So, I’ve never seen a bad play. There’s just so much in how the staging is done, in how space is occupied, etc. There’s something about the breathing presence of live actors that gives a performance tension; I always feel tied to the actors on stage, and experience them as physical entities, unlike television, where you are a passive witness to slim projections of light and colour. It’s the difference between observing a live person and a facsimile.

Saturday night, Wayde & I decided to see “Summer of my Amazing Luck,” a Chris Craddock adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel. Three actors, Daune Campbell, Renée Iaci, and Thomas Conlin Jones, played all of the roles. Since Iaci played Lucy, that left Campbell to cover eleven characters, and Jones to cover twenty-two. Brilliantly. The staging was minimalist, a series of blocks that could suggest a stoop, a kitchen table, a housing front. Four chairs that could be slid into the blocks, to virtually disappear, or could be arranged on stage in different formations to represent a van, a home, a series of benches. Simple clothing – a hat, a pair of glasses, a jacket that was clutched closed or fully worn – was enough to signify shifts in character. That and the transformations in the actors’ expressions and voices. From one line to the next, they’d shift personas recognizably. While there were a number of literal cues, in the staging, props, and costuming, to indicate what role was being played, much of it came down to facial expressions and shifts in the way the actors inhabited their own skin. It was astonishing to see these three carry it off – and for a full two hours at that. The roles weren’t assigned to each actor according to a division of gender. Instead, gender was also ‘worn’, indicated through stance and voice and a hundred other small cues, so that gender, too, was performed in this staging.

Wayde was wondering, as we left, if the actors got a grant. He said, I can’t imagine the time that went into development and rehearsals. Months. He said, you know, actors are kind of like writers. All that work, and it’s not for the money – so few of them make a decent living. And it’s not for want of talent, either. It’s about making a choice to spend your time at what you love – in spite of the fact you’re not going to make a decent living at it.