Victoria Day Week end May 2005

My interview with Theatre Pasta, an India-based Theatre company magazine

What does theatre mean to you?

A safe place in which to explore life and human being and feelings. A laboratory for experimenting on how to (re-) create reality with truth, insight, heightened awareness, high stakes drama afforded through the ritual of theatrical presentation. A communication, actor to actor and actor to audience sometimes on that deepest of levels where change happens. A partnership of listening and responding – actor to actor before an audience of spectator participants who have suspended their credibility, sharing the space of that particular story and the best thing of all, with Theatre, you had to be there.
A way of life. A way of being in the world. A path. A dedication. A vocation. A journey. Learning things the hard way and putting them to use constructively. Learning. Sharing.

When and where did your career in theatre start?

Artistically - Grade 6, Stephenville Newfoundland when Sister Mary Patrick James wrote her version of Anne Of Green Gables ‘My Eileen’ for St. Patrick’s Day and cast me as ‘Eileen’ – I remember very little – but one thing was the cast surrounding me and singing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ and I wanted to sing, but Sister said I should just smile – I didn’t realize till much later it was because they were singing to and about me, I thought she didn’t like my singing voice. I didn’t understand my part in the story perhaps. In retrospect I think she was being a good Director and using me in a good way – I’ve always tried to be able to put myself in the directors hands, but it has sometimes been a harrowing experience.


I started studying and attending acting classes as soon as we moved to Toronto. I was 12. I went to Marjorie Purvey. She had a radio show that she used students in and she was I think a good teacher because I continued to love acting. I remember working on a poem and she had me pounding on the door into the classroom area to help me achieve the sense of reality of being kept out-side, not being able to get in. When I was sixteen a friend Charles Dennis said I had to study with Eli Rill, who would commute to Toronto every weekend from New York, who had studied with Lee Strasberg and knew ‘the Method’ and I studies it over the next 10 years.

Professionally, my career started after all my Theatre training with Film, doing the Canadian Film GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD –a case of ‘being there’ when History was being made in Canada and on an International level. But mostly being where great work was being done.

With GDTR I was present for an experience in Canadian film making which is still regarded as seminal. I was also ‘there’ in a somewhat less happy way for Henry Jaglom’s second film in Los Angeles TRACKS.

These though film shoots were very important in my development as an actor. I describe GDTR though a link on my website and I am still coming to terms with the TRACKS experience, (there are some blog entries about “survive and stay alive in ’75). It was a trial by fire working with Henry, Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell and many other actors - children of movie stars who Henry assembled on a train that for me derailed and landed me in New Mexico with a new respect for ‘something larger than my own feelings’..in other words I grew spiritually from having been in a dangerous place. I don’t recommend this method of spiritual enlightenment, or acting technique however it is part of what I draw on as an actor and a person in my struggle to understand this life.


Any incident during the practices or staging of a play that you just can’t forget.

Lots – something every time – but to be specific – when we did MEPHISTO, the Play based on Klaus Mann’s description of a Hamburg Theatre Company during the rise of Hitler – we had a school audience from one of the city housing projects. We were all trepidatious because we knew they might be rowdy and shout out during the show and in the first act they did, they went wild when one actor drops his pants but in Act Two when things are falling apart and people are disappearing to concentration camps and murdered, they became very quiet and it was obvious at the Curtain that they ‘got it’ and were deeply moved. They waited after to congratulate and meet the cast. It was one of those times when the power of theatre and the possibilities to affect and alter sensibilities was so clear and beautiful. It was an excellent production directed by Bruce Pitkin under the auspices of Equity Showcase Theatre, the teaching arm of Equity in Toronto.


What do you feel is more important to have when pursuing a dream: passion or skill?

Of course - Both – you start with the passion – the desire, the need and I think in the arts with a soul that can empathize – with compassion.

Though some actors that come from such angst in their lives that they are raw may not have the compassion initially but they have a raw creative energy forged on the front lines. They’re naturals like Paul Bradley who also starred in GDTR.

My husband Dwight (Click on Dwight McFee link) for example was a kid from a mining town who hitch hiked to Toronto for a Theatre audition and ended up in one of the best training programs in Canada at University of Alberta for 4 years…he’s a highly skilled actor with over 80 plays to his credits = over 40 first productions and 100’s of TV shows and Films. Initially he was raw talent. Raw life.

