For most stage actors, putting their stamp on a character is a process that begins during rehearsals and culminates with the performance onstage. Alison Sealy-Smith is not one of those actors.
Her involvement as a "dramaturgical performer" in Lisa Codrington's one-woman, multiple-character Cast Iron began long before she, Codrington and director Ahdri Zhina Mandiela stepped into the rehearsal room. In fact, Sealy-Smith put on her dramaturgical hat almost as soon as she read the play more than a year ago and fell in love with the story of Libya Atwell, a 78-year-old woman from Barbados now living and reminiscing in a nursing home in sub-zero Winnipeg. Sealy-Smith and Codrington, both of Bajan heritage, then flew to Banff for an intense playwright-performer development workshop.
"I like to think I was always guided by Lisa and her intentions but I also knew I would have an impact on the way it developed because of the kind of performer I am," says the Dora-winning actor of Harlem Duet and founding artistic director of Obsidian Theatre Company. "I'm a very weighty performer. Subtlety is not my forte. As soon I approached it, what I was drawn to and what I loved is where the play could deepen and where I saw potential for drama rather than comedy."
Cast Iron opens next week at the Tarragon Extra space in a Nightwood Theatre production in association with Obsidian. If the title seems familiar, it's because Codrington herself played the one-woman show in an earlier version at SummerWorks that leaned more toward a comic performance tradition than a dramatic one.
"It was an unfinished piece when I started working on it," recalls Sealy-Smith, "and it did live in a more comic realm as a way for Lisa to strut her stuff, play a few characters and explore her heritage. It's now about storytelling. . . . I think the play is a richer, darker cut of meat now."
It's also a more demanding piece to perform. The lesson here may be: Be careful what and for whom you dramaturge. As she sits alone onstage, conjuring up and conversing with a handful of people from her character's past, including virile young men in their 20s, Sealy-Smith must anchor each new persona in Libya's consciousness of them. The role requires technical proficiency, vocal rhythm and timing but also an ability to make the story and its characters clear and accessible to an audience who don't share Sealy-Smith's and Codrington's innate knowledge of Bajan history and dialects.
"It's been exhausting," says the feisty Sealy-Smith, emphasizing every syllable in the word. "You're supposed to do these things when you're in your twenties and that was the last time I did a one-woman show. The age is showing. Lines don't go to my head the same way. Fifteen years ago I used to glance at a page and I memorized the lines. Now I'm studying like a fool."
And yet 15 years ago Sealy-Smith -- who won't reveal her age but says she's "almost double" Codrington who is in her "early twenties" -- may not have been able to give Cast Iron "the due it deserves." That weightiness she refers to was put on after 20 years juggling the feast or famine of being a working stage actor in this city.
Something else has changed in Toronto in the last two decades: the emergence of a black Canadian theatrical movement. It's still in its infancy and as Sealy-Smith readily acknowledges, it's "hit and miss," but productions like The Adventures of a Black Girl , The Piano Lesson and ' da Kink in My Hair and now Cast Iron are more than isolated phenomena.
"We're trying to unearth an aesthetic," suggests Sealy-Smith. "Is there a way that we can do theatre that's relatively unique, informed by a whole bunch of diasporic influences that can enrich Canadian theatre?"
There are some facts of Canadian theatre that are equal-opportunity obstacles: short development and rehearsal time for instance. Although Cast Iron has gone through Nightwood's exemplary development process -- from its Write from the Hip program for novice writers in 2002 to its Groundswells Playwrights Unit in 2003 to Banff in 2004 -- all involved are aware they're discovering the play's essence to the beat of a ticking clock.
"I don't write plays but I would imagine a playwright will learn so much from the first production and three weeks of audiences," says Sealy-Smith. "Some playwrights have to be produced to learn. I can imagine we'll come down some time in March, look back and say 'Well, if we had to do this again. . .' But that's evolution, that's growth."
Or in Sealy-Smith dramaturgical parlance, that's how plays turn into richer cuts of meat, performers become weighty and playwrights learn how to develop writing muscles.
Previews start tomorrow; opens Feb. 16 and runs to March 13. $16 to $33. Tuesday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun. matinees, 2:30 p.m. (except Feb. 19). Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, 30 Bridgman Ave., 416-531-1827.