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101 Plays1 year ago
Mark and Joe are joined by the Canadian actor, director, producer and playwright, Saul Rubinek.
They have a wide-ranging and educational conversation that they launch with the question: "Who was your favorite playwright." Saul answers Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, whom he believes (along with many others) wrote all of Shakespeare's plays.
"Even some of the most renowned academics have trouble accepting the evidence," he says.
He's done a one-man version of Merchant of Venice, and in the process researched the question; he's a proponent of the idea.
Then the conversation moves into a discussion of an opportunity Saul had to play a Hasidic rabbi in a little village in 1941 Ukraine, called Shttl. (The Yiddish word for "village.") It was a project that deeply connected him to his own family's history.
Not to be missed!
For more info on this episode, please visit the show notes.
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Mark A. Rayner.
Contact us at: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Greetings
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Hello, Joe, you magnificent bastard. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. I was saving that for a special occasion. And this is a special occasion, yeah. It
Favorite Playwrights Discussion
00:00:19
Speaker
is. So my question for this week is, do you have a favorite playwright? I do, actually. Yes. It's a fellow who worked for the CBC, CBC Radio. Our guest today might actually even know him. His name is Dave Carley.
00:00:36
Speaker
And he was a story editor with CBC Radio. He worked on some of my stuff. He worked on everybody's stuff. And he writes tons of plays, which I've seen and they're fabulous. And you can see his stuff all over Ontario, Canada. He would be my favorite.
Shakespeare Authorship Debate
00:00:51
Speaker
How about you? I feel badly that I don't have Canadian content for this, but it really is my favorite. So I got to be honest. Tom Stoppard. Oh, of course. Yeah. You know, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Travis Dees, that guy. I love his play.
00:01:06
Speaker
Good choice. And what about our guest? Yeah. I thought our guest might have an answer to this question. Yeah. Saul Rubinek. Welcome to our podcast. Thank you. You want to know who my favorite playwright is? Well, if you have one, I mean, you might have too many that you can name. So we want to know many things, but we'll start with that. I like, uh, I would say.
00:01:24
Speaker
that my favorite playwright, I just want to make sure I pronounced this correctly, would be Edward Devere. He was the 17th Earl of Oxford and he wrote these wonderful plays that you may have seen, including Hamlet,
00:01:39
Speaker
King Lear, Measure for Measure, a number of plays. He's otherwise known by the Shakespeare Industrial Complex as an illiterate merchant by the name of William Shakespeare who could barely sign his own name.
00:01:56
Speaker
who nobody came to his funeral, and whose children weren't taught to read and write. But Edward de Vere, yeah, I think his plays are wonderful. And your people who are listening can say, what is he involved in? I've done a lot of research on this. There are many people who doubt, certainly there's a lot of reasonable doubt about whether or not somebody called William Shakespeare wrote any of this shit. A lot of reasonable doubt. The trouble is that billions of dollars are being made on Shakespeare's name.
00:02:26
Speaker
And so, whereas there are, you know, there are master's degree and PhDs in many universities that have to do with authorship, whether or not it's a painting's authorship or a novel's authorship, and you can get a doctorate in this category. It's considered something not short of heresy, if not, you know, blasphemy, or you're some kind of conspiracy nut to have a thought
00:02:49
Speaker
that maybe this guy didn't write this shit. But there is a preponderance of evidence that certainly shows reasonable doubt. And Edward De Vere since the beginning of the 20th century, anyway, was one of the most likely candidates. So he's, yeah, my favorite playwright. Okay, so not Francis Bacon then.
00:03:10
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of reasons for it. People thought it was if you really investigated this and you don't want to take up our time talking about Shakespeare and whether or not he wrote this stuff. But there are other candidates and there have been over the last 150, 200 years. But Bacon
00:03:27
Speaker
There is some evidence, but very little. Most of it is Devere. And if you actually look it up and you look at the Devere society and you look up what it's about, you'll go, how could it not be? The most educated man of his time, his family owned a theater. And in fact, pseudonyms were common in those days, certainly hyphenated
00:03:49
Speaker
pseudonyms
Understanding Authors and Their Works
00:03:50
Speaker
and in order to not be ostracized or at least communicated from British society including all his ancestors you couldn't be seen to write a play for money you could support a group of players and you could sponsor them but you could not it was probably a well-known fact that he you know had written them as plausible deniability but if you think about it you know the truth is that there were I don't know if you're aware of this you know the population of
00:04:17
Speaker
London was a little less than the population of Ottawa when I was growing up there. So it was less than 200,000 people, of which maybe 200 of them, if that, maybe 250 of them could read and write. You're dealing with that particular family. So that's interesting. You guys can look that up and to your heart's content. So you're not being the least bit tongue in cheek about this. No. This is something that you subscribe to.