I was a kid from a Middle Class Jewish family growing up in the Maritimes after WW2 –I was informed by what had happened in Europe, raised by loving parents and Grandparents and became the odd man out, the one who wandered from the fold to live out my own destiny. I think my greatest talent was compassion as a child which probably came from my Jewish identity and then a rough and rocky journey to whatever wisdom I possess to date.

What do you think is the most rewarding aspect of performing in Toronto?

I used to say Toronto is like a bad neighborhood – “you don’t bother them, they don’t bother you” – that in the biz’ nobody really helps you but they don’t stop you either – so you can go your merry way and do what you can.

Another way to look at it is that Canadian actors are very entrepreneurial, very clever at finding and creating venues to work in – very versatile – working in any medium or situation that affords a chance to do our work – we do everything – write, act, produce, direct. We’re not about making money because aside from the American productions that are drying up these days there is no way to make ‘big bucks’ here.


What do you consider your greatest achievement in theatre so far?

That I’m still doing it.

If you had to choose, between your memories of the particular theatre
experiences that have given you the most satisfaction, which would you
choose?

I have never had an unsatisfactory experience in doing theatre. It is always thrilling, exciting, challenging, rewarding, stimulating.
Because no matter what happens in rehearsal you have the performances and they are yours in a way that cannot be taken from you. Perhaps it’s what John Cusack said about film: “that magic time between action and cut, when anything can happen”. You have an experience of spontaneity inside very specific boundaries, parameters. A beinginess.

As you have more and more success, what keeps you grounded in your life?

I’ve had no real success, other than some performances that moved some people. Other than that I’m still doing it, other than that I still love it. What is important is the work - a use of myself that helps me to live as fully as I can.

Any Theatre Person you really admire?

So many – Paul Scofield never fails to amaze me. Judy Davis, Vanessa Redgrave who I saw onstage in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, I could just create a long long list. But all the great actors stage and screen who have moved me, astounded me, educated me, thrilled me since Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and early Hollywood fascinated me. Since I saw Sir Lawrence Olivier onstage in Strindberg’s THE DANCE OF DEATH, Rudolph Nureyev dance GISELLE. Peter Brook’s writings about Theatre. Stanislavsky. Strasberg. Growtoski.

Were there any particular teachers at your university who played an
important part in your development as an Actor?

I picked my teachers carefully and as much as a beginning actor can, my projects. I didn’t want to go into a training program that picked my teachers for me – so I chose Eli Rill when I was 16. From Eli I learned to live the ‘life of the artist’ – the life of the imagination’ through our personal relationship, and I learned of the talents and techniques of the great Masters and Mistresses who came before me – the creative ancestors – and I learned how to work on a role, how to make ‘discoveries’ about my character, how to listen and answer and how to be PRESENT! later from Henry Jaglom I learned about bringing ‘the components’ together to create live theatre on camera. I learned that my technique wasn’t strong enough to withstand a ‘bout’ with the boys. Every job taught me something – even if it was how to survive with my love for ‘the work’ in tact.

When I returned from L.A. and the TRACKS experience, I questioned my desire to act – how important was it to the World that I keep on acting. How important was it to me to put myself out there only to find they’ll kick you when you’re down..and I crawled back to Canada, my tail between my legs. I needed a dose of ‘reality’ Canadian-style after my L.A. experience. I started reading aloud on tape for The Canadian National Institute for The Blind because it made sense to me to read for people who couldn’t themselves see to read. That led to a reading program in Nursing homes called Living Literature. That, to a series of Documentaries for Cable called AGING IN INSTITUTIONS.

And I went back to acting classes, studying in the first year of Tony Pierce and Louise Nolans’s NEW SCHOOL OP DRAMA based on their Meisner studies in New York. I kind of figured I did my university years in Hollywood, the School of Weird knocks.

I did several plays, got back up on the horse and loved to act more than ever once the TRACKS experience settled into the distant past and I moved on.

What personal qualities do you feel a person should possess who wants to do Theatre?

Resilience as I just described, emotional honesty, or at least a need for it. Ability to withstand or at least survive severe humiliation, trauma and insanity – or hey is this just what is required to live life. As my Mother says “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”

The most difficult thing is that we have to recognize the importance of the body as our vehicle, our vessel our mode and means of experiencing life on earth. Or as we say in the Theatre ‘our instrument’.

So, what’s the coolest part about being a Successful theatre actor?

