FEATURE INTERVIEW - 26 Jan '10

MacDONALD FANS ON CLOUD 9 WITH HER RETURN TO THE STAGE

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
26 Jan '10

For a Canadian art lover, it’s the pinnacle of a delicious ambivalence.

The theatre lover in you thrills at Ann-Marie MacDonald’s return to the dramatic stage in the Mirvish production of Caryl Churchill’s CLOUD 9, which opens Tuesday night at the Panasonic Theatre. If you’ve caught her performances in anything from GOODNIGHT DESDEMONA (GOOD MORNING JULIET) to TOP GIRL, you know she spends far too little time acting.

But even while the theatre lover celebrates, those craving another MacDonald novel such as FALL ON YOUR KNEES or THE WAY THE CROW FLIES to take the chill off a February evening, will rue the time the award-winning novelist will not be devoting to quill and quire.

And that doesn’t even touch on how the fans MacDonald has amassed as a playwright (the aforementioned GOOD NIGHT DESDEMONA, the recent Shaw Festival hit BELLE MORALE, A NATURAL HISTORY and several others) might feel. Or fans of her turn as host and narrator of CBC’s The Doc Zone.

So, just what does it take to get the multi-talented MacDonald to favour performing over her other skills?

Simply the right director. And the right director, as usual, is named Alisa Palmer — and not just because Palmer happens to be MacDonald’s wife and co-parent of the couple’s two children, aged five and seven.

“I love working with her” MacDonald says. “She’s an excellent director.”

Further, MacDonald trusts Palmer not to cast her in roles that won’t stretch her as an artist — but even so, it took her a bit of time to grasp the reasoning behind Palmer’s decision to cast her as both a nine-year-old boy and that boy’s 54-year-old mother in this highly unconventional play.

At first, the role of Edward — the nine-year-old boy — seemed a cakewalk to a woman who admits to being a bit of a tomboy in her youth, a woman who has recently embraced the sport of hockey whole-heartedly.

“The furthest thing for me wouldn’t be being a boy,” she says, adding that as a child, she’d compared her life to the boys around her, “and I thought: ‘Wow, if you’re a boy, you just strike a lot of problems off the list.’

“But a boy who’d rather be playing with dolls?” she continues, returning to the world of the play, “And he’s in love with men, and that proves to be an even longer walk for me.”

Then in the second act, MacDonald surrenders the role of Edward to Evan Buliung and herself becomes Betty, Edward’s 54-year-old mother, a role played by Buliung in the first act. And even though it might seem like a more natural fit to the 51-year-old actor, it’s not proved a perfect fusion either.

“I have a composite of Betty,” MacDonald says. “But there’s a danger there too — to do something facile. I’ve had a really hard time with her. I know how to do (the) Betty that is effervescent and pisses everybody off — but that is arch.”

So as she struggles with both, it’s hard to say which MacDonald favours.

“Being an adult, I’m saying Betty. But next week, it could be Edward,” she insists.

And while she juggles her parts, she is very aware of her co-stars — a sort of who’s-who of the Shaw and Stratford companies, with a touch of Soulpepper thrown in for spice — Buliung, Ben Carlson, Megan Follows, David Jansen, Yanna McIntosh and Blair Williams.

“I am very aware of being part of this cast, and of bringing as much to the cast as everyone else is and not letting them down,” MacDonald says. “I’ve got to keep up with them.”

Happily, she seems utterly unaware that a few of them, no doubt, are trying to keep up with her.