00:04:43
Speaker
I subscribe to Reasonable Doubt. I certainly subscribe to Reasonable Doubt. And over the last few years, when this thought occurred to me and I read other people, including Mark Rylance, probably the most famous of all actors doing Shakespeare today and his doubts about this and what he's written about it and other books about it. And then I went into a really interesting deep dive and spoke to many people, including some of the most prominent
00:05:10
Speaker
of scholars, and then I realized, of course, it's doubtful that Shakespeare wrote any of this stuff. And what you're dealing with is a mammoth complex of money that is hilariously incapable of accepting any reasonable doubt in this area, which is ridiculous. Of course, there's reasonable doubt. But their defensiveness speaks volumes about this. Even some of the most renowned academics in this area, their defensiveness, because their reputations have been made,
00:05:40
Speaker
about this. If you look at any life in Shakespeare, of course, it's filled with we imagine or we surmise or what could have been, they don't know anything about this guy's life, except that he signed his name three times badly, that he had a statue of himself built in Stratford, which was originally cotton merchant, but later on in the 18th century when he was considered to be a playwright, they changed it for Penn and Quill.
00:06:00
Speaker
that nobody came to his funeral when everybody else, you know, huge playwrights, much less renowned than his works, you know, the entire town came out for. He was unsung,
Upcoming Projects and Personal History
00:06:11
Speaker
and there's a lot of evidence that it was other people, if not a group of other people, and probably more than one, because people did that kind of thing.
00:06:19
Speaker
Anyway, let's let's. Mark, did you expect this answer? I am. I'm so I so love this answer because I might might fear my degree wasn't my undergrad degrees in theater. So I'm like, I love this because Christopher Marlowe was always always kicked around as another possible candidate as well. Marlowe was way too young to do this. And he died in 15. He died in 1593 ish and probably murdered by
00:06:44
Speaker
because of his heresy and because he considered it, he actually said out loud that he was an atheist plus the fact that he was gay openly. And he was murdered under very, or killed under very suspicious circumstances, very unlikely that it was Marlow.
00:06:59
Speaker
It's a very fascinating subject. I'm really interested. I'm going to be doing a version of Shylock in Toronto a year from now, which I can't talk too much about because it hasn't been officially announced. I'm not really doing Merchant of Venice, but it's a one-man show about Shylock. I've investigated who wrote that and why it was written.
00:07:19
Speaker
Edward de Vere lived in Venice. There's no record of Shakespeare ever having left England. But de Vere lived in Venice right next to the ghetto when he was 25 years old and knew the character that it was based on. Shout-out group based on it. Gasper Rivera, who was a very, very well-known convert to Christianity after a famous trial. Probably that story never made it across to England. But certainly de Vere would have known about it. But along with the fact that he was, you know,
00:07:44
Speaker
highly educated and could read Latin and Greek and French and Hebrew. You know, they believe it's snobbery, that those of us who think that it is unlikely to have been this Dutch expert isn't because they say, well, we are snobs because we don't believe genius can come out of the common people. Of course genius comes out of common people, but you can't do it without education.
00:08:06
Speaker
You can have the potential for creating this work, but unless you're educated, you're not going to get anywhere no matter what kind of potential genius you are. So it's not snobbery. Of course, most, many of the people who believe this come from very humble backgrounds, these academics and actors and different quite renowned people, including Mark Twain and Orson Welles and many people in the past who doubted the veracity of Shakespeare having written this stuff. But it's a fascinating thing because we need to talk about
00:08:35
Speaker
why does it matter? Why does it matter? You go see a play or you go see a movie, you really need to know the background of the author or why does it matter if you either like it or it matters to you or not? Well, it does matter. It does matter when you know about the life of Mozart and you know what he went through as a child prodigy and what his father put into it. It does matter. It matters certainly to the people who are interpreting the work in the orchestra or
00:08:59
Speaker
And as the case may be, people are interpreting the work as directors or actors or it matters the life of a of the artist and what they were up to matters. Does it matter, you know, when you look at, you know, poets, some of whom were
00:09:15
Speaker
egregiously antisemitic or difficult or went mad or whatever. Does it matter? Their poetry still may be extraordinary. Yes, it matters, not so that we can cancel them or say they're not worth it, but it's important to understand what human beings have created and why they've created it as part of the human experience. And that's why there are degrees in this and why people study it. So it matters to me. I've read the life of Edward De Bier. It matches very much
00:09:40
Speaker
what those plays are about in terms of his life. And it's fascinating, of course, you know, I mean, all of it, all of his life is fascinating, including the eventual publishing in 1621 of most of his plays, oddly published by Devere's daughter, who had for some reason had them.
00:09:57
Speaker
Is that where the front folio came from? I didn't know that. Where all those folios in 1621, after his death, it was Naveer's daughter who had been published, probably because there was rumour that there might be a Catholic king. There wasn't, but there might have been. And if his plays were discovered, they would have been destroyed because they were so anti-Catholic, because you know, and are so geared away from Catholicism in order to
00:10:25
Speaker
you know survive however they would have been banned by an Elizabethan court. Okay now we need to talk about whether Harper Lee wrote Kill a Mockingbird or was it Truman Capote? Well do you know that Harper Lee's book is, well anyway that's a whole other, you wanted to know what I wanted to talk about. Yeah what do you want to talk about? I mean off to a great start. Yeah well this is controversial in 2020
00:10:49
Speaker
Six months before the invasion by Russia, I was in Ukraine. I was offered the opportunity to play a role in a film that took, it was going to be a black and white film. It was going to be a single shot film. The whole film looks like it's a single shot. It's one day in the life of a village, a Yiddish, a little Jewish village in 1941 in Ukraine.
