Stage presence

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This article was published 13/10/2016 (3470 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Marina Stephenson Kerr, glowing from a chilly bicycle commute downtown, is enjoying an oatmeal breakfast at Stella’s on Portage Avenue. We’re a couple of blocks from Prairie Theatre Exchange, where she is rehearsing for the title role in PTE’s season kickoff production of The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, playing a mother confronting the challenges of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Coincidentally, we are also a couple of blocks from the downtown shoot for a TV movie — a Hallmark Channel Christmas film called It’s a Wonderful Wife.

She says she was offered a role on the film, but had to decline because of her commitment to the theatre role.

(The film’s director, Gary Yates, worked with her before in the TV movie Maneater opposite Gary Busey. The actress recalls how Yates skillfully directed the unpredictable and volatile Busey.)

From this, we can infer it’s a wonderful time to be Stephenson Kerr, 54, an in-demand actor with an impressive resumé, owing to her work on a diverse roster of movies, such as Capote(opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman), The Big White (with Robin Williams and Holly Hunter), and My Awkward Sexual Adventure with Jonas Chernick.

“I’ve got this great demo reel with all these movie stars,” she says, not boastfully but truthfully.

The latest notch in her CV is a role in the locally shot horror series Channel Zero: Candle Cove, which premières Oct. 18, on Showcase.

Before the show’s debut, she is secretive, but reveals she plays a schoolteacher and shared many scenes with the great Irish actress Fiona Shaw (herself an accomplished stage actor best known these days as Harry Potter’s shrewish Aunt Petunia).

If she hit it off with Shaw, it may have something to do with their shared skills in theatre.

Compared with actors who work exclusively in motion pictures, theatre actors tend to be a breed apart.

“One day, I had to do a nine-page scene and when television and film actors see that, they usually say, ‘Whoa, you’ve got all these pages of dialogue!’

“You don’t want to hear that, but then I realized: They’re just not used to doing that,” Stephenson Kerr says. “We do that all the time. They’re used to doing snippets that they don’t even memorize. They rehearse, then refresh and then they do it very naturally (on camera), where I’m used to drilling it and drilling it and drilling it, so I know where every punctuation is.”

Stephenson Kerr’s comfort zone is in the bigger, emotionally full-blooded roles she plays in the same way she prefers to attack a Beethoven piece on the piano, with thundering feeling.

In that respect, Bernice Trimble is something of a departure for her. She says the emotional heavy lifting of the play is done by Robyn Slade, who plays Bernice’s distraught daughter Iris.

“While it’s called Bernice Trimble, it’s really about Iris Trimble,” she says. “She carries the weight of the show and she’s your guide.

“Bernice gets her situation and she knows what she’s going to do and she’s at peace. Robyn is the one who has to go through all the emotional conflict.

“She has the conflict and she has the crisis,” she adds, allowing that Bernice does have her own character journey in the drama by Edmonton playwright Beth Graham.

“This is a woman preparing for the end of life and knowing absolutely it’s coming and how she can do it with grace, including her family, with kindness and with dignity,” she says. “Things are thrown in her path and it doesn’t go the way she planned and she has to deal with that.

“It’s a nice role for me because it’s very contained… so it’s a challenge that way.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing