gordon white in king lear
A few evenings ago after Amy Reitsma’s Blonde Ambition Fundraiser Nova Scotia-based actor Gordon White made his grand return from Ottawa where he just closed Peter Hinton’s production of an all Aboriginal King Lear starring August Schellenberg at the National Arts Centre. I watched in fascination as White, bursting with emotion, passion and fervor launched into story after story about his exhilarating experience playing Edgar in the show. I immediately thought to myself, “I need to get all this down on TWISI!” So, a couple days later Gordon and I sat down at the Paper Chase Cafe in Halifax and had the following conversation about the monumental production in his career and his life.
Gordon pulls out a portfolio filled with papers and the programme for King Lear at the NAC.
Gordon White (GW): I brought out props because I was trying to remember-
Amanda Campbell (AC): Everything?
GW: EVERYTHING.
AC: I didn’t come up with any specific questions because I figured that you could just TALK…
GW: I could just ramble, yeah. It’s still in a rambling around in my head kind of thing.
AC: Nice.
GW: So, apparently, about 40 years ago Augie Schellenberg had a dream. He saw a show and he had a dream. He saw a production of King Lear and said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have an all Aboriginal Production of King Lear?” Him and a friend of his, a director, John Juliani, kept that going between the two of them. That was their dream. And that dream lasted for forty years.
AC: Wow.
GW: John Juliani passed away a few years ago but Augie asked Peter Hinton if he would consider it. And Peter did. And it became his final show as Artistic Director at the National Arts Centre just last week.
AC: A part of history!
GW: Yup. It’s still unbelievable. Just to be in the room, you know? Let alone actually have had it done. Augie Schellenberg. Jani Lauzon. Tantoo Cardinal. Lorne Cardinal. Kevin Loring. Meegwun Fairbrother. The old trail-blazers for us and the newcomers that are going to carry the torch. The best in the country. Some of the best in the country were there. And, not only was everybody there for Augie and his dream everybody in the National Arts Centre building, from admin to janitors, were there for Augie’s dream. Everybody wanted to make sure that this happened. And we fought and we struggled and we pushed to get it done. As Peter said, “Augie, he had a very generous dream.” And Augie is very generous. He may be the toughest man I have ever worked with in this industry. 75 years old, beat cancer twice, taking on Lear. He may be the oldest guy in the country to ever take it on. Christopher Plummer was 72. And, he took it on… he used to be a boxer, and he attacked the role a lot like a boxer. And, it’s a tough opponent. It got him on the ropes a few times too, but he fought with the energy of a guy half his age.
And then there’s the whole, actually doing King Lear and the gift of actually speaking Shakespeare. And the joy of it actually being so dense that you can say it several times and it will mean something else every time you say it. How it grew from the first day we sat around the table with fifty people to our closing show where we all cried.
Yeah, there was also something in the show called the Four Nations Exchange that I’m going to talk about. It was something that the NAC started working on in January which was introducing community people, Native people from the community, to theatre, to acting. Eventually, they became Lear’s followers. So, in the Opening scene where Lear divides his territory amongst his people, all his people are there. Including a family: a mother, a father and their two kids. Jordan, I think, was six or seven. So, you had, like, from seven to seventy five on stage. So you had a community in this show.
AC: Yeah. Wow.
GW: I played Edgar and I put all the pressure of the world on myself: being Augie’s dream, being Peter’s last show, being the opportunity for me to play this role because it’s a gift and it’s also very tough. God—I can’t even… the first day, the first reading, the first break, Peter takes me aside and says, “This is something you have to think about: Why doesn’t Edgar appear in the first scene?” And I think it goes towards why Edgar is so easily convinced by his brother Edmund that his dad wants to kill him. That was in the first two hours. It started from there. Peter was very simple and very brilliant at the same time. He would keep going, “What is your target?” “Who are you talking to?” “What are you saying?” “Is it good or bad?” But then, he would layer into that. We talked about the existentialism of Edgar and trying to play three things at the same time. But always: clarity and intention, clarity and intention. And one of my favourite acting notes that he gave was, “Stop walking so Shakespearean.” And EVERYBODY knew what he meant. Cuz, the whole idea of this project too, was to, well, more often than not, Shakespeare has been taken academically and not played, but just presented, and make an academic sense of a production. But that’s not what Shakespeare was trying to do when he was writing. He wasn’t writing to the aristocracy, he was writing to the people, talking about people. So, that’s what we tried to do. And we tried REALLY hard.
AC: What were your audiences like?