00:11:07
Speaker
bordering Russia. And it was called, the film's called Stetl, S-H-T-T-L. It was the winner a year ago of the Realm Film Festival Audience Award, and it played at the Jewish Film Festival in Toronto last June, and New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, and many festivals around the world. It's gonna be opening in Toronto and Los Angeles and New York, I think in February. This is what I look like in this film.
00:11:35
Speaker
So I play a Cassitic rabbi of this little village. Stetl is the Yiddish word for village. So I'm very happy about that. But it also coincided with something else that was going on in my life that I could talk about. You asked me to talk about one of my projects. So many years ago, you know, I'm the child of Holocaust survivors. My parents survived together, hidden for two and a half years by Polish farmers. And in 1986, together in co-production with the CBC, I went to Poland.
00:12:05
Speaker
with a small three, four person crew. It was still communist Poland. And we shot a documentary film less than an hour long called So Many Miracles. And that film is about the reunion with my parents and the Polish farmers that had hidden them 40 years earlier.
00:12:21
Speaker
And I wrote a book around that time that was published by Penguin, called So Many Miracles, which was a result of almost 10 years of interviews that I'd had with my parents about their lives before, during, and after the war. And I did all that before my parents passed, my dad in 96 and my mom in 2000. And about five years ago, four or five years ago, a very good friend of mine, a playwright, Emmy award-winning
00:12:45
Speaker
writer who I'd known for 25 years said to me, I don't think you're done with this subject. And after cursing him for a while, I said, I've done this documentary film, I wrote a book and
00:12:55
Speaker
And he said, well, you've talked about everybody but yourself. You're also your daughter. There's a whole issue about when you introduce this subject of genocide and what happened to her, that side of her family, because the other side of my wife's family is all Celtic, Scottish, Irish. But to bring up genocide and what happened in the Holocaust, you and your wife decided to wait till she was 13. You introduced the subject to her classroom, at which point right around then you discovered that her best friend
00:13:25
Speaker
her elementary school was the great granddaughter of an SS captain. And so the idea of introducing a subject like this to the school at that time, the documentary film, which is not filled with horrific stuff, because it's not about concentration camp, it's about, you know, how people
00:13:43
Speaker
were very brave and saved my parents' lives, these Polish Catholic farmers. So it was a way to introduce with the schools and the parents' cooperation children to the subject because they felt that at the age of 13, children can begin to contextualize their own experience with consequences and begin to place themselves in history and begin to understand the subject as difficult as that.
00:14:06
Speaker
And I didn't want to do it at first because I didn't like the idea in those days of, so to speak, Holocaust education. Not because I didn't believe the world should know about what happened to my people in Eastern Europe, but because I felt it's possible that it could exclusive the experience in the sense that I wanted to relate it to all of human experience.
00:14:29
Speaker
other Holocaust, whether it was to the Métis or Native people or the Black experience or Armenians or Rwandans or whatever the experience was. We've barely gone a day in the life of human history without some form of genocide. So the school agreed to do this as part of
00:14:47
Speaker
a way of inspiring the students, 13, 14 years old, to investigate their own personal history. And then in a week or so, share that experience with the class. Well, we were knocked for a loop when we found out my daughter's best friend was the great-granddaughter of an SS officer. How are you going to do that if her mother had never told her? And how are we going to inspire her to investigate her own background? So anyway, he talked about, my friend, the playwright said, you know, and you haven't really talked about your own experiences, never mind what happened with your daughter.
00:15:14
Speaker
But how it came to be that you wrote this book and how it came to be you did this documentary because he knew that it was all based on lies and deception of me trying to figure out a way to get back with my parents who weren't so happy about me being with a non-Jewish woman. And so I lied about there being a documentary. I lied about there being a book. And there was no book and there was no documentary. I mean, I lied about everything. And it was a way for me to get together with them and have interviews.
00:15:41
Speaker
I lied to every, I lied to my girlfriend about the book. I lied to everybody about it because I was embarrassed about my parents horrific reaction, even though they weren't religious particularly. So he said there's a great story there, very funny in retrospect in school that will relate to other people. So I started writing this play after cursing him for a while. And I started writing, I kind of had too many stories. I'd grown up with all these stories. Eventually it took a while, like almost three and a half, four years.
00:16:09
Speaker
Before I knew what it was about, I knew how to narrow it down and I called the play all in the telling and I found
00:16:19
Speaker
a producer for it. Corey Ross, who is from Toronto, who is one of Canada's very few commercial theatre producers, who most recently, in the last three years, is responsible for the worldwide Van Gogh immersive exhibits. And he loved the play and worked at the moment trying to raise money to put on a commercial production of this starting in Toronto.
00:16:40
Speaker
Sometime in the near future and then try to take it to the rest of the world so that we are fundraising for that from the telling and that's been occupying me as well as Writing and adapting it into a feature film and finding a really wonderful Canadian producer
00:16:57
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to stop you there because I want to unpack some of this because you kind of raced through some of that, much of which was very intriguing. Like the business about talking to your parents, manufacturing a story about a book and a documentary. I thought there really was a book and a documentary. Yeah, it all happened.
