Eric Coates

(Picture by Andrew Alexander)

Name: Eric Coates age: 53 G: Describe your career in four words: EC: Unexpected, isolated, fulfilling, frustrating. G: What do you do? EC: Determine the artistic direction of the Great Canadian Theatre Company. Sooo, I’m just going to leave that there.

G: Why do you do it? EC: It’s become my vocation. After a series of frustrations as an actor, as a younger artist/ G: What were those frustrations if you don’t mind me asking? EC: The frustrations were with observing…Initially… it was the result of observing directors who I felt were not up to the task. Which I now acknowledge was naive on my part. In terms of artistic direction, when I observe artistic direction that I felt was weak or lacking…I had the incredibly arrogant opinion that I could do better without having any experience in it. That’s more of a series of circumstances than a ‘why’. The ‘why’ speaks to a need to be in a directorial position regardless of the context. Whether I am playing baseball with some friends or I’m building a dock with my brother or decorating the Christmas tree I’m just, I always find myself in the directorial position and I just gravitate to that. It’s hard to describe in any simpler terms than that.

G: What made you fall in love with it? EC: What eventually really made me really fall in love with it was having some control over an artistic career. Having control over the content, artistic resources and human resources. In the simplest terms I can choose who I work with and what I’m working on and that’s and extraordinary privilege and that’s something that I dearly love about the position/

G: And you’re doing a good job, the reputation is so positive. Having worked at the GCTC myself, you can just feel the warmth there. The artists and arts administrators seem to love their jobs and produce great work. You don’t find that at every theatre. EC: No, and I think that’s a generalization about GCTC but it is fair. It’s nice to work in a building that has that aura about it.

G: Where did you train? EC: Ryerson Theatre School. Before that I had been a child actor in my early teens with a quasi-professional theatre in Guelph called the Road Show Theatre Company. It was an interesting model. It had a professional Artistic Director and a couple of professional actors and sort of a core ensemble of recent graduates of U of G People that came out of that company included Peter Donaldson who was hands down the most influential actor in my career; Doug Lemcke, who eventually became the production manager of the Stratford Festival. They were a really interesting gang. It folded shortly after I entered high school and I stopped doing theatre entirely, so I didn’t do any theatre in high school except for one play. That was a very conscious decision to do high school things for that period. When I finished high school-ish, ish…/

G: You didn’t finish high school? EC: Not really, I mean I was there for five years I just didn’t…really…’finish’.

Eric and I giggle. I laugh because I am tickled by our similar approaches to high school life and Eric probably out of nervousness because I keep prodding for information about it.

EC Cont’d: The subsequent training was as an apprentice at Stratford, as an actor, which I started half way through my final year at Ryerson and that’s how I completed my diploma. That was the common practice then. They would hire four apprentices each year and take them midway through their final semester. When I was there NTS kids weren’t being hired that way but it was York, Ryerson and George Brown [students] that were mostly getting those apprectice positions.

G: Do you have a favourite book about your craft? EC: Not really. I don’t…I would say scripts inform my craft more than textbooks. I don’t have any formal pedagogy in terms of directing, or really acting for that matter. When I was at Ryerson the training was remarkably vague. It really was. There were no formal systems that we were working or ‘schools of acting’ that we were working with. It was all very ad hoc. So I would say the ‘books’ that have influenced me most are scripts/

G: Wanna name drop any of those? EC: Well… The Drawer Boy is the most important play for me in the Canadian canon/

G: What about it? EC: Long story short I was aware of it from its inception. Michael [Healey] and I went to school together and then we were both at Blyth as actors the summer he started writing. He told me his idea for writing this play and there was a significantly different engine to it. When it emerged the premise was the same, but it had a completely different catalyst driving the piece. He told the same story but with a different catalyst and I found that really interesting. Just how a writer shifts and how a writer had that clarity of the big picture. Which I think is the strength of Michael’s writing. He sets out to write a very specific arc.

