Passion Play

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2009 (6319 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

American actress Precious Chong had just strolled into wardrobe at the Manitoba Theatre Centre for a fitting when she began sizing up her male co-star in The Mating Dance of the Werewolf.

"I thought to himself, ‘Ooooh, he’s way too young, way too cute and an actor — forget it,’" Chong recalled the other day. "I would never go out with any of those things, especially actors."

The daughter of stoner comic Tommy Chong (of Cheech & Chong fame) was in Winnipeg five years ago to play the sexy wolf girl in Mark Stein’s romantic thriller, which had a Canadian cast that included Toronto performer Wes Berger. Their relationship began innocently in the MTC rehearsal hall before their private mating dance evolved into a lusty fandango.
 
“I fell in love so hard, so fast, it was crazy,” says Chong, who is back at MTC as the star of the next Warehouse production. “It hadn’t felt like that since I had my first love in high school. It was scary to be that open with someone.”
 
Stein’s script only called for the pair to be together in the climactic scene in which Chong’s Abby decapitates Berger’s police officer character. Backstage, Berger’s head was over heels in love.
 
On opening night, which happened to be Chong’s 36th birthday, he proposed.
 
“We literally knew each other three weeks,” she recalls. “We got married three months later when we eloped to New York City.”
 
Chong has a soft spot for this frigid flatland where her steamy passion peaked.
 
“Winnipeg is my Paris,” she says. “You know how they say Paris is for lovers. I had the great love affair of my life in Winnipeg.”

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Such a whirlwind courtship is nothing new to Winnipeg theatre. The community is dominated by stage couples in numbers that far exceed the normal rate of professional pairings. The city’s flagship troupe, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, is captained by Steven Schipper, whose wife is actress Terri Cherniack. The artistic director of Prairie Theatre Exchange, Robert Metcalfe, is married to actress Miriam Smith. Leslee Silverman, the longtime artistic head of the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, is wedded to actor David Warburton. The spouse of Theatre Projects’ artistic director Ardith Boxall is actor Gordon Tanner, while the first couple of Shakespeare in the Ruins is actor/director Arne McPherson and his actor/playwright wife Debbie Patterson.
 
Open a Winnipeg program and you will invariably read the names of local theatre couples. The list of actors for MTC’s season-opener Pride & Prejudice was topped by Mairi Babb, who is engaged to cast mate Matt Kippen. It also included Cherniack and Warburton, who appeared with James Durham, husband of costume designer Leanne Foley; Carson Nattrass, who lives with actress/playwright Sharon Bajer; Charlene Van Buekenhout, whose boyfriend is actor Kevin Klassen; Stefanie Wiens, who lives with playwright Angus Kolm; Marina Stephenson Kerr, who is married to University of Manitoba theatre professor/director Bill Kerr; and Rob McLaughlin, whose partner is actress/ writer Sarah Constible.
 
It is hard to account for the disproportional number of lovestruck Romeos and Juliets who have found their soulmates in the theatre here.
 
There is no research into the phenomenon, only theories about these unscripted hookups.
 
So for Valentine’s Day, we’ve asked local actors and directors to reveal how they fell in love, and psychiatrists and other professionals to speculate about what theatre people see in each other.
 
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Debbie Paterson took an instant dislike to Edmonton-based actor Arne McPherson when they first met at the Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay in 1990. Something to do with how he went on and on about his girlfriend.
 
Their paths crossed a year later when Paterson arrived in Winnipeg as the roadie for a punk band named Furnace Face at the same time as Saskatoon’s Persephone Theatre was conducting auditions. She landed a part in a touring teen show opposite, as fate would have it, McPherson as her prospective boyfriend.
 
“I seriously wondered if I should do the tour,” says Paterson, who once billed herself as Canada’s favourite topless accordion player. “I had just moved to Toronto and I didn’t know if I wanted to spend a whole winter in Saskatchewan with this annoying guy.” What to do? She sought the counsel of a higher power.
 
“I did a Tarot reading to decide,” she says. “It said I would find romance. Isn’t that silly?”
 
So she spent four months crammed into an equipment-filled van alone with four others navigating the icy roads to remote Saskatchewan towns.
 
“You really do feel like you’ve got nobody but each other to rely on,” says McPherson. “We were away from home spending a lot of time together and I fell in love.”
 
With the spark of romance in full flame, the tour ended and they went their separate ways in what looked like the classic length-of-run romance (a.k.a. “showmance”), a common occurrence in which two actors enjoy a short love affair that ends closing night. But the two exchanged love letters for four months before rendezvousing at the 1991 Winnipeg Folk Festival, where they decided to live together. They are now raising two children.

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The creation of a play can be a blissful, bonding endeavour, a state of non-reality that many in showbiz call the bubble. During the typical two- or three-week rehearsal period, actors and directors are wrapped inside the world of the play nearly day and night. The intensity, esprit de corps and heightened emotional state can be intoxicating.
 