00:17:15
Speaker
Yeah, so where do the lies come in? Well, the lies started because I couldn't get along with my parents, and I was embarrassed to tell my girlfriend
Creating Documentaries and Plays
00:17:24
Speaker
and my friends in the theater community that my parents' reaction was biblical about me living with a non-Jewish woman. And so I lied to my girlfriend saying that they were fine about it. And in order to figure out a way to get back to my parents and have some relationship to them, they were living in Ottawa. I was in Toronto as a young actor. I said that there was a book.
00:17:42
Speaker
that people, I was starting to get known in television in the late 70s in Toronto, and I said people are interested in me writing a book about their wartime experiences, and they kind of were like, well, they're already told the story of the diary of Anne Frank. And I said, well, this is not that. And I said, who is the publisher?
00:18:02
Speaker
just looked at the nearest bookshelf and said penguin. And oh, that's a big, that's a big publisher. What my parents couldn't really deny me anything, even though I was mindingly and informally excommunicated from the family. Not really, but I couldn't call without weeping and my father hanging up on me. They said they could never deny me anything when it came to my career.
00:18:23
Speaker
So you were not exactly estranged but you were but there was yeah, so Given the fact that I was gonna make money from penguin and this was a big deal in my career I was able to travel to Ottawa and start writing a book course I didn't tell my girlfriend or my friends that penguin was publishing it because they would have seen through that as bullshit immediately, but my parents believed it and I Spent, you know three four or five times a year traveling to Ottawa interviewing them. Luckily there was tape in the cassette recorder and
00:18:50
Speaker
Eventually, what I didn't know what would happen, this is all part of the play that I wrote, I'll dramatize, is that my girlfriend would say, and I should have seen this coming, can I read some of it?
00:19:02
Speaker
Well that was a fucking nightmare because now I had to fucking write the fucking thing. So I had an issue before computers so I was on a typewriter to begin with. Anyway, eventually I had an early 1983 Mac but before that it was a typewriter and headphones and a cassette recorder and I started typing this shit up and I realized I'd heard these stories all my life and so they went in one ear and out the other and
00:19:25
Speaker
when I was with my mom and dad. I suppose underneath it I was really trying to find out in my own unconscious, subconscious way why they had this reaction to me being with a non-Jewish woman. I really wanted to get to the bottom of that somehow. Not that I knew that consciously at the time. But any case, I couldn't really write it because it was filled with repetitions and tangents and I actually had to rewrite their voices. And because I'd been in theater all my life, I knew how to do that. And then I actually, the epiphany was that I actually wrote the thing.
00:19:54
Speaker
And the rise became reality. The rise became the truth and eventually Penguin fucking published it. That is a hell of a Babe Ruth moment. That's a cult shot out of the ages, man. I'm going to have this bubble.
00:20:07
Speaker
It's a great story and very funny. And the plays, I've had several readings of it with wonderful actors and I've had wonderful reactions to it. It's very difficult to get a production on of it in a regular theater, although it's still possible. We're trying to find a way to do it commercially. So that's been occupying me. And in a way, I was inspired by the fact that this film I did in Ukraine called Stelll is in Yiddish. And my dad was in Yiddish theater before Hitler put his hand to that.
00:20:34
Speaker
And I, you know, he stopped doing all that, but I had never performed in Yiddish. And it was my first language when I was an immigrant kid in Montreal in the 50s. I spoke Yiddish and French before I spoke English, because the street was a working class French-Canadian street filled with that kind of patois, which was called Joao. And Yiddish and immigrants, recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. And so I spoke a kind of mixture of Yiddish and French. And then we moved to Ottawa when I was six and I started to speak English.
00:21:04
Speaker
and then ended up in a theater school when I was seven years old at the Ottawa Little Theater and I never kind of never left. But I had never acted in unison and I was given this opportunity and it was an extraordinarily inspiring thing and kind of, you know, done instead of for my father. And I think it helped me write the play because I realized that
00:21:31
Speaker
You know, my life is a storyteller. Journalists, historians can tell you stories about millions of people.
00:21:43
Speaker
But I know how to tell stories about very few people, in this case, my family, and I don't change any names in the piece. And I feel my story has universality to it, whether, you know, parents and children. I mean, the logline of the play, all I'm telling is it's a play for people who've had parents.
00:22:04
Speaker
That's great. So that's what it is. I think it relates to a lot of people whose parents wanted their children to go a certain way and the children tried to go another way and there's difficulties no matter what race culture you come from. Can I ask you a few further questions about that? And Mark, you know, jump in a few because I know you probably got a bunch of questions. I just hear such a good story. I'm just kind of sitting here and soaking it all in. Yeah. But okay. So what happened to the non-Jewish girlfriend?
00:22:34
Speaker
There were, in the play, I put them into one character because after certain readings, everybody said, this is very confusing. So I was with one woman at first. We parted amicably before I had children or money. And we're still in touch with each other. And then in 1988, by that time, my parents had already accepted and I'd already written the book and I'd already made the documentary.