GW: It’s funny, the crowds were pretty good. The response was quite good. More often than not the show was received well. Then, there were some people who kind of were, “I had no idea you Native people could do it so well.” But, they were few and far between. People said, “It was so clear” which is what we were going for. Yeah, the audience response I would say was great.
AC: Were the demographics mostly the typical National Arts Centre patrons or was it more mixed?
GW: It’s funny, because the audiences seemed to mix for me because more often than not if I heard them laughing… at King Lear… and quite often they would laugh quite a bit… I would think, “Alright, that’s not the typical audience. There are some Natives in that crowd.” You could tell by the responses, generally. But it was enjoyed. We had a couple talk backs and they were great. Because, it’s just that good of a play. If you are coming in to look at it academically, we did enough academic work on it as well, to make something interesting enough that you can take away from it. But, at the same time, we’re trying to play the heart and soul of these people, to give an emotional response to it as well. The play was set in the location where the National Arts Centre Theatre sits at the time when Shakespeare was writing it. So, it was on Algonquin land.
AC: That’s so cool.
GW: It was. The design was, again, simple and brilliant. Thrust bare stage for the most part but canoes would come on. A canoe rode onstage. A fire pit that became a sun. Just, you know, there was a huge tree in the background that a lot of people thought was a totem pole. And I was like, “Nope! No totem poles. No dream catchers!” That’s just a tree. But beautifully set. Beautifully lit. The lighting design by Louise Guinand, was just gorgeous. Stunning. And I could only see a bit of it. I would have loved to have watched the whole show to see her lighting. As well as, going back to Augie’s dream, the sound design was done by Alessandro Juliani, John Juliani’s son. Augie had the Julianis with him. The sound design was also beautiful.
We worked hard on it. We worked tirelessly to try and honour the Shakespearean text and the gift of the words and our own traditions that everybody brought. It was an amalgamation of Nations, really. I’m Micmac from Newfoundland and I was Edgar. Kevin Loring who is from BC, played Edmund. We covered from Coast to Coast in the Gloucester family alone. I kept thinking, “Geez, I’m in the original Game of Thrones, this is fantastic! You’ve got House Cornwall. You’ve got House Albany. Goneril and Regan at each other…” I still miss it terribly. From the folks onstage with me on down to the crew… a three women stage management crew that organized a show that big, you know? Lorne Cardinal, who played Albany and was Assistant Director, is trying to produce a documentary on it. We had a crew that was with us most of the time that were allowed to sit in on some of the rehearsals, that would follow us around from time to time. So, hopefully that we’ll have that record of history too.
AC: It does sound like something that everybody across the country should be able to have the opportunity to see. I mean, I know, it sounds huge, so, touring would be problematic. Ugh. Our country is too big. (laughs) Too wide.
GW: It is. I mean, I look at the coast to coast to north to south that was represented, I mean, Augie lives in Dallas right now. The representation there, we represented North America in this show and it is frickin’ huge. I wanted to share it with EVERYBODY. But it’s so huge. Yeah, to be with Augie, who– see Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee— he was nominated for an Emmy for that one, he’s a wonderful actor and a generous soul and he’s only a little bit taller than me, so he’s basically the trendsetter for me. I’m the guy who’s trying to follow in his footsteps. They are BIG steps.
AC: Do you know why it took forty years for Augie’s dream to come to fruition? Obviously a bit of that was waiting to be the right age for Lear. Or did he just want to be the oldest guy? Was he just waiting as long as possible on purpose? (laughs)
GW: There was some of, when Augie first had the dream, there just weren’t the Native actors to do it. And, in a way that was true because there weren’t a lot of Native actors when Augie first started. But, then it also became, no, there’s nowhere to do it. And everybody in the room, every person in that room said, in some shape or form that they had been told at some point in time, “Natives can’t do Shakespeare.”
AC: Oh wow. That’s wild.
GW: So there was some of that too. But, that was Augie’s point. We have the talent here now to do the best writer in history. Basically, Augie constantly loved to prove them wrong. The rumour was when Peter was approached to do this he was uncertain if it could be done and then he was convinced that it HAD to be done.
Gordon takes out the programme from the show and turns to Peter Hinton’s Director’s Note to the Audience. It is the longest one I have ever seen. He begins to read from it:
GW: “Forty-five years ago August Schellenberg and John Juliani shared a dream doing Shakespeare’s King Lear with an all First Nations Aboriginal Acting Company. While the idea was received with a reasonable amount of enthusiasm, they were told that there were not the actors available to handle such an undertaking. While, perhaps that may have been true in the late ‘60s, nothing could be further from the truth today. John Juliani passed away in 2003 and the dream risked never becoming a reality. So, you can imagine how truly honoured I was when Mr. Schellenberg asked if the National Arts Centre would take on this project this season. Our production of King Lear is dedicated to John Juliani’s memory and is, in no small way, deeply indebted to him.”