G: Is there an experience that comes to mind where you learned a lot about your work? EC: This is going to seem incredibly pedestrian. It has nothing to do with producing a play. Ok?... The first year I had taken the Artistic Director position a Blyth, we were doing this massive outdoor production that we had been doing for a couple of years, The Outdoor Donnelly’s. There was a challenge in finding enough seating for the audience outside for one portion of the play. And Paul Thompson phoned me one morning and he was in Niagara on the lake, and he said ‘my son-in –law is helping me remove all the seats from the festival theatre at Niagara on the Lake and I have access to a truck and if you come down and help me you can get enough seats for the outdoor theatre. They will be comfortable seating and it will be fun and it will feel like a theatre’. So I got to Niagara on the lake and the truck that Paul had commandeered was actually a full 18 wheeler transport truck owned by a local farmer in Blythe who was a trucker. Paul said “hey let’s take all the seats, let’s take enough seats to actually replace all the seats in the theatre in Blyth. And I said ‘yeah that’s a good idea!’ Not thinking for a second what my responsibilities really were in this situation, not in the least taking into account that the festival doesn’t even own that building. It’s a municipal building …long story short, we end up with this inventory of 500 heavy, used theatre seats that I had to store in the interim. We had to convince people to use them as replacements for the old ones in the theatre and to find a way to pay for that, and it was not a revenue neutral thing. It was in so many ways a huge disaster …they were more comfortable but the downside outweighed the upside/

G: What did you learn from it? EC: What did I learn from it? Well Artistic Direction is perceived as overall direction of a company and overall license to do whatever you want and I recognize from that experience that I waaaay overstepped the bounds of my job. I created a huge amount of trouble and work for a lot of people…The road to hell right?! It’s only now that they are finally replacing all of that seating. They have a huge grant to do it properly/ G: Is a little bit of you sad? It took all that work to get them there! We laugh for a second. You should put one in your apartment! EC: Yeah, it was such a stupid thing, I could provide you with a hundred examples of artistic moments that changed the way I see things but so much of this job is representing the organization as a whole. But those seats are a great example because so much of this job is representing the organization as a whole. It was clearly a defining moment in what my responsibilities are/

G: But that’s great because those kind of teachable moments aren’t what future ADs may be thinking of when starting their careers/ EC: Future Artistic Directors will come across some charismatic characters who will say “Hey, we should do this! We should turn your theatre into a pirate ship!...”

G: Do you have a personal philosophy? EC: I don’t have one that’s emblazoned in my brain. I think the thing I subscribe to are the four essential competencies. That drives my approach. To listen, to be willing to colborate, to not provide an alibi when things start to go wrong, and to recognize that the task at hand is more important than I am individually. I would say that they are equally difficult in different situations. And the good thing about it is I have that list on my bulletin board and I can’t remember the last time I looked at it as a reminder. I’ve found I have really committed to it. Not only did I become a more effective director of an organization but it got easier. If you actually listen, instead of pretending to listen if you actually give up the need to provide an alibi or make an excuse it’s just so much easier to make it through the day. That’s what I live by. Get out of your own way. G: What does your week look like? EC: A lot of correspondence. Several structured regular meetings, organizationally. There’s a staff meeting Tuesday morning, there’s a senior staff meeting on Thursday mornings, like there’s a looooot of emails/ G: I know I always feel bad when I email you because I know you have a million of others to get through. EC: But that’s a self-perpetuating thing. So much of that is generated by me by giving an unnecessary response which elicits another reply and back and forth, that sort of thing. What I’m hoping my week is going to include is structured reading time and I’ve been really good about that lately and really enjoying that commitment. So few of my answers to your questions have been about art; so the reading is all about that artistic component that should be driving everything. That’s the gig; reading material or seeing material. So I have three or four dedicated chunks for reading in a week where I really try to isolate and unplug and do that. Depending on the level of activity in town, several evenings a week are taken up by seeing shows or running a playwright's' network evening. I meet with sponsors or potential community sponsors outside. And at least once a week I will have a meeting with an independent artist or playwright or director or someone who is coming through town. That’s part of my job, to be available for useful conversations.