00:22:57
Speaker
thirty-five years ago i met elenora and we're still together she's in the other room and our children are twenty-eight my son's a writer and my daughter's a political activist and an actress and um she's 32 and so we're we're we've been together for a long time my parents it kind of all went away once there were children so yeah that was my next question see you became no longer
00:23:20
Speaker
You know, they they they I would threaten them with writing another book, you know But no by the time there was a documentary film my first wife and I were already splitting up but they eventually had to accept it and Luckily, you know, I had had all these interviews and I did come to some understanding of why their reaction was this, you know Yeah, that was my question. Yeah the way I relate to this
00:23:47
Speaker
other people will relate to it. I mean, one of the ways to live is very funny, the play is very funny, but it also has in it, you know, great traumatic events. And in many ways, it's about intergenerational trauma, which is an experience that what I told the class of 14-year-olds
00:24:08
Speaker
I remember kind of a moment of a Tiffany when I see this documentary film, which is really cool and very emotional, you know, of this reunion, which my parents and the farmers who hit them, who did an extraordinary act of bravery. And I look at these 14-year-old faces, 13, 14-year-old faces. Well, who thinks that my family history is kind of more dramatic than theirs? You know, 30 hands go up in the air. And I say, well, I don't think it's true.
00:24:36
Speaker
that it is. I really believe, and this is part of the impetus to help inspire them to investigate their own backgrounds. I said what I believe is that in your own family background, there is murder and suicide and saving people's lives at the last minute. There are victims and there are perpetrators.
00:24:59
Speaker
There are bystanders, there are cowards, and there are heroes, and sometimes all of those things in the same day. And they are in your own family history as dramatic as any novel ever written.
00:25:14
Speaker
If you ask the right people the right questions, and before you do that, you have to want to ask the questions. Where do I come from? Why am I living in this city? How did you meet? And you begin to understand something about your family's history. And if you are lucky enough to have a grandfather still alive, or an aunt or an uncle, or somebody who is old enough and still got
00:25:41
Speaker
you know, the wherewithal
Impact of Historical Events
00:25:42
Speaker
to be able to tell you these stories, you find out that you have a common humanity with all races and cultures. There was one young girl who put up her hand after first hearing the word genocide, which had never been introduced in this group of children. And after it had been introduced, she put up her hand and said, well, we all did this after a week of the sharing stories of the family backgrounds. She said, if everybody did this, wouldn't genocide be impossible? Which was a very innocent, naive and moving question.
00:26:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I have a question just because I just I just want to know how because I love that sense of curiosity that that like understanding like being curious about other people and in this case your own family's history. How do you how do you think we can foster that amongst our kids? I think it's part of it is education and it all comes down to how we raise our kids and what kind of schools we're in.
00:26:40
Speaker
And whether so little money is given towards music, literature, now it's all about, much of it is about getting ahead in the world. And the fear is fear-based, much of public education, fear-based, fear of the parents' fears, that their children aren't going to make it or succeed in life. And it's all about that. Much of it is about that. And I don't know how you inspire it except to bring your children to
00:27:06
Speaker
the stories, you know, to bring them to theatre and have them read novels and bring them to movies that are something beyond superheroes and have family discussions about this thing. Of course, you have to live in a society, we have to be lucky enough to live in a society that's not engaged in day-to-day survival, feeding them, not being killed or bombed or
00:27:33
Speaker
And I think, you know, we're living in a world, there used to be a line in my play, which is not a little off topic of what you just asked me. But we're living in a very, you know, fractured world. Maybe we always have been. Only in our times we feel more fractured than any other. But we're living in a difficult, fractured world. And I, there used to be a line in the play, I took it out because it was a bit too on the nose. And it was, if you believed
00:28:03
Speaker
that your Holocaust is more profound than anybody else's, then it might give you a reason to drive a plane into a building. And I believe that telling our stories, art, painting, sculpture, music, dance, theater,
00:28:33
Speaker
cinema allows us to express our common humanity and how we can join hands. I think it's always been the case at the same time as there's been people who want to divide us and hate the otherness in others and worry and fear for their survival of the white race or the Christian race or the Jewish race or the Islamic race or whatever. The fear brings
00:29:03
Speaker
brings this violence. I'm struck by how events reverberate down centuries and millennia. I've been listening to the history of Rome and I just got past the section about Emperor Hadrian and what he did in Judea, which arguably is still reverberating today in Israel. And I wonder about what's going on now
00:29:31
Speaker
Will it still be reverberating 2000 years from now? You know, I hesitate to speak about current events because you can be taken out of context easily. And I am worried about that. And I'm going to shy away from talking about the events in Israel, which are very difficult and complex. But what you're saying is, I hope that, was it Martin Luther King who said, the Ark
00:30:00
Speaker
of the universe bends towards justice. And I hope that that's true. I hope that it bends towards us being brothers and sisters, you know, and that we recognize in each other, each other.
00:30:19
Speaker
I'm going to take it then to a little bit safer ground and you've already touched upon this, the importance of family. And I know how important family is to you. You said to me one time that you could never time travel past the birth of your children because that would effectively make your children go away. Well, no, you could, if there was time travel, the point about that story, it's a joke. It's a trick. It's like this question. I used to, it's a game you can play with your friends and family and the game goes like this. I have a magic wand.
00:30:48
Speaker
But you have to believe I have this magic, or the game is useless if you don't believe I have this one. And I can send you back in time for half an hour to any time in your own life. And you can say whenever you want to yourself. And the question you ask the group at the party, the drunker the better, is,
00:31:09
Speaker
When would you go to and what would you say? So inevitably it's about, this is a road I took in my life that I wish I hadn't gone on. It's a game about regret in many ways. And it's a way of looking at regret. And what I said to you years ago was the trick to this is if you go back before the inception of your oldest child, that child won't be born.