AC: Wow. That is so nice. His Note is so long! Usually they are not that long. He must have had a lot he wanted to say.
GW: It was also his last show as AD. The Opening Night was very emotional because, while we had to keep going, there were some people who, their work was done. And, it was also the beginning of the journey. We made it that far.
AC: Sometimes you just know… you know that this experience is never going to be replicated ever again.
GW: I know! I know!
AC: Again, with the pressure that you put on yourself, I am sure!
GW: Again with the pressure, Oh God! The pressure that I put on myself… mid-way of the run the wig mistress is putting on my wig and she says, “Oh. I think I’m going to have to put in some more grey hair in the wig.” I’m like, “What?” “Looks like you have more grey hair now!” This show did that to me. I stressed a lot. I worked. I sweated. I cried. And, one of my favourite notes, in a lot of really lovely acting notes from Peter, was, “Lighten up.”
AC: I like that a lot.
GW: Yup. It was hilarious. Augie said around two days before closing he said, “Geez. I see why it goes to a younger guy.” And he knew that from the get. It was all about honouring Augie’s dream and I think we did what we could with it. I hope he’s happy because I know I am.
AC: It must have been amazing for him, just to see something that you’ve wanted and you’ve thought about for so long and then having real, tangible human beings who are making your dream come true.
GW: He got accepted into the National Theatre School without ever having done a play. He’s THAT GOOD. He was working in Stratford and he played Cornwall in King Lear, and he approached, when he did The Ecstasy of Rita Joe with Chief Dan George, he approached George to play Lear and (laughs) Chief Dan George says, “No. Too many lines. Too many lines in that show!”
AC: A little bit of wisdom of that.
GW: Oh yeah. Well, and that was the point in time that Augie said, “I’ll do it someday!” Yeah, it would be nice to keep doing it, but at the same time, it beat us all up. (laughs). The show is so tough and so hard. Everybody had mountains to climb and you’re spent by the end of it.
AC: It reminds me a little bit of what it must have been like to be the first cast ever at Stratford. But that dream was only, like 12 months old. (laughs)
GW: Right. Yeah. That’s just it. My parents came to see the show from Newfoundland and my dad said to me, cuz he was sitting with me and Billy and Tantoo and he said, “You have no idea the effect that this play will have because you won’t see it for five years or ten years but you’re inspiring some Native kid somewhere.” And it’s like, “YEAH.” Augie did that for me when I saw him in North of 60 years ago. Billy did that for me when I saw him in The Donald Marshall Story. Now I’m onstage with them.
AC: I love that. That’s the best.
GW: Hopefully, it’s a beginning of something like a Stratford and hopefully it’s a beginning of people looking and things different. Look at what we’re capable of.
Me and Billy, Billy Merasty played Gloucester: my Dad, we have the scene where I as Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, have to convince him that he’s jumped off a cliff. We struggled so much with that scene and we loved it so much because it is such a gift of a scene. It is such an unbelievably beautiful moment. Such an incredibly difficult well-written scene. (laughs). An INCREDIBLY difficult well-written see. But, we would come offstage every night when we got it, and more often than not we felt pretty good about it, and we would just give each other a big hug. And then keep going with the rest of the play. I might as well say too that I was honoured that in our final, closing bow between me, Kevin Loring, Craig Lauzon and Billy Merasty we did the “Billy Bow.” (Laughs) It was pretty awesome. “We gonna do the Billy bow, boys?” “Yeah, okay, Yeah.”
AC: It makes perfect sense to me that if you do something this gigantic that you are going to develop relationships with people in your cast that you wouldn’t normally have.
GW: I mean the Native theatre community across the country is pretty small anyway. But, when I walked into the room in rehearsal the only two people I knew were Lorne and Keith Barker, who played Cornwall. Nobody else knew who I was. Now we are all brothers and sisters because we fought a war together. And we were part of an event. It was an EVENT. And watching each other grow in their work, watching some people who have never done Shakespeare before and take it and own it, watching people pick each other up and carry each other to keep going, to keep honouring the dream. We were all there for one another, but we were all there for Augie. And, like you said, that will never happen again. Not like that.
Huge thanks to Gordon White for sharing this amazing experience with us.