G: What is the hardest part of what you do? EC: Uh, getting over my need to make other people happy, y’know, getting over my need to provide a uniformly satisfying experience. That’s a personal challenge. I want to be liked but that gets in the way of me making the decisions I have to make for the company. Yup. And invariably there are people who are going to be disappointed or actively hurt by choices I’ve made and sometimes that’s hard to reconcile. That’s part of it.

G: Did you have any mentors? Who were/are they? EC: Yes, Anne Chislett who was the AD of Blyth before I took over. That was a formal mentorship I applied for a grant with the Ontario Arts Council and I got it. It was a PTTP. The first grant application I ever wrote was a PTTP and that got me a year working for very little pay. For a full season but she really committed to keeping me on at the company after the length of that first contract and that turned into a six year associate position and a real roller coaster. We did not always get along/

G: But that’s to be expected, no? You aren’t expected to get along with your romantic partner for six years straight so why do we expect it from our working relationships? EC: Yeah sometimes it was hard. She was my formal mentor but there were people who I sort of glommed onto as informal mentors. Miles Potter was a huge influence on me. I would say he was the single most important influence on me along with a number of actors at Stratford. I was there as an actor for four years. People like Goldie Semple, Peter Donaldson and Colm Feore. Those were all people who were really influential even if it wasn’t a formal mentor-ship. They were instrumental in how I saw the work. And they had the work ethic that I try to emulate.

G: Who inspires you? EC: Right now, I would say Rahul Varma of Teesri Duniya Theatre in Montreal. I just came from the PACT conference and Rahul really is voicing his frustrations with the status quo in a way that really allowed me to see it. This is something I have been trying to see. To see the world from the point of view of those who are disenfranchised. For several years I’ve been trying to see it and I always feel I’m like I’m making headway and ‘I’m seeing it’ but I really wasn’t seeing it like someone who is looking at it from the outside. Someone who is not white who is struggling with agency. Rahul really articulated it in a way that made me recognize my role in it. He was looking at conventional funding models that continue to propagate the problems even when they are topped up with more money. Like the Canada Council now has this huge influx of cash and the programs that they rolled out to use the cash really don’t address the systemic inequity. They appear to but they don’t. The only way they can address that inequity is for the money to go directly to the artists who are without funding now as opposed to going to institutions like GCTC which then supports work and gives support to other companies. This is a model I’ve always been comfortable with and it’s a model that we will inevitably keep using for the time being but it’s not the kind of radical shift that has to happen.

G: Is there someone whose career you envy and why? I hate this question…I may cut it…I think it makes people uncomfortable. EC: Well I’ll answer it. Anthony Cimolino’s because he was my understudy at Stratford when we were both young actors. And look where he is. Like “wow you were the kid nipping at my heels and now look at you!” G: How do you prepare for a role? And I’m talking about the boring nerdy stuff…that I find fascinating. EC: Um, what I observed from the people who have influenced me, like Peter Donaldson, was the ability to simply allow that character to harness one’s own person. So Pete for example, if he was playing an extreme character, like a mass murderer, he would never disappear behind some impenetrable mask. He would always be what Pete would be like if he were a masked murderer. It seems like a simplistic response but we all approach the job differently. During my training as an actor, like I said, there was very little formal pedagogy. What I found to be the best preparation would be to simply look at the text, discern as much as I could from that text about how many truths are revealed about that character in the scene and find what action are there…like if a door opens or whatnot and then figure out what that character looks like if it is me in that situation. If I happen to be playing a doctor who is running for political office, what do I do in that situation instead of trying to immerse myself in a totally different human being in that situation? G: I tend to lean that way as well. And I love the challenge when a character’s instincts are completely different than mine. I just have to find some middle ground and that’s really what I love. EC: Yeah and you will find a stronger choice if the character goes against your initial impulse. You need to accept that this is a choice your character is making so what would it take to get me to that choice. That’s what makes interesting performances.