00:31:40
Speaker
because you will have changed everything, because the moment of conception is unique. That instant, the fertilization of that egg is a unique moment in time, otherwise a different egg, different sperm, whatever. So unless you don't want your children, don't go further back than that. You may have regrets, but you really don't want to go further back. Yeah, yeah. There's a wonderful movie about that, actually.
00:32:05
Speaker
Which one is that? It's the one with Donald Gleason and Bill Nighy. Oh yeah, it's about time. That's a fantastic movie. And there's a wonderful scene because I think that's what he chooses. He chooses to go back to talk to his father, I think just after his children have been born, but before his father passed. It's just, it's beautifully acted. It's beautifully acted. Yeah. We love time travel here in this podcast. Yeah, we're big time travel. We're pro time travel. You were going to ask me about family
00:32:34
Speaker
What were you going to? No, I guess it was just really just a comment about, uh, about what you had said to me that went on. I should explain that, uh, that we haven't met before. I had the great privilege of working with you back in the CBC radio drama department, working on, uh, Barney's version. And I always wonder, I look at people's Wikipedia pages and actors that have worked with, they never mentioned anything about radio drama. I noticed that too, but I got to tell you right now, I loved that, that radio play.
00:33:03
Speaker
because I think I had just finished reading the novel and then I saw you guys are doing that. Wait, you heard that? I actually listened. I was riveted to the whole thing. It was a fabulous performance. Fabulous. It sent
CBC's Radio Drama Legacy and Cultural Heritage
00:33:16
Speaker
me on a mission back when you and I got together and talked about this because I couldn't find it. Then I found the
00:33:24
Speaker
recordings, which are very hard to find. And then I found out about the shuttering of radio drama and what happened to that studio, as you know. And then I tried to get together with a group of people and realized that the problem was a union problem, that nobody had ever brought the unions together to talk about this, which I did do. But it was impossible. Ultimately, I realized it was a full-time job. There wasn't the will. I mean, it'll eventually happen.
00:33:48
Speaker
I mean, radio drama, very few people know that CBC Radio Drama, the studio, was one of the best, if not the best, studio in the world for radio drama. It wasn't anything like it even in London. It was an extraordinary place.
00:34:07
Speaker
in which you were one of the head technicians there. And there was nothing like it. But because of budgetary reasons or whatever the reasons, so it disappeared and became a real estate office or whatever it became. But we are probably the only country in the world, Canada, where the population has paid for, through tax dollars, all of this television and radio for 100 years.
00:34:35
Speaker
and don't have access to it. You don't have access to its archives because nobody's created the archives. Well, as you know, that's going to be created in Northern Ontario in an old
00:34:46
Speaker
I think some kind of missile site that they bought. No, no, really underground nexus for where you can get Wi-Fi and they're going to store all this stuff because CDC originally secretly tried to destroy these tapes to get skate. When that was to get space, all of these tapes were taking up room and they tried to sell it to New York state as fuel.
00:35:08
Speaker
true story. It was discovered and stopped. I don't think I'd heard that. Yes, absolutely true. I've got the paperwork to show it. And so they were just bureaucrats who were doing, well, I'm sorry. If we needed space, we were going to just, we'd make some money off it. All of this original material was going to be destroyed. So then they went into the process of digitizing this stuff, both television and radio drama.
00:35:32
Speaker
The problem is that there isn't a place for it yet and ultimately it should have free access. People should have the population of the country should have free access to what they paid for for a hundred years. The project you were talking about is bringing all the old radio plays to light that nobody can. We've had so many great actors and so much money spent on all this and like you said nobody can
00:35:53
Speaker
Yes, and women played a huge role in it, unsung. Many, certainly in the 40s and 50s, and there are great many people who had their start in, I certainly had my start in radio drama in Ottawa when I was a little boy.
00:36:10
Speaker
and then did wonderful things at CBC in Toronto that I'm very proud of. But now it's called, you know, log podcasts or scripted podcasts. They would be able to sell them everywhere if they made them. And then it could be the basis of somebody says, you know, I want to buy the rights to it and make a movie or a TV series out of this. It's a great idea. But Canada is backward in all the Western countries in the world. We are unique.
00:36:39
Speaker
embarrassingly unique in that we do not have access to our own culture in French or English about what has been created. That is not to say it's been destroyed. There are groups that are preserving it and somebody will eventually get it together to create a website modelled maybe on the BBC's wonderful website where you can access the archive of radio plays and it's a rolling
00:37:04
Speaker
Yeah, itinerary of work, you can different curations, curators, they bring in guest curators, famous people, famous artists to curate that month, their shows and you can access different things and underneath you can access who the cast was and their biographies and
00:37:21
Speaker
You can learn about the writers and directors and the cast of these shows and it's a great resource for the culture of the UK and their shows. And we have a very similar rich cultural heritage of stuff.
