Toronto Pause.... and a new year...

And what a year it’s been…..

Just back in Toronto from the Floridian temperatures of the Gulf Coast: Sarasota…the beach with its glittering talcum powder sands, the pool, the hot tub… and family -- at one point we had 16 people and four generations crowded around the various tables. I think I’ve gained a hundred pounds….

The Gulf Coast is a new Florida for me: my Florida is one I remember from winter trips to the Keys in the ‘60’s. Dad would pack up the Dodge and we’d head out from NYC in the late afternoon. Mom would drive overnight and me and Louise would stretch out toe to toe in the back seat and sleep the night away. Or part of the night at least… I remember sitting up in back seat watching telephone polls sweep by against highway nightscapes. Then we’d spend almost a month camping on the sands of the keys and swimming and wandering through the tiny brightly colored gingerbreaded houses of the keys plucking limes and oranges from the trees in the streets….

My work on the show finished on Dec 20/21^st with two performances (I can call them work in progress shows now that we have plans to mount it again) at the Alchemy Theatre. In the final performance the actors began to really hit their mark and gather their emotional energy for the piece. It was a beautiful night of theatre… if I do say so myself. We managed to explore a lot of new media and ways of working that I’ve never had the chance to use on stage…. We found ourselves with an extraordinary team of people working on the show: Tyler Seguin and Emily Pearlman worked incredibly hard to make an emotional connection to this very poetic text. Craig Desson and Kit Pasold came up with beautiful images and sounds and struggled with all the technological problems of getting these material onstage. Sarah Miller Garvin and Sarah Brebner ran the show and made it work. Torben Beeg and Kit did amazing work to create the headlight and lighting effects that added so much to piece's atmosphere. And Lisa sat patiently while we struggled with her text and filled us in on what she was really thinking and adapted and tweaked the poetry to make it work on stage.

My discovery was that how much power the actors had over the ‘empty space’ and that the shift from a wide empty floor to props, images, sounds was unimaginably more delicate and powerful than I had imagined. I’ll put some video clips up soon… We’ll be applying to the Summerworks theatre festival and if that works out then we’ll be remounting it in the summer in Toronto and trying to redefine some of the loose ends. I felt incredibly lucky to have had the support of the Canada Council and the Toronto Arts Council for funding to do this initial work. It wouldn’t have happened without them.

I learnt a wonderful story while we were there: Simon Michelepis, the wonderful, generous owner of the Alchemy, told me that his theatre owes its existence to the attack on the World Trade Centre. Just after Sept 11^th 2001, the insurance company where he has his day job was hit by devastating claims from the loss of life, and to cope they had to pass on claims to their own insurance companies: which was Simon’s job. And in the face of all this work he demanded a raise… and with the raise he bought – the Alchemy. I have some intense memories of the period just after the attack: I had a flight in from London to NY on the day after. I was supposed to be doing some concerts and working on writing a play. I finally managed to get in on one of the first flights into the city on the 16^th. We did do one performance later in the month but mostly I roamed around the city and wrote and wrote: the devastation demanded a response and my first full length play came out of that writing. It is amazing to know that elsewhere strange parts of those shifting responsibilities and monies bubbled into creative events and desires… and that we got share it in some way last week.

Now I have ten days in Toronto to research and prepare work on some new projects and then next stop – The Yukon!!