By my definition, successful being that I am still doing it, the cool thing is every time out, every project is a step forward in my ability ‘to be’..

There are so many roles I’d love to play that I never can: Anne Frank, many plays that I am too old to play certain roles in and I never got to – but maybe that’s okay. I did my Anne Frank my way –through performances pieces, documentaries, maybe I’ll never get to play Maggie in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF but I may yet get to play Amanda in THE GLASS MENAGERIE.

I love the opportunity a character gives me to have yet another life- time. Perhaps that’s the greatest thrill of all! To inhabit another life, set of circumstances, set of habits, as Michael Margotta (click on A Canadian Actor in Italy) describes it:

Making a decision begins with a thought.
Sow a handful of thoughts
you have a handful of Actions.
Sow a handful of actions you have
a handful of habits
from which we reap Character.
Sow a character
and reap a Destiny


Is acting an art that anyone can succeed at with training or are there other natural talent one must possess to excel in this discipline?

Depends on what kind of acting, or actor. You can have a series on TV, be a regional theatre actor or a Sir Lawrence Olivier. You can win an Oscar, die unknown or change the World like Marlon Brando did, or Barrymore, Duse, Sarah Bernhart. Lots can and have succeeded in various ways. The art is the thing that is created out of its need to exist, everything else is craft.

Describe your dream Role....

My next role is a chance to be the dream, to create life on camera in this instance a short film I’m working on this week end in Toronto called FAMILY PRCTICE or with SARA’S CAVE onstage this Summer to create both THE CROW a Polish Peasant and a Jewish woman concealed in a basement root cellar in Poland during WW2.

But in a larger sense my dream role could be something like getting to play Hannah Arendt or just something so challenging and mind and consciousness expanding for me that I get to grow and use every aspect of my being to create. (as I did to create the documentary IN THE SHADOWS about the forgotten Jews of Syria for a woman who was rescuing them, buying them out head by head – literally saving lives)

Aside from working on making things happen I don’t really like to have too much of an agenda because the wonderful thing about this business of being an actor is that you never know what might come up.

What kinds of scripts turn you on?

Ones I might have a chance to work on. Beautiful ones. A play by Arthur Miller I just read BROKEN GLASS. Pinter. Beckett, John Patrick Shanley et al.

Was your family supportive about your decision to pursue acting? Were you worried about the risks of pursuing it as a full time career?

Yes and no – long story. We battled long and hard. Sometimes it was me against them, sometimes them against me. There was always love and hence pain-filled misunderstandings and cross-purposes. If I was more financially successful and less crazy they probably would have been better about it.

What was it like playing for the first time to an audience?
Back in Stevenville Newfoundland, I actually recall going on stage the first time, at age 11 and feeling sick to my stomach and praying to God to help me get through it, and if I did survive I promised myself I’d never do it again.

Every tine since has been exciting, terrifying, and just as wondrous.

Has there been any time in your life when you planned that you won't be able to do theatre...

As long as the body’s willing, the spirit able and the work available, I’m there.

You have done films & theatre both, which is more satisfying?

I don’t think about being a Theatre actor or a film actor – the projects vary and sometimes you’re on stage, sometimes on camera. It’s still about a character and a story and giving it your best shot and full attention at the moment.

I like to work in all available mediums. When I’m doing film or television I explore the character in the same way as theatre minus the Rehearsal process and of course the experience of creating it is different - the logistics. My old friend Doug McGrath, who starred in GDTR a terrific actor, says: “On television you have to make it happen, in film you have to let it happen".

In Theatre you can play around with both.

If someone offers you an opportunity to perform with your husband what is the role you would like to play with your Husband?

Dwight and I (click on husband Dwight McFee) would love to do WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF. We did a scene from it for our 5th Anniversary party. But there are many possibilities and I would love the chance for us to work together on anything.

How do you define your world — the one from which you are acting?

My friends far and near. People. My world is a comfy flat with my husband in Toronto’s East End. It’s bare bones survival but somehow very luxurious. I type this on a sunny Friday afternoon after participating in a staged reading of two plays by Yehuda Amichai last night. I have a rehearsal tonight where I will see the set being built as my apartment where I live with one of my two sons, both of who try to kill me over the course of 20 minutes in FAMILY PRACTICE.

What are we going to see you in, in the future?

Theatre–wise I will be onstage the last two weeks in July in SARA’S CAVE a new Canadian play in Brampton, Ontario.