00:37:39
Speaker
And I know you tried valiantly to make it happen and you're not saying it's impossible, but it is happening. There are people still doing it. I, I had to, I had to back off it because it became too difficult to organize for me, but there are people who are doing it and who are involved. They're, they're, they're, they're fundraising and they have a space for it. Uh, it's being digitized eventually. Once it's in one place. I mean, I think it'll happen, but you were really part of that world and
00:38:06
Speaker
And you've written about it extensively, and you've written a book about it, which is really cool. And I think that it'll eventually happen. I hope it happens in my lifetime, that people start to have access to this material. Yeah.
00:38:23
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay. I have to ask you, you mentioned me, me writing about that. And of course I wrote about you and that book. One of the things I talk about is how impressed I was. And this is the flattery portion of the podcast, by the way. I talk about how impressed I was.
00:38:41
Speaker
with your work, which which Mark has heard on Barney's version, because, yeah, I mean, I worked in that department for over a decade and we had a lot of actors come through and many of them were were top notch and fantastic. But there was two or three that stood out and you were definitely one of them. And I wanted to ask you because I speculate in the book, you know, how you achieve that level of performance, how how do you
00:39:07
Speaker
You know, I don't approach things trying to reach a level of performance. If I did, I would be too intimidated, I think, saying, okay, I've got to be great in this. I think all that happened was that I had known Mordecai Rischler as a young actor doing a couple of projects that were adapted from his work, and I'd read it extensively, and I knew this material.
00:39:33
Speaker
And then I was really thrilled with the fact that we weren't going to be standing around a microphone, you know, turning pages, that we were going to spend a week, a whole week doing the novel in an adaptation. So it was very, I knew that it was being
00:39:47
Speaker
almost filmed because that studio, to people who don't know it, was massive. And if you were on a bed in the scene, you were on a bed in the scene. A microphone could follow you. If you were going up concrete steps, you went up concrete steps. If you were in a kitchen, we had a kitchen. If you were outside, we had a dead room, which means that it had no echo. So really it could record it as if you were outside. If you wanted to be in a car, you could be in a car. And so you were actually performing it as if you were shooting it.
00:40:14
Speaker
And that gave a certain life to it. And then it was like I did every other role that I've ever approached, which was I collaborated with the director, producer, Gregory Jason, Claire. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Who is really great and a great writer.
00:40:30
Speaker
a great adapter of this whose name was Howard Wiseman, I believe. Howard Wiseman. And so I worked with them and I set certain requirements. I needed certain setup for myself when I was doing the monologues. And I had, you know, I remember you had told me that you thought I was a bit of a prima donna at first because of
00:40:53
Speaker
Yeah, I wasn't really. I was afraid that you would be, but you very obviously were not. No, I just wanted to collaborate. I wanted to set up conditions for myself in a very difficult role that had to be done in a week and cover an entire novel. And the guy monologue of a character is an alcoholic and has dementia as he's trying to write his memoirs. So he has trouble remembering things. And that's part of the humor of what Mordecai had written.
00:41:21
Speaker
And so I didn't set out to do anything great. I just set out to be accurate and to pay service, respect to the character that was written and try to inhabit it as best I knew how, which means, you know, collaborating with the other artists and wonderful actors I was working with and to make sure that technically I had what I needed. You know, that's all. Yeah. Yeah. That was a great idea. I climbed a tree. It's one tree at a time. It's not looking at a forest. Hmm.
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, so a combination of natural ability and experience and the environment. And you really were working with one of the best directors, Gregory Jason Clare, who completely exploited Studio 212. And I have a compliment to you here, Joe, because that chapter of your book really describes the set so well. It describes that studio and what made that studio so special.
00:42:14
Speaker
It's well done. Oh, I am still pissed off. Everybody at the CBC knows how pissed off I am about them shutting down radio drama and shuttering that studio. Yeah. Well, it's an egregious act. It is, yeah. But they couldn't afford it, or at least they wouldn't afford it.
00:42:31
Speaker
better said than couldn't. Given the fact that it was state of the art, that people from all over the world should have gone there to study how radio drama should be done, and that we would have been world class at the time, and now the only difference is that I would say the only technology that's changed aside from the size of microphones and the kind of mixing units that are smaller now and maybe a bit more accurate is that you can go on location now more easily than you could have been.
00:42:59
Speaker
And we certainly did back in that day, you know, with people like Bill Lane, you know, I reported on location with, uh, with Bill in Montreal many times. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, so all of that is, uh, I hope to be positive about it because, you know, people are still doing scripted work. They're calling
Career Reflections and Canadian Theater
00:43:19
Speaker
it something else, scripted podcasts or whatever. And they're very popular. Well, I know they do that in LA. Do you do any of that work?
00:43:26
Speaker
I have done a little bit of it. I know Greg is doing that in Toronto, I think. Yes, he is. Script and podcasts. And mind you, we, none of us have that studio to work in. I mean, only could be done with tax money. It can't be done on a commercial level. It would have to be done that way. And also we forgot. I mean, CBC Radio was commercial free, which is what the television should have been. And still is. Yeah. Still is commercial free. Yeah. Radio is. Radio is.
00:43:57
Speaker
I have a question. I want to go way back to, as you mentioned, preparation. I'm a London, Ontario boy, so I want to ask you about Stratford because I know you spent some time there. What was Stratford for you because obviously you love the Canada Shakespeare? I crashed the auditions when I was 20 years old.
