All stories about the Dome (that is, when it really was the Dome) begin and end with Bertrand A. Henry . . .
The period from 1979 to 1983 was one of enormous changes for the Dome and its Theatre Department. In terms of personnel there was a huge turnover in the ranks of the faculty. New voice teachers were hired and lost culminating in a two-year hire of a young man from the U.S., who would be lost in the next huge changeover in 1982. Marcy Kahan arrived and Perry Schneiderman was lost to NTS. And Eugene Lion arrived from the Guthrie Centre to start his “Montreal period”.
In addition to all of this (a lot of which I will come back to) there were also massive architectural changes to take place. To put all of this is some kind of perspective, allow me to briefly describe the layout of the Dome as it was when I started there. Historically, the Dome goes back to1926-7. It was built as a movie theater (The Quartier) and one of a duo that were built at the same time. The other was up in NDG, on the corner of Girouard and Monkland. The Monkland was the more beautiful of the two having a wonderful painted interior and, of course, that one has been completely gutted. The last time I was there it was a medical therapy building. Montreal is probably the worst city in the world for preserving it’s architectural past and what it has done to some of the most majestic theatre buildings in Canada is beyond pathetic. None of the great theatres on St. Catherine Street have survived and none of the great themed theatres (like the Seville) has endured. The tactic with most of them was the same – do no maintenance until the building is falling apart(literally, in the case of the Seville) and then let the City of Montreal condemn and tear the building down. Just for the record there was a sister Seville Theatre in Sherbrooke and, the last time I looked, it still endured and still looked Spanish.
When the Dome was the Quartier it served as St. Henri’s movie theatre until the 1950’s when it was closed and became a warehouse. It became a “semi-historical” building because it was the setting for a major section of “Bonheur d’Occasion” (“The Tin Flute”) by Gabrielle Roy – but then so was half of St. Henri. I was told by the building’s owner, that the plasterwork (some of which still survived when Dawson vacated the property) was created by a German craftsman who was brought over to Canada to do the Quartier and the Monkland at the same time. In the 1960’s it was re-opened as a nightclub with a round aluminum dance floor and then it was rented by Dawson for the Theatre Department. Yes, rented, because Dawson was never allowed to buy it although, at one point, they could have owned it for less than $100,000.
There was a low-level stage at the back of the building and a two-line fly gallery that had been used to enable the occasional Vaudeville show between movies. The dressing rooms were two small spaces on either side of the stage, one on top of the other and a large passageway under the stage that later doubled as props storage. Our audiences sat on chairs in font of the stage and on top of the metal dance floor. The upstairs balcony was used as set storage as well as a central area that was the control “booth” – wide open so that the audience could often hear cues being called, wafting down from above. The old movie projection room was costume storage. The lights hung from a suspended grid of pipes accessed by a rolling scaffolding. Working lighting crew was not for the faint of heart. Oh, not to forget the best anomaly, the tool cupboard was a walk-in refrigerator behind the long bar, under the balcony.
The season that year was Playboy of the Western World (directed by Victor Knight), Ten Lost Years (me again) and a show called White Night, written by faculty member Marcy Kahan. Slotted to direct the show was new faculty member Eugene Lion. First, a bit about the third play. It was based on the memoirs of John “Buffy” Glassco, a Montreal poet, memoirist, translater and pornographer who ended up as the Mayor of Foster, Quebec in the Eastern Townships. The memoir (I don’t call it an autobiography because parts of it are fictional) was called Memoirs of Montparnasse and deals with the period of time in the 1920’s when Glassco (at 17) ran away from McGill to Paris and met and partied with James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie of Oscar Wilde fame) and others. One of it’s (true)high points is the time that Canadian author Morley Callaghan knocked down Ernest Hemingway in the boxing ring with, F. Scott Fitzgerald refereeing. I will be writing about Glassco at some future point elsewhere on my blog.
The play was set in the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1931, the night before Glassco had a tubercular lung removed. During that night – that white night – Buffy communes with many of the people from his memoire and relives his years in Montparnasse. The play has never been published, although Marcy went on to a hugely successful career as a writer in England, principally for the BBC. Th effect of the play was a bit surreal as one scene bled into another, the present and the past, and Lion attempted to build on that effect with staging and abstract design.
I do not remember what Bert said to explain his coup in hiring Eugene to the faculty as a teacher and a director. Lion had just been fired by the Guthrie Centre in Minnesota after having run vastly over budget and then engaged with them in a nasty legal battle. His wife had fronted a dance company and they had moved to Montreal to continue their artistic careers here. If you’d like to be impressed, google his bio online – Dawson even gets a brief mention. Eugene was a one-man natural force (not to mention being an enormous man) and he dominated every where he went.
Now here, unfortunately, this gets a tad personal. But Eugene was one of those people – you either loved him or hated him. He was a born guru of the theatre, and I have never been much of a fan of artistic guhu-ery. The students were mostly smitten, particularly the third year, particularly while he was directing them in the final major, particularly the ones he got on particularly well with. Local designers were not up to his standards so he was furnished with a movie designer who had worked with Altman – but had never designed for the stage. As a result, the designs were lavish and abstract and beyond our skills and budget. But Eugene insisted and on we went. The set designs changed a number of times, even after they were partly built and had to be scrapped and restarted. As deadlines approached, tempers frayed and there was all-out war on a number of fronts. From the trenches I tried to explain to the artistic team that these were just students, not master craftspeople and at the rate that we were going, very little would be ready for opening. Not acceptable. We should pull students from classes and work longer hours. Did that mean that there would be no more changes to the designs? No, it did not mean that. Did that mean that they would move their rehearsals to a rehearsal hall – say, Richelieu campus. No. Eugene can’t work under those conditions.
The fight moved on to the faculty level and coincidently coincided with Chair elections (usually a formality with Bert’s yearly acclamation). But this year Eugene made it fairly obvious that if he didn’t get “more support” that he might very well run for Chair. And he might very well have won. So, the faculty caved in and decided that the set crew would be released from classes and would sleep during the day and build over night. And that is what happened.
The set got built and the costumes got made. The crews were exhausted, some students had missed weeks of classes but Eugene’s show opened. The hostility between factions within the faculty and within the student body was palpable at the end of the year. The roast was nasty and I left early. A lotof people were not speaking to a lot of other people. Eugene is the only person that I have ever seen Bert be afraid of.
I had a conversation with Bert after the run of the show. I really only had one question although the conversation was (of course) a lengthy and one-sided one. Essentially the question was: is this going to be allowed to repeat itself next year? Or, was Eugene going to be un-invited to return in the fall? After all, he had no tenure. The answer was extremely lengthy, with elaborate twists and turns in Bert’s inimical rhetorical style, but boiled down to this: “There’s nothing I can do, man.” And in that moment, I had left the Dome.
