Whenever You're Ready

Shawn DeSouza-Coelho

Description

Whenever You're Ready is an intimate account of the career of Nora Polley, who - in her 52 years at the Stratford Festival - has learned from, worked with, and cared for some of the greatest directors, actors, stage managers, and productions in Canadian theatrical history. In so doing, Nora became one of the greatest stage managers this country has ever seen. Here is an account of the Stratford Festival's history like no other. From her childhood forays into a theatre her father, Victor, worked tirelessly to help maintain, to her unexpected apprenticeship and the equally unexpected 40 years of stage management it ushered in, this is the Stratford Festival seen exclusively through Nora's eyes. Here is an immersive account of a life spent in service of the theatre, told from the ground floor: where actors struggle with lines and anxieties, where directors lose themselves in the work, where the next season is always uncertain, and where Nora - a stage manager, a custodian, a confidante,

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773051734
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Whenever You’re Ready
Nora Polley on Life as a Stratford Festival Stage Manager
Shawn DeSouza-Coelho






Contents
1969: Prologue
1956
1960
1964
1967
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
Interval
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009: Part 1
2009: Part 2
2009: Part 3
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Copyright


To Jeannie, For giving me July, And to my parents, For everything else.


All these stories have some basis in truth. Over time they may have acquired embellishments in the telling. If you are mentioned in one, please accept the compliment in the spirit in which it is offered.