00:44:20
Speaker
It was nowhere else to go. And I somehow got in to the company. But I left very quickly. I mean, I got my kind of university education on the works of Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers like Johnson and other people. And by being among those wonderful actors and directors, but I didn't get to really play any roles. I was too young. And I could see the writing on the wall for me that I wasn't built
00:44:47
Speaker
for what they were looking for. And right at that time, which was 69, when I was turning 21, my friends were starting these theaters in Toronto, like Theater Pass Marais out of Rushdale College. And you could work for 20 bucks a week. And I threw out the idea of making 100
00:45:10
Speaker
$200 a week, which full-time, as an actor, to my parents' chagrin, and went and worked with these so-called hippies in this, you know, unwashed world of alternative theater, because it was the beginning. So Stratford was a bump for me, and a bump I needed to get away from, because what was really amazing about those days wasn't Stratford. What was amazing about those days
00:45:39
Speaker
was the Trudeau government had initiated opportunities for youth grants and local initiative program grants, lip grants, OFY grants, that allowed and began to build cultural centers in Winnipeg and in Ottawa and in different cities across the country. And we campaigned for those things to be built only if they were also going to commission Canadian writers. But there were no English-Canadian
00:46:05
Speaker
Almost none, they were an anomaly. It was my generation that was first writing plays in English and about people who were living in those cities because our theater was, for the most part, imported from England and the United States. What made a huge difference in my life was that occurrence and partly that was to an unsung extent,
00:46:32
Speaker
influenced by the Vietnam War because we ended up in Halifax, Winnipeg, Toronto, Vancouver with draft dodgers, American draft dodgers and American draft deserters, many of whom entered into our culture and influenced us in many areas of life, including
00:46:53
Speaker
in the law and in social medicine, many other areas, but certainly in the area of theater and in the arts, where I knew a lot of people who convinced us not to be good citizens and showed us how we can blackmail our own government along nationalistic, you know, and convince them to give us money to create our own work because you really couldn't do it. There wasn't a place and very, very few places that were doing original Canadian work. They were ahead of us in French Canada.
00:47:23
Speaker
by almost a decade, not much more than a decade for original Canadian, French Canadian work, but they were ahead of us. But in English Canada, we didn't have it until the beginning of the 70s, you know. And then, and then it all, just when I was starting to be in my 20s, very luckily, this was where my life began. And I don't think it would have been the same if I somehow stayed at Stratford. Not I don't think, I know it wouldn't have been the same. I would have had a different life. Stratford had its own value and its own beauty.
00:47:49
Speaker
and its own cultural significance. But it wasn't for me. My life went in this other area because of what was happening in the theatre's communities. And it's where I first learned the value of being part of our creative community. But theatre, past Marais, is so influential in Canadian theatre. I mean, that must have been so exciting to be there.
00:48:12
Speaker
I don't know, it was an audience of 10 people. Sometimes there would be a show that would make a difference and there were some great directors and occasionally an amazing show and sometimes they were very experimental.
00:48:30
Speaker
run by Jim Girard first and then by Martin Kinchen. But basically, Paul Thompson is the one who really put it on the map. And shows like the Farm Show that went all over the country. And those were the shows that really put the place on the map. And it's now one of the most important theaters in the country, of course. But that was just the beginning. I mean, we were originally, it was Toronto Free Theatre, which is now the Berkeley Street Theatre part of Canada Stage, which was a free theater.
00:49:00
Speaker
that we were doing Canadian work in. It was unusual in 1972. It started over 50 years ago. And those were in Factory Theatre Lab, which was dedicated only to original Canadian work.
00:49:15
Speaker
That was happening in Winnipeg, and Halifax was happening in Vancouver, and it was a very important part of what happened in Canada. And then, of course, we could supplement our income by the fact that John Hirsch, who was a Stratford when I was there, took over a CBC drama in 1973 and opened the doors to a lot of writing and directing and acting talent in the English section of CBC, so the doors opened for us to be able to do.
00:49:38
Speaker
Television then, new television, it was really interesting, more interesting than the work that was being done in the future film industry at that time, in the late 70s, mid to late 70s, and yeah, that was my life.
00:49:50
Speaker
Listen, I'm happy to have spent this time with you. We have a family dinner. Oh, yeah. I'm going to have to go. We spent almost an hour here. Oh, yeah.
Podcast Conclusion and Book Promotion
00:50:00
Speaker
Yeah. And thanks for taking all that time. Thank you so much for your time. It's been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much.
00:50:20
Speaker
you
00:50:29
Speaker
So Mark, you and I have discussed how people can support this podcast, and one of the ways I would like to get them to support us is by, and I think you're gonna like this, by purchasing one of your books. Ooh, I like that. How about your books? We're gonna start with your books. Start with my books? Okay. And today I would like to point people in particular to Alpha Max, which is a novel about the Metaverse, which is kind of in vogue these days.
00:50:51
Speaker
Yeah, and it doesn't take a lot of the standard approaches that the Metaverse stories do. I think it's a bit more grounded. It's funny and it's witty and it's smart and it's entertaining. Go to recreative.ca slash support and you can find your books there. Alpha Max by Mark A. Rainer.
00:51:27
Speaker
you