too Good For A Cowboy, which was based on the lives of local cowboys Rich Hobson and Pan Phillips.
Lisa Dahling (see her in Snow Dogs with Cuba Gooding Jr. and School of Life with Ryan Reynolds) and Donna Soares (a regular on DaVinci's City Hall, several appearances on Battlestar Galactica, in the Belle Knox biopic From Straight A's to XXX, etc.) also have careers balanced between stage and screen.
Grinhaus said the heavyweight cast was deliberate, for this play. "Mighton has written it with very cinematic pacing. I felt I needed experienced film actors to bring that out," he said .
Grinhaus turned to his longtime friend Adam Kenneth Wilson to play opposite his wife Lauren Brotman in the roles of the two younger characters in the script. Brotman has quickly become a pillar of the Prince George arts scene in the few years she and Grinhaus have lived here. Grinhaus needed an actor who exudes as richly as she, so he called on the man who can be seen now on Netflix portraying Charles Manson in the docudrama entitled Manson.
Wilson was also the recurring narrator for the Alien Mysteries television series, was Ace in the gangster series 24 Hour Rental, he was Ragnor Fell in Shadowhunters and Duncan in Reign. He loves the stage, and was happy to get the TNW call, but again it was the script itself that called him to Prince George.
"I love Toronto (where he lives now, after growing up in Guelph) but I've heard more pleases, thank yous and how-do-you-dos since I've been in Prince George than a year back home," he said. "I couldn't have asked for a better way to get to be involved in the genius of this play than finally getting to work with Lauren, finally working again with Jack, it's all finally happening."
"The trick for us is appearing as strangers," said Brotman. "It's rare to have to deal with the instruction 'give less' but we have to erase 14 years of history for this interaction we have."
It helps that the complexities of the script are mentally consuming for the two of them.
"You'd think reaching your half-life would be a time to celebrate and feel enriched in our experiences, but you are also at a point in your life when you feel parts of you fading away at the same time parts of you are emerging," Brotman surmised.
"Right in the title Mighton is already talking about that pull in two directions - Half Life - is the glass half empty or is it half full?," added Wilson. "You grieve and suffer the parts that are being stripped away from you, decaying, but you also know there's so much more to come and perhaps a better mentality for understanding it all."
"I just think writers and mathematicians both have savage imaginations. Mighton might be the only one in the world who can be both," said Ralph. "They are working a lot inside their own heads, it's all about imagination, it's solitary work, but the difference is, when it comes to writing, the trained writer is very concerned with form while the mathematician who takes to writing is likely more interested in the people and their predicaments within the story. It's so powerful, what Mighton has done for us."
Half Life is on at Theatre Northwest from now through to April 12. Tickets are on sale at the TNW website or in person at Books & Company.
