Of the two Dora Mavor Moore Awards actor and playwright Mike McPhaden took home in 2003 -- for outstanding actor and outstanding new play for the quirky drama Poochwater -- one has opened more doors than the other. This being Toronto theatre, where playwrights and play development still define our stages, it's the writing award that really mattered.
"It got me a play-writing agent and that's how people are thinking of me now," says the Winnipeg-born McPhaden. Since winning the outstanding actor Dora, McPhaden hasn't been seen on stage in Toronto even once, although regular film and TV work keeps him feeling "like an actor," he says. "I think people presume that I'm a theatre maker rather than an actor for hire and think I'm too busy doing my own thing, which isn't always true."
By comparison, the Dora buzz helped Poochwater land a production from England's edgy Wise Donkey Theatre at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which McPhaden has flown to see and fully intends to steal "a couple of moments" from for the second, independently produced, cash-strapped remount of this two-hander, which opens here next week. Patrick Conner directs and Jeff Miller joins the cast as replacement for Brendan Wall.
Poochwater first surfaced at the 2000 SummerWorks Festival, taking the public and the critics by surprise. The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor declared it as a "grand artistic winner." Its 1950 Detroit setting, post-war optimism and the sense of paranoia brought about by an amnesiac trying to recover his identity all added up to a great mood piece, one where history and politics got a stylized workout. The play was so intriguing and elliptical that I asked McPhaden to explain its genesis if not its meaning.
The play grew out of an image he had of a man standing in a room and looking confused. "I just understood that confusion within the soul. I was looking for a story that would express that image," McPhaden recalls, adding that the notion of amnesia began to emerge simultaneously.
When his grandfather, who served in the Second World War, died, leaving behind his war memorabilia, the pieces fell into place. The play became about two men starting over after the devastation of the war, much like the country and the world around them.
The year 1950 brought together the various thematic explorations in Poochwater. "Nineteen-fifty was a transition time where the war has been over for a long time but our idea of the 1950s -- the 1957 Cadillac with big fins -- hadn't formed yet," explains McPhaden.
"The baby boomer generation existed but they were toddlers and didn't have a cultural identity yet. It was a time between eras. I think of it as the year that slipped through the cracks."
But it's how this 1950 world is reconstructed by McPhaden and Conner that lends the play its biting critique of popular culture's role as our collective and sometimes false memory. "Our perspective of the period is heavily influenced by Hollywood film," suggests McPhaden, explaining the stylized, monochromatic look of the production. "Rather than trying to hook into absolute cultural accuracy, the production is trying to hook into our cultural nostalgia for the time period. To me, nostalgia and amnesia are first cousins. We choose to forget the unpleasant and the dull and remember the glamour and the style."
For the current remount, McPhaden insists that the running time will not exceed the 62 to 65 minutes of the 2002 production. Moving to Theatre Passe Muraille's Mainspace from the cramped Backspace does not mean adding more plot twists or an entire new act as was the case of its immediate predecessor at the same space, Little Dragon. "I write stuff in but take stuff out. Although the writing process hasn't ended, the play is not growing in time," McPhaden reassures us.
That should also come as good news to McPhaden the actor who has to juggle three different versions of the script where some lines have been rewritten up to eight times, fine-tuning a word here and a phrase there. "At the stage I'm at right now as a performer, I need the writer to go away and shut up," he says, conjuring up creepy images of ventriloquist-and-dummy power struggles in, appropriately enough, classic Hollywood horror movies.
"I need to stop being the playwright and become the person I'm playing. Performing the play has always been part of the writing process but never while I'm on stage. After I perform, the actor gets off stage and has a little meeting with the playwright."
Previews Feb. 2 and 3. Opens Feb. 4 and runs to Feb. 27. Tues. to Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun. matinee, 2:30 p.m.
$23 to $32. Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave., 416-504-7529.