G: How do you usually feel after a show closes? EC: At this stage, a great sense of relief generally. If I’m speaking to you as an actor, because I don’t really enjoy performance as much anymore so it’s a huge sense of relief. As a director it is specific to each show. If a show is a huge hit then I’m always a little bereft when a show closes. But honestly, if a show hasn’t been terribly successful I’m relieved when it’s over. I don’t have to worry about having to deal with the negative response anymore. And that’s more about me being an Artistic director because I’m also the complaints department. It’s a little emotionally exhausting as much as I try to convince myself it isn’t. It’s hard when you sit down at your desk first thing in the morning and it’s a list of everything you did wrong, y’know, you can be as thick skinned as you want but it can still sting.

G: I find it so interesting when people are upset by a show. We live in a world where things rarely have a 100% success rate. So, I’m often shocked when people expect their art to be a certain way…it’s like an unrealistic ideal expectation…I find that frustrating. EC: Well it’s because people are thinking “hey we made a deal! I paid $50 to see your work and I’ve committed two hours to see your work and I have an expectation that it’s going to please me.” But if I spend $100 on a dinner at a nice restaurant it’s a very reasonable expectation that it should please me. The primary difference is that I’ve got more control at a restaurant. I can choose what I want from the menu and if that choice, when it comes, isn’t satisfactory I would be really disappointed. Some people have become so entitled to feeling that way about everything in their life they treat theatre in the same way. And it’s not like going to see a painting. When I go to see a painting….I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, why we as theatre artists are so hyper-critical of each other’s work, um, and I don’t feel that way about visual art. I don’t see a painting at the National Gallery and think ‘oh there are things they could have done or should have done differently or better.’ I simply walk away and move onto the next one. I spend less time with the work. In theatre we spend so much time with the work, instead if we see a painting that doesn’t appeal to us, we I simply move on. We're not committed to that experience for two hours. In the theatre we are.

G: How do you prepare for an audition? EC: I would get as familiar with the text as possible. If I have access to a full script, obviously I would read the whole play. I would approach it by thinking “how can I best represent this part?” and knowing the human qualities I would bring to it. How can I simply be myself in this role and not audition as if I’m some other human being. How do you nail the audition? By really committing to that because you know, ‘nailing an audition’ is a perfect storm of a whole bunch of factors. The most important factor is the one you have no control over, which is: what are they looking for? They want you to be the one. We suffer from this idea, as actors, that we have to convince them or that we are fighting against something. The people sitting behind the table at an audition desperately want you to be the one because then their job is done. So that is the X factor and if you go in there simply committing to who you are and you happen to be that quality that they’re looking for then their job is done. G: What if you’re never that quality? Should you think about your career choice? EC: If you’re never that quality?... I think you should think about your career choice. It’s not just a quality of who you are it’s a quality of how you handle text. And we could talk about that for a long time. G: What trick of the trade can you share? EC: I'll stick with auditions. Treat them like a day of work. A great trick of the trade is to understand that on the day you go to audition for something you are a working actor. That way you relieve yourself of that horrible pressure of rejection or acceptance. That way you’re just going in and doing your job. It would be disingenuous of me to say it will relieve you of any disappointment if you don’t get the job but it helps you commit to the life of being an actor and to not feel despondent about it all the time. Think of it as a work day…there just isn’t a pay cheque. We knowingly giggle . When You're casting stuff you can sense fear, you can sense defeat, you can sense all of those things.But when you sense the comfort of someone just coming in to do their job then the room feels better*** ****Warning: Shameless Self Promotion.******* And I did NOT pay Eric to say this. and I’m shamlessly leaving it in because this made not getting cast hurt a little bit less******** And that’s something you, Gabbie, are very good at. You come in to do your job. That is a key factor in working.