I am working in two short films now: FAMILY PRACTICE and LEO. I assume they will be Festival circuit fare. I have a short NOT A FISH STORY I did with Anita Doren currently playing on The Movie Channel and Anita and I are working on another project presently in script development with Michael Mortensen, THE CIRCLE ETERNAL based on his novella MRS. HARPER.

What is the quiet voice inside of you that needs to be heard?

I just need ‘to be,’ present, conscious, applying myself, understanding as much as possible. Loving being alive. Loving.

What is the message or advice that you would like to give to the Theatre Pasta readers ?

Keep up the good work! Theatre is good work.

Daddy

May 2, 2000, my Father Solomon Lipman Chernin passed away at the age of 81.

From a novel(unpublished) I wrote in Los Angeles in the 70ies called THE BEDSIDE ALICE:

DADDY'S BIRTHDAY CARD from Alice:

Today, of all days is Daddy's Birthday and on the verge of tears I rock myself to sleep, because in the end and on the day of your Father's Birthday, you GROW UP, because Daddy's fifty and you're not a kid anymore.

It's raining. It's 5:30 in the morning and Daddy is 50.. Daddy is having his Birthday and I am giving birth to the day by staying up all night.

It's all in the shadows on the wall. Head in hands I write:

Happy Birthday Daddy,

saving the minutes of the only night when it will be Daddy's fiftieth Birthday...can't sleep on Daddy's Birthday.

Your little girl can't sleep, she's crying on your birthday. It's raining on your Birthday and your little girl's in pain on your birthday.

I'm tired. It's 5:30 in the morning, the night is gone until it comes again and if I don't get some sleep, I'll be even more tired and more tired and someday I'll be too tired to go on, and I don't want that to happen.

Let me sleep, Daddy, even though it's your only fiftieth birthday, especially because it's that day.

Love and Birthday xxxxx's

Alice.

Written On the occasion of the second anniversary of my Father’s death: May 2, 2002.

I have been talking to my Father incessantly for the past twenty four hours, on this day May 2, that marks the second anniversary of his passing in 2000. I have been talking to him about the two years without him, when I have not been able to pick up the phone to say, “Hi Daddy”, or been able to stop by and feel the comfort of his hugs and kisses. My father became much more demonstrative in his last years, showering his four daughters with affection and becoming the mellow companion of his wife of fifty plus years.
The last time I addressed a letter to my Father was on his 50ieth birthday. I was living in Los Angeles and I felt the impact of his ageing. I figured it was time for me to start maturing, because after all Daddy was 50 and I in my twenties saw it as a bench mark for my own growing up. That did not stop me from continuing to call him ‘Daddy’ except for a brief period in adolescence when it was ‘Father…yes Father, anything you say, Father’ a rather pathetic attempt at sarcasm as we waged a war over my life and his control over it. I wanted him to relinquish that control so I could follow my heart and I did so for many years, often to his distress.

So Daddy, thanks for hanging in with me. I know it was rough at times. My unconventional ways and needs were often a source of frustration and I know pain for you, but we survived, our love in tact. Of course I could never really say this to you, because as a man of few words you were not one for declarations. Au contraire, you were indeed, the strong silent type. There you sat behind your newspaper and in later years the ever present books that you read in your easy chair nightly. When you could no longer play tennis or even golf, it was the world of books and the beloved history channel that kept you gloriously occupied. You took to retirement very well, just another indication that all your years of dentistry were the sacrifice you made to raise your family – your girls. The four of us plus Mother were a constant source of amazement I know to your manly disposition. You were a man’s man and that’s what you understood. And I learned to understand you which was probably the greatest gift you gave me, although there were so many generous gifts – support for your artist daughter, whose mystifying commitment to the life of the imagination was if not always comprehended, never relinquished.

Dearest Father of mine, we struggled through my difficult high school years, my Hollywood sojourn which I know worried you and let me say, your concern was not unfounded. I was pretty ‘out there’ but I could always call home. Once when I phoned you, upset about a writing deadline, financial problems, building a career. You brought it down to a wonderful simplicity that gave me perspective: “You’re under pressure", you said, and it clicked and soothed me.

When the L.A. experience finally got the better of me and a billboard saying ‘Fly Toronto’ beckoned me home, you responded to my tearful ‘plaints with a ticket to come home. The first snowfall back in Toronto, we shovelled the walk and cleaned off the car together and some part of my brain that had been fried under the California sun was restored.

