(long) haul

What actor Paul Gross loves about Stratford

Wild Hog Country Market

“I am a carnivore. I love cooking, and I love dead animals (but not in an RFK Jr. way). The meat at Wild Hog is fabulous. I’ll load up my cart with all sorts of unbelievable steaks, chucks, ribs—you name it—and fresh produce before heading out of town to my place in Cobourg with my wife, Martha. They also have a good café—not that I need any more coffee after pounding back-to-back cups at 5 a.m.” 2785 Line 34, Perth East, wildhog.ca

T. J. Dolan Trail

“I have a terrier—or terror­er, as I like to say—who always needs to go out. He’s indefatigable. A few years ago, I started a habit of running my lines while dragging him around the picturesque T. J. Dolan Trail that winds around Lake Victoria and through a graveyard. At the time, I was growing my hair and beard out for King Lear, and I looked insane, yelling at a dog in iambic pentameter. Hikers would stare at me. They still do, even though the lines for Godot are more decipherable. I don’t stop to do much explaining.” Entrance located off John St. N.

What actor Paul Gross loves about Stratford

Fanfare Books

“I’m so glad people have continued supporting independent bookstores even in the age of Amazon—they’re too special to lose. Fanfare Books is almost 60 years old. It has creaky wooden floors, and the atmosphere is wonderful. No one bothers you while you’re browsing, but the staff are quick with a recommendation if you ask for one. It’s the kind of place where I could end up sitting in an armchair and leafing through a whole book. They have lots of plays and books on the craft of acting, but I read more fiction. I recently picked up Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent on a staff member’s suggestion and loved it.” 92 Ontario St., Stratford, fanfarebooks.ca

Canadian Tire

“Canadian Tire is the world’s all-time greatest store. It has some sort of ESP that knows how to make me compulsively buy stuff. I go in for two things and walk out having spent $200. I used to use a little handheld basket, but now I know myself: I need the big cart. My dad had a one-piece snowsuit from there that he called his bunny suit. I inherited it, and I still wear it every winter. I’m sad the fake money is disappearing, but that’s okay. I’m learning to accept change.” 1093 Ontario St., Stratford, canadiantire.ca

Gallery Stratford

Rookie Blue producer Tassie Cameron will receive the Margaret Collier Award for a written body of work in TV, GlassBOX founder Jeffrey Elliott will claim the Digital Media Trailblazing Award and Landsberg will be honoured for his humanitarian work.

Bienstock, most recently behind the Emmy-nominated film Tales from the Organ Trade, will be given the Gordon Sinclair Award for broadcast journalism, while Montreal-born CBC fixture George Anthony will receive the Academy Board of Directors’ Tribute.

The special awards will be handed out during Canadian Screen Week, Feb. 23-March 1.

The inaugural Canadian Screen Awards were handed out in Toronto during two industry nights on Wednesday, February 27 and Thursday, February 28, and during a live telecast from the Sony Centre on Sunday, March 3.

List of winners in Performance Categories:

Best Performance in a Guest Role, Dramatic Series

It’s been 23 years since Gross was on stage in Stratford. In 2000, the Due South star played the lead in Hamlet.

His career spans 45 years in television, film and on stage.

In an interview with CTV on Tuesday, Gross said being back in Stratford is a special feeling.

"This is one of the great theatre companies in the world, certainly the largest and most important theatre company in North America,” Gross said. “The whole staff, all of the acting company, the directing staff the research staff, there are a lot of people here and they are all at the top of their profession, so to come here you are really in good hands.”

King Lear is known to some as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. It’s a story of an aging king who divides his power and land between his daughters, and the havoc that ensues as a result.

On June 22, Provocation Ideas will present Illuminating Passion, a high-energy benefit evening at Revival House. That night, acclaimed artists and community voices will show off their unexpected creative talents, offering audiences a rare glimpse into their lives beyond the spotlight. 

Set to hit the stage that night are Paul Gross, David Keeley, Marcus Nance, Laura Condlin, Ann Baggley, Lucinda Jones and several others. The event will be hosted by multi-Gemini Award-winning actress Sheila McCarthy and local wedding officiant Chris Blake.

“Through live performances that defy expectations, audiences will experience artists who, through choice or circumstance, have developed alternative talents beyond their mainstay vocations,” festival officials said in a media release.

Along with the performance, this fundraising evening will feature a live auction of one-of-a-kind experiences, including Stratford cultural packages, and offerings from local businesses and artists. Proceeds from the night will help fund future Provocation Ideas Festival programming.

“This is an evening about artistic risk and discovery,” said the producer of Illuminating Passion, Don Shipley. 

“We’re inviting performers, and audiences, into a space where the unexpected can happen. It’s about revealing the creative impulses that often remain hidden, and celebrating the courage it takes to share them,” Shipley added.

Illuminating Passion is about the joy of creative reinvention, said the festival’s founding director, Mark Rosenfeld.

“It’s also a vital fundraiser that helps us continue to present bold, accessible programming, creating a public space where ideas, art and community come together in meaningful ways,” Rosenfeld added.

The performances and auction run from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m, with doors opening at 4:30 p.m. Dinner will be available for purchase from the Revival House starting at 5 p.m. Tickets for the event are $75 and can be purchased online at zeffy.com.

“It’s nice in here,” he says, walking into the rear lobby and setting up a table where we can sit. “I come in here to write on breaks sometimes.”

That is, also, about what you’d expect. Though he’s spent the last month far away from the Newfoundland setting of Republic of Doyle, tucked into a small rehearsal hall on the other side of the courtyard, he is never really that far away from it. Distance is not actually a luxury that the star/showrunner/head writer/executive producer of a television show can afford.