G: thank you! I try to… it’s a better choice then walking in and begging. Anyway, what’s your favorite piece of theatre (right now)? EC: after thinking about it for a few seconds Eric responds. Oh my god! I just saw the double bill of Jordan Tannahill’s new pieces! Botticelli In the Fire and Sunday in Sodom at Canadian Stage, oh my fuck they were good! It was an astounding afternoon of theatre. It was really great. Hands down that was the theatrical event of the year for me. I jumpy clapped in my head when Eric said this because Jordan is an Ottawa boy and fellow OSSD alum. We never met despite us attending the school at the same time but for some reason I feel a great amount of pride when it comes to Jordan Tannahill.

G: What are you trying to say through your art? EC: Hahahaha…I am trying to say that there is no place in our society for the dumbing down of our culture. I am trying to say, I’m realizing I’m just paraphrasing Michael Healey, but I’m happy to do that. This is a complex system that we live in and oversimplifying it in the twitter battle that’s become our political campaign is not useful to anybody. And especially not useful for the people who purport that that power is for the greater good because they’ve achieved it through a dumbing down of the process. And it’s not exclusive to Donald Trump. That’s the current example that’s in front of us 24hrs a day but it’s just as apparent in Canadian politics at every level on the municipal and provincial level. It’s not useful and it’s going to be the end of us at some point. These stupefying simplistic ideas will kill us in the end. G: What is your perceived biggest failure? EC: As a single production it was a play at the Blyth festival called The Bootblack Orator. It was by Ted Johns and Ted was in many ways the icon of Blyth and that movement of grassroots theatre. He has a spectacular fluency when it comes to rural issues and presenting them in a way that’s very palatable and also kind of agitating at the same time. This play was a poorly conceived re-enactment of a Victorian era lecture as entertainment. So it took Ted out of his role as a contemporary narrator on rural issues. The audience wasn’t for that. The material was far too dense and I did an extremely poor job directing it. I just gave in to the artistic temperament of the creator of the piece instead of having the guts to fight him…get him to provide the support the piece needed …For instance Ted was not comfortable with having a sound design in the piece even though we’d hired a designer and he won that fight. I will forever hold myself responsible for that. For not fighting harder and insisting that we keep that component in it. I don’t think it would have saved the production but it would have made it a more interesting piece. I could have possibly shifted it into a different aesthetic. Anyway it was a spectacular example of me caving into my fear of upsetting the artist and that was consistent throughout the process. It was a sensational failure on every level!

At this point the owner of Thyme and Again, Sheila, comes over and says hi to Eric and offers us a Gin and Tonic because of her friendship with Eric and it was Friday afternoon so why not?! A sweet score for me and the timing couldn’t be better considering my last question.

EC: Ooo, now you can stretch the questions out a bit! He says this with an impish laugh. This makes Eric even more congenial. G: What is your perceived biggest success? EC: That’s a good question. I’ve been asked it before and I would say Innocence Lost: A Play about Stephen Truscott. It was commissioned, developed and produced in a short period. It was actually within one calendar year, it all happened. The reason it was such a success was…it was commissioned and developed in Blyth and that was within fifteen kilometers of the original crime the rape and murder of Lynne Harper and the subsequent arrest of Steven Truscott. The community has lived under the shadow of not just the crime but the subsequent mishandling of the case and the trial. And it has never really found its way of dealing with those demons of the story. When I launched the project I did it in a very compressed time period because it had just been revealed that the Supreme Court was going to deliver a final judgement on Steven Truscott’s verdict. I wanted the project to take off before that definitive judgement had come down. In one way I didn’t want to chicken out and only tackle it after a verdict had come down. At the same time I wanted the piece to still exist in a time where there was no definitive verdict. I wanted it so that the piece could be about the community’s response to the crime. And to be in a small town in Southern Ontario and all these shifting sands of fear and guilt and attention on a national scale was influencing all those feelings. So that’s why I pushed it through. When it was announced there was some great resistance from some people in the community. People implored me not to do this and the reason I say this was the greatest success is because there were two very specific and powerful exchanges I had with people who had initially come to me and didn’t want me to do the project. And after the play they came to me and thanked me for doing it. I’m speaking as if I was the sole creator of this piece but I commissioned it. I didn’t direct it but I provided the dramaturgy and the resources to make it happen. That was one of those concrete examples of people changing their position, politically. Those are the moments you live for. It exercised demons without removing a sense of accountability. People were able to express what it was like to be in that moment but they weren’t given the opportunity to say ‘we’re guiltless’. They were given the opportunity to say what it was like to be there and it gave people like me the opportunity to have empathy for them whether we agree with their actions or not.

