All stories about the Dome (that is, when it really was the Dome) begin and end with Bertrand A. Henry, except . . .
When I left the Dome, I received an offer to set up a new technical program to be added to an already existing acting program at Humber College in the west end of Toronto. It was a chance to run my own program, teach technical theatre to students who wanted to train as theatre technicians and not to deal with Eugene Lion again. Since these stories are about the Dome and Bert, I will be very brief about Humber College but I would like to mention a number of things that happened while I was working there.
Humber was, and is, a technical training college, with tuition fees, that taught an enormous range of technical skills. It had a huge hospitality sector, teaching programs for everyone from travel agents to chefs. The chef school actually ran a small restaurant that served a lunch every Friday, created by a different graduating year student each week. Reservations were almost impossible to get. The College had a fabulous music program, with a great orchestra, an excellent television technician and reporter school and they even had one of the few programs in Canada in undertaking.
I ran into an old friend there who was teaching in the acting program: Bill Davis. Bill had been the founding Artistic Director of Festival Lennoxville, had taught at NTS and would go on to play “The Man Who Smoked” in the X Files.
One of the features of the Acting Program was that one of their Major productions got a short run at one of the (then) alternative theatres in Downtown Toronto. That year the theatre chosen, had two stages (big and small) and a shared Green Room. It was always an interesting experience for the third year acting students as they got to play to a walk-in from the street audience and to meet some real working actors. That year the professional show on the big stage was Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane and there was an intermission after Act II that coincided with the Intermission of the show from Humber so the students were in the green room when the actors came offstage from the Orton play and the last one out was the corpse, literally covered in blood. As the actor playing the corpse staggered through the greenroom some of the students audibly gasped at his appearance. He stopped, fixed them with a stare, and said with heavy irony: “Sell shoes!” then exited into his dressing room.
And there was a great silence.
One of the shows at Humber that year was The Cherry Orchard. Like most productions of the play, it was staged entirely wrongly, going for the melodrama rather than the exquisite comedy it was meant to be. (You don’t have to believe me, you can read Chekhov’s letters to Stanislavski on the subject.) But it’s also a great demonstration of the old props’ adage: never allow animals on stage! In Act I, as part of the great, group entrance, Charlotta appears with “a lapdog.” Charlotta says, “My dog eats nuts.” Pischik says, “Fancy that.” And everybody exits. And that’s that. Now that dog can easily be handled with a toy dog, wrapped up. The dog, after all, has no lines. But not a single director that I have ever known has been able to resist the impulse to demand a real dog. As a result, the great entrance is always marred by the dog’s moment in the spotlight. Some bark and at least two have escaped and had to be caught backstage. One dog had a mild epileptic fit. The dog in this production took one look at the audience and threw up.
The line about nuts was dropped that night.
In Carol Churchill’s Fen several live rabbits are supposed to be seen in a cage. Naturally, for the authenticity of the moment, the actors had to touch the rabbits. As a result, in our production, on opening night, a rabbit escaped into the audience. How’s that for authenticity?
And it’s not just the animals. Audience’s have a fascination with many touches of reality. Just start a microwave on stage, with a bowl of soup inside, and the audience will lose everything that is said until the damn thing beeps and turns off.
Actually, a whole new light can be cast on a particular scene by a “realistic” prop. In one production of The Seagull, we managed to procure a real seagull for the scene where Treplev throws the bird he shot into Nina’s lap in a fit of pique. In a Bishop’s University production, a local farm had a seagull fly into their largest window and break its neck. For some reason that was never explained to us, the bird was immediately thrown into a large freezer and kept there. One of our prop crew members heard about it and borrowed it for the show. It was thawed out and introduced (as was customary) during the technical rehearsal. The actress playing Nina nearly had a stroke and ran screaming from the stage. The bird went back in the freezer. I wonder what the first Nina would have done.
In The Playboy of the Western World, at the Dome, there was a whole cooked chicken called for as a prop. We used a real, cooked chicken. Every night, during the week’s run, we kept it in the bar refrigerator under the balcony (so that it would not turn too green). No one ever ate any of it during the show so it was quite safe. On closing night, Eugene Lion found it during the strike and ate the whole damn thing.