1969
Prologue
“So, how’ve you been?”
His question wasn’t very formal, but then neither was the interview. Jack Hutt was one of the first stage managers at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada, a festival that had begun only sixteen years prior in 1953. I was six then; now I was twenty-two.
“I’ve been good,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. “Things are a bit busy what with the end of term.”
Jack had asked to meet at Murray’s Restaurant in the Park Plaza Hotel, just a stone’s throw from my residence at St. Hilda’s College at Trinity College in Toronto. It was a chain of diners that served traditional Old English fare: chicken pot pies, baked macaroni, tea and crumpets. It was the kind of place with regulars the staff called by name. The restaurant was half-empty, and through the snow-speckled storefront window the afternoon sun laved the chestnut-brown seats, backlighting Jack and illuminating the blue haze of cigarette smoke drifting patiently above us like a thin cloud.
“Is this your last year?” Jack asked, lighting a cigarette of his own. Jack was the production manager at the Festival now. He was soft-spoken, efficient, and humble, taking care of business without the need for fanfare. Jack Hutt always took care of business.
“Yes it is.”
Jack nodded and then flagged down a waitress.
We’d met before, he and I. Rather, I’d seen Jack around, in the green room or in the hallways, sometimes when I was visiting my dad, Victor, who was the Festival’s administrative director at the time.
“More coffee, dear?” the waitress, a middle-aged woman with a beehive ’do, asked.
“Yes, please.” The waitress nodded and hurried off.
“Any plans for after you finish school?” Jack then said to me.
Plans for afterwards . . .
I hadn’t really planned to do a sociology degree to begin with. I never really had any ambition to do anything. I grew up three blocks from the Festival but never had any ambition to work there, either. I didn’t think there was anything in the theatre I could do, though I did act some in my childhood and in high school. I didn’t tell Jack any of that. Instead, I told him no, I had no plans, and that was when he asked me about my involvement in The Memorandum .
The Memorandum is a play by Václav Havel that was put on earlier in the school year by the Trinity College Dramatic Society. A play about conformity, the main character spends most of his time within a fictional bureaucracy, trying to translate a memorandum written in a fictional language. Eventually he hates the new language and opts for his mother tongue. Given the fact that Mr. Havel was in internal exile in Czechoslovakia at the time, the play garnered a bit of publicity.
I was the so-called producer of the production, selling and taking tickets on opening night. I was standing behind a small table in the foyer outside the auditorium at St. Hilda’s College. It was still fifteen minutes before the house opened so earlycomers were milling around, chatting. A man in a grey suit walked in and approached the table, leaving his wife behind to gaze at the equally grey carpets near the door.
“Is this where the play is showing?” he whispered, as if in a library.
“It is,” I replied.
He turned back to his wife, who was wearing a blue chintz dress and white gloves, and nodded. She smiled. Another man with a round, stern face entered. He was middle-aged, his hair the beginnings of a widow’s peak. He wore black, thick-framed glasses. At the sight of him I almost gasped.
“Ah, good,” the first man said, relieved. “This place was very hard to find.”
“Yeah, the campus can be a bit of a maze. Do you have tickets set aside?” I pointed to the list of names on the table, while still keeping one eye on the second man. I suddenly felt anxious.
Why are you here?
“No, no,” the first man replied. “We thought we’d just buy them now.”
I nodded, giving him two tickets. I put his money in the safe deposit box and said, “The house will be open in about fifteen minutes. You can feel free to wait here or outside, if you’d like.”
He thanked me and then rejoined his wife. That was when the second man approached the table.
“ The Memorandum ?” he asked, pointing casually to the brown auditorium doors.
“Yes,” I said, still in awe.
It was the Nathan Cohen, and he was standing right in front of me. The drama critic from the Toronto Telegram was here to see our student play on opening night. Jesus Christ! It must be a dead night for Toronto theatre, I thought.
Mr. Cohen asked for a ticket and I was happy to oblige.
“The house will be open in about fifteen minutes,” I said.
He thanked me, turned to leave, but then whipped back around. “Is there a place near here I can get a coffee?”
Shit. There isn’t.
“Certainly,” I smiled. “What do you take in it?”
“Cream, two sugars.”
“Just one moment.”
I walked down the corridor until I was certain I was out of sight and then sprinted up the stairs to a friend’s room to boil some water in her kettle. As I caught my breath, I watched the water bubble, never once second-guessing my impulse. To make Mr. Cohen a coffee seemed natural, like aging: he needed some, the ingredients were upstairs, so that’s where I ran. After I made his coffee to order, I bolted downstairs, and when he was in sight again, I strolled, as if I’d just popped in to an empty café across the street.
“Here you are,” I said cheerfully, suppressing my laboured breathing.
He tested the brew and smiled approvingly. Relief streamed all the way out to my fingernails.
At Murray’s, Jack took a sip of his coffee before saying, “Jean read Nathan’s review.”
“ Gascon ?” I blurted out. Jack chuckled and I couldn’t help but do the same.
Jean Gascon was the flamboyant artistic director of the Festival. At the frequent parties my parents threw at our house, Jean and his company would carouse, sometimes in song. He was very French: everything was garlic and wine. Suffice it to say it startled me to hear the review of our tiny production had made it all the way to him.
“Jean asked your dad if you had anything to do with the show,” Jack said. “And then he asked if you’d be interested in working at Stratford.” I looked at Jack then as if he had just told me a strange riddle. I’d worked at Stratford plenty of times, but those were just high school summer jobs: available, close, and nepotistic. Coming from Jean, this meant something different. “So, would you be interested in working at Stratford?”
“Doing what?”
“The Canada Council has given us the means to hire two apprentice stage managers for the 1969 season, and I’d like to know if you’d be one of them.”
I paused.
Stage management?
The truth was I had never given a thought to stage management. I had worked with stage managers backstage throughout university, so I knew what they did, or at the very least thought I knew. But the job itself didn’t speak to me. Then again, nothing spoke to me.
As I ruminated, I found myself listening openly to a conversation between the beehive waitress and a big woman sitting alone at the counter, smoking. She had long, curly red hair and was a regular, it seemed from what the two of them were chatting about.
“How’s your dad?” the waitress asked, taking the woman’s plate.
“Not doing so well,” she sighed, ashing her cigarette. “They thought he was in remission.”
“He’ll pull through. He still in London?”
“Yeah. Still there.”
“The pay is $65 per week,” Jack seasoned, and I turned back to him. “You would work shadowing an assistant stage manager to begin with.” He took a drag of his cigarette before gently prodding, “Well?”
With little more than a featureless horizon before me, I said yes.
1969 was to be my first season in stage management with the Stratford Festival, and I would only ever miss two shows in my entire career.


1956
With a small black comb in hand, I stood at the landing just up the stairs at 75 Front Street, my home. There were three bedrooms on the second floor, two of which were for me and my four siblings. My brothers, Fred and David, shared one room, while I shared the other with my sisters, Susanne and Margaret. Dad was in my parents’ room, to the left. As I pushed my thumb between the teeth of the comb, I glanced down the stairs, ears perked up like a rabbit’s. Outside, a bell rang as a cyclist rode by. Inside, pots politely clanged. My mom, Elizabeth, or Lyb as she was called, was busy making dinner. I smoothed my short, sandy-blond hair and crept towards my parents’ room.
Dad had go