But Daddy, enough about me. You had 81 years of life, born on Armistice day, November 11, 1919, named Solomon for Peace. (My sister) Barbara wrote me from London England on one occasion in the year following your death when we corresponded by constant e mails that got me through the year: “I think a lot about how Daddy shaped my life and really how deep down good he was. He lived his life to the best of his ability. Let’s hope we all do”.

It’s harder to do without you, Daddy. I understand how Mother felt when she said “how could he go and leave me now”..I just wanted you to go on forever, taking your simple pleasures, your shelf of best sellers, your chair at the head of the Passover table, your wonderful recalcitrant monosyllabic ‘don’t bother me now’ replies as you rushed back to the TV with your plate of sliced apple, “a healthy snack” gleefully anticipating the conclusion of ‘Catherine The Great’….

To say I miss you is inadequate, but I have so many memories that live on in me daily so many indications that what Barbara said is so, that you shaped my life and now in my maturity I can be grateful.

When you took your last breath I was beside you, my heart breaking. I felt you were frightened and very confused. I felt helpless and terrified. I felt so much love for you. And you died like a man. You just suddenly died, no last minute capitulation’s or changes of character, somehow without ceremony your heart stopped. No last words, because you didn’t need words, that had been established in your lifetime.

It was your presence, Daddy that was so compelling for me always: your strong capable hands, your dear bald head, the layers of life that deepened your face and form, the warmth of your embrace that drew me close to your signature sweater vests, the sound of your voice, the humour that would surface and surprise us all and the laughter we shared in our little circle of Sol and his girls, Beryl and Cayle and Franky and Barbara and Nancy.

The other day I used up the last of the shirt cardboards that you used to save up for me from your laundered shirts because you knew I liked to use them for mailings. My source is gone.
My source is gone.

SOME ADDITIONAL NOTES -

Later when I again came to live with my parents, now a ‘maturer person’ and way too old to be living at home, but in spite of minor embarrassment on my Mother’s part, “it didn’t look right”, it was heavenly. It was my busiest year to date, if we don’t count my ignominious Hollywood movie experience, otherwise known as ‘survive and stay alive in ’75’, advise from Nick Ray, the director of ‘Rebel Without A cause’, but that’s another story (alluded to in a previous blog). One I couldn’t tell my Father.

I am so curious about the stories that he couldn’t tell me. Wish I could pry some ‘Solly’ stories out of the nephews he was so close with, who accompanied him on his once-a-year trips to Vegas. Sharing my parents house with them in adulthood was fantastic. Perhaps as someone wrote the prodigal daughter returns home because she has found no one to love out there. Basically I loved the service, dinner on the table, the air conditioner turned on in my room when I got home from late night editing sessions, because Daddy knew it would be too hot for me to sleep..living with people who love you is the best.

I am so grateful to be able to experience it now with my husband, my now love. But it was Daddy who was my first love, my friend, who drove me to airports, got the woeful calls, slipped me the twenties, bought me a car in L.A. We, Chernin girls are considered independent, and we are because we had that secret weapon, a Father who loved us through thick and thin. He didn’t speak to me once for three years because he thought I was in the process of ruining my life..his love was killing him. My Grandmother of course blamed it on me. When the relationship that he reviled broke up, (my five years with Eli Rill) in no small measure because I had a continual nightmare that I would wake up one day and someone would call and tell me that my father had died and I wouldn’t have known him for years. I couldn’t bear the thought and it was eliminated when he once more welcomed me into the bosom of the family – from which my Mother never allowed him to exile me from anyway.

Daddy, my first love, my friend, first shoulder I cried on, the first lap I sat in, my first man, the only man in what eventually became a house full of women. A funny place for a guy like Sol Chernin. The guy who hid his hockey skates from his mother and played hockey under an assumed name til he got busted when a Halifax paper showed a picture of him with the bogus name underneath. This was hidden from Grandma Chernin whose wrath or displeasure was not courted by her four boys, (Daddy being the second oldest) or two daughters for that matter. They were a tight knit bunch, Daddy and my Aunts and Uncles.

Solly, I wish you could have seen me holding the Torah at the service for you today. I could feel Mother’s proud and grateful eyes…’she is going to be alright, Sol. You don’t have to worry about her anymore”.

I miss your physical presence so much...after all, the alternative title for THE BEDSIDE ALICE was >"Daddy you should have told me you were already taken"