If it is a problem, though, it is a problem that Hawco has spent most of his life trying very hard to have. And it is a problem that, in his estimation, he owes to the people he has spent the last month working with, the creative team that Company Theatre has put together for its latest show, Belleville.

“Whistle in the Dark, that show, it changed my life,” he says, referring to Company’s inaugural production. “Truly. Without that, there’s no Company, there’s no Doyle, we’re not sitting here.

“Changed my life.”

At the very least, it seems unlikely that Hawco would have been anything but an actor. The outskirts of St. John’s are not typically regarded as a hotbed of stage and screen talent in this country, but it followed him through his youth there. The first play he ever saw was a children’s production of Hansel and Gretel — starring Daniel MacIvor (albeit before either of them knew who he was, as Hawco puts it). He got guff from his elementary school nuns for trying to freelance direct a school play when he was eight or nine. The desire was evident enough that, when he took the responsible route and enrolled in business classes at college, his sister called to ask what was wrong with him.

“That’s an obscure call to get,” Hawco admits with a smile, traces of Newfoundland inflecting into his speech. “Of course I was failing it anyway, so it’s not like I had an option.”

His next educational institution was a much better fit: National Theatre School in Montreal. From here it was dominoes: a safe environment in which to experiment and grow, auditions, work for small companies, work for touring companies, work for large companies in Toronto.

But something about being a working actor wasn’t sitting right. It was better than business school, but it was not what Hawco wanted it to be, not what he thought it should be. The rhythm of putting a play together — talking about what it was supposed to be, trying to capture the perfect expression of that, then trying to replicate that expression night after night — felt like the opposite of what he thought acting should be.

Phil Riccio, who met Hawco around that time doing a play in Montreal, felt the same way.

“We were bitter, but not in the classic sense,” Riccio says, sitting in that same lobby a few days later. “We were working, we had good roles, but those weren’t fulfilling in the way we thought they would be. For me, I was working professionally, and I felt like I was getting worse as an actor. I could see patterns forming. You get cast as the person who people see you as, so you just start playing that: ‘This is my bag of tricks, this is what people want from me.'”

“The bag of tricks, that questions paralyzes me, almost,” Hawco explains. “Why are you doing this job if you’re just going out there to do that?”

The answer, it seems to Hawco, is fear — specifically, fear of failure. If that’s an easy thing to dismiss from an academic remove, though, it can be almost paralyzing when you’re actually up onstage. Especially when you’re onstage in front of dozens or hundreds of people who have paid good money. If you have something that you know works — whether that’s a reaction in a specific scene or a persona that you know will get you another gig — why take the chance of trying something that might not?

Well, for one, because it’s making you miserable not to.

“I think for a long time I was just in a bad mood all the time, and I tried to figure out why,” Hawco says. “And I knew I couldn’t just spend the rest of my life thinking about how I thought it should be done. I had to take a shot or shut up.”

As Riccio explains, Hawco is not one for half-measures: that shot was going to be from a cannon. They settled on A Whistle in the Dark, which they had found while working together on an another Irish play in Montreal, and Hawco would not be dissuaded: “Allan is such a go-big-or-go-home kind of guy. Most companies will start with a Fringe show, or something, but he was, ‘No. Full on.’ The play has eight actors. Established companies don’t do plays with eight actors, and that’s how we were starting.”

One of my jobs now is creating ideas from nothing. Which is crazy around regular people

They spent a year getting together funding. They booked the Berkley theatre, and called in favours from artists they had worked with. They got director Jason Byrne because he was the first person to actually call them back. But, most importantly, they baked that ethos of “take a shot or shut up” right into the company’s ethos: they were going to do this play differently, ensure that no one was able to fall back on their tricks.

To that end, Byrne was a stroke of pure luck: restless and clever, he was equally tired of the standard rehearsal process, and found in Hawco and the Company a troupe of actors who were willing to try things a different way — every time. Rather than talking about the play and deciding on an idea of what it should be, he has his actors dive right into it, trying different takes, reactions and attitudes each time.

In a rehearsal I watched for Belleville, for instance, Hawco ran through the same scene, first with a kind of withdrawn stiffness, then with an almost cheery friendliness, then with a sort of forced politeness, like he was trying to keep a darkness at bay. Not one of the run-throughs even looked the same — he wandered freely around the stage, sometimes delicately touching co-star Christine Horne, sometimes withdrawn to the opposite corner — and some seemed almost antithetical to how the play reads. But each also had a certain life, a way of melting the stage and the other seats and the techs and Byrne’s occasional quips into nothing — of making you forget you were in a theatre, as the old critic’s line goes.

Both Byrne and Hawco admit that this kind of process is fraught with risk: that by never doing things the same way twice, even when the audience is watching, you’re opening yourself up to doing something that doesn’t work. But audiences obviously respond to the liveliness of the process: A Whistle in the Dark is landmark in Toronto’s theatre history. Our own critic, Robert Cushman, called it “A masterpiece production of a masterpiece play” — it left enough of an impression that just last week he referenced the show as “one of the great events of Toronto’s last decade.”

For Hawco, it was proof of what taking chances can bring, that you don’t necessarily need to have things figured out, but that you can’t hold yourself back from trying something, onstage or off.

“One of my jobs now is creating ideas from nothing. Which is crazy around regular people. Everyone you talk to, when you bring them an idea, they’ll go, ‘That’ll never work.’ I think it’s their default,” he explains. “But focusing on how things aren’t possible is death to ideas. Focusing on the no is where good ideas go to die. Our currency is chaos. That’s our job, is to embrace it.”

“You know, his idea for Doyle, he told me it, and it was just ‘It’s a father-son PI show in Newfoundland.’ That was it,” Riccio explained as we were wrapping up our conversation. “I was kind of like, ‘I think you have to flesh it out a bit more.’ ”