“When you are in a great play and you are feeling filled up as an actor as you have been very few times before, and there is another person who is plugged with the same force, it can be a romance inducer,” says U of M theatre and film professor George Toles.
 
Veteran performers know how to channel this infatuation into their performance and to leave it at the rehearsal door. Young actors may mistake scripted passion or chemistry for a real-life romance.
 
“You fall in love because you see people in their truth,” says Chong.
 
“Everyone is irresistible when they are in that space.”
 
When Chong attended Los Angeles acting classes, it was against the rules to date other students.
 
In the excitement of the rehearsal hall, actors can unconsciously assign that emotion to their co-stars. That’s called misattribution of arousal, in shrink talk.
 
“In the intensive-care unit and the emergency room, it is my subjective impression there are more hookups between professional staff because of the intensity and the intimacy of the workplace,” says U of M psychiatrist Dr. Michael Eleff. “If you spend six hours working to try to save somebody’s life, by the end of it you feel very close.”
 
Chong’s mating dance with Berger eventually ended, as did their marriage. She returns to Winnipeg in a show with a title that again underlines her romantic status: Bad Dates.
 
“I have had my share, unfortunately,” she says.

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Carson Nattrass, then a 19-year-old U of M student, was thrilled to get cast in PTE’s 2000 production of Walking on Water, playing the stage brother to actress Sharon Bajer’s character.
 
He admits to harbouring more than fraternal feelings for Bajer, who at the time was a popular leading lady a decade his senior.
 
“I had a crush on this gorgeous woman since I was 13,” recalls Nattrass, who recently played Happy Loman in WJT’s Death of a Salesman.
 
“I had been watching Sharon in student matinees for almost 10 years.”
 
There was no immediate romance during the show, but the two quietly began seeing each other afterwards.
 
What their relationship lacked in early heat, it made up with staying power while Nattrass went away to theatre school in Edmonton.
 
When he came back, they occasionally found themselves in the same cast again, such as in Liar at PTE in 2004, in which again they played brother and sister.
 
“I had to kiss the other guys in the show while he watched,” says Bajer. “It was an odd thing. We all laughed about it.”
 
“You have to be cool,” Nattrass adds. “It takes a huge level of trust.”
 
Bajer gave birth Jan. 22 to Theodore Nattrass, their first child together.
 
“Ours is a romantic story, but it certainly took its time,” Nattrass says.

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It was lust at first sight when Steven Schipper spied Terri Cherniack wearing a leotard as she ambled into National Theatre School cafeteria.
 
“I said, ‘That is the girl I was going to marry,’” says Schipper, then a first-year student. “I really thought that. I won’t admit I thought that a thousand times before.”
 
His later reconnaissance uncovered the fact that Cherniack was going out with a second-year acting student, so he bided his time, keeping an eye on her. As a technical student, he was assigned to be inside an on-stage mountain during a student production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in which Cherniack was performing.
 
“I always made sure that I got in the right position in the mountain so I could watch her on stage,” he says with a laugh.
 
He kept watching for his chance, sometimes to the detriment of his budding directing career. When he was helming Cherniack in a graduate student production in Toronto, he had to ask her not to wear her short shorts any more.
 
“I couldn’t focus on rehearsal or concentrate on the work,” he recalls.
 
It was only after he learned she had broken up with her long-term boyfriend that he made his move from Calgary, with a letter of condolence to Cherniack. He returned to Toronto, and they went out on a date, after which he asked to her to accompany him to his sister’s wedding.
 
“I was cutting carrots in the kitchen when he asked me, and it was like a bolt of lightning,” Cherniack says. “I thought, ‘Of course, it’s Steven. He is the one.’” The two were engaged the following year in 1982 and married that August.
 
Schipper was appointed MTC’s artistic director in 1989.
 
“He was the first nice guy I became involved with,” she adds. “It was a shock to my system because I wasn’t used to someone being a decent person. I’m lucky I met one.”

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There can be risks to portraying make-believe characters. The identity of their stage character can some times get entangled with the personality of the real actor. Who they are pretending to be can rub off on those sharing the stage.
 
Cherniack remembers she and Jim Mezon being congratulated by director Tibor Feheregyhazi after a run of Romeo and Juliet at the Persephone Theatre for being the first couple to play the famous lovers without having an affair.
 
“I think if you looked at the history of Romeo and Juliet you would find a lot of people hooked up because of that play,” says Cherniack. “You endow the other actor with all kinds of qualities because of the play.”
 
There is an old saying that when couples marry, the woman thinks the man will change and the man thinks the woman won’t change. They are both wrong, according to Eleff.
 
He says there can be a transformation and it doesn’t have anything to do with a male actor falling in love with the Juliet character.
 
“It’s not that he wants to marry Juliet,” Eleff says. “It is this actress is capable of being somebody, anybody, which might stimulate the fantasy she could be who I want her to be.”
 
kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

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