G: What is your strongest skill? EC: I would say creating an accessible, artistic space...people who know us, people that come to GCTC know that they have got that access. I think that’s it: being accessible in equal parts to artists and other stake holders. G: What do you wish you were better at? EC: I wish I were better at saying ‘no’. I wish I were better at feeling comfortable with that decision when I know someone is going to be disappointed. But that’s the gig. G: What is your actor pet peeve? EC: Hehehe...which one is it? Impatience. Impatience implies that the director isn’t doing their job well enough that they don’t see the mess that’s still in the corner and it’s my job to absolutely recognize that there’s a mess in the corner but have the confidence to get to that later because there’s a bigger mess in the other corner. And it’s not unusual to find yourself in a situation with an actor who just can’t accept that you’re going to get to that in due time. It usually manifests itself in fear and fussiness and an assumption that you can’t see that it’s there and that’s the problem. To deal with someone who thinks you can’t see what’s going on when you are. One step at a time. It’s like anything, that stuff is always driven by fear. You recognize that person is afraid you don’t see the problem. They are afraid the mess is going to affect them or their ability to get their job done. My other pet peeve is ‘The Entertainer!’. That is probably what I recognize in myself. That person who comes into rehearsal and needs to be the star of the show. Who needs to be cracking the jokes and telling stories all the time when we really just want to get to work. G: What is you actor pet rave? EC: It’s the critical thinker. It’s the informed opposition. So, and I will use this example because you were in the room during Butcher… an actor who wouldn’t simply leap into the direction until they understood it. And there are times, as a director, I think I’m being abundantly clear that I want them to try and it gets frustrating if they won’t just tryyyy what I’m asking them to do. But with someone like Sean [Devine] who isn’t afraid to say ‘I don’t understand that.” I know I’m not communicating clearly. When I’m receiving isn’t resistance but a critical response. And I love the critical thinker that says ‘sorry you need to explain that to me because if I do what you’re asking it’s going to undermine everything I’ve been working on up to this moment.’ I much prefer that to “Well that [direction] is going to affect what comes later” because the character doesn't know what’s coming next. It’s much more useful when their critical thinking is there. That’s why I use the example of Sean because he was really consistent with that. He would always supply specific examples for why that was a difficult choice for him to make because it just undermined what he was working on up to that point. A couple of times he caught me off guard and I was like “oh shit, I completely ignored the previous beat” because I thought something might ‘feel kinda cool’. It’s good to be accountable in those moments. G: Ah! I’m taking up so much of your time. EC: Hey its’ gin and tonic time we can talk forever. G: Why do you think people need theatre? EC: Well…It’s good for the brain. It goes back to what I was talking about. I believe firmly that we need to address complex issues in a complex format. Television and film, I’m not saying they can’t do it, but as their technology changes their storytelling format continues to condense things down to shorter and shorter scenes. They are simplifying the argument and in theatre it is by virtue of its live interaction…even if we shorten those scenes if we condense those messages we are still requiring a greater cerebral engagement from an audience which leads to a deeper emotional engagement. It’s just a more effective way to keep critical thinking vibrant. G: What theatre secret do you have to divulge? EC: What do you mean? Like who slept with who? G: Well… hey why not? (Feigning shock) Has that happened?! EC: Oh I think I heard of that happening that one time? G: Oh, did it go well? I can’t imagine it didn’t! We laugh because well…y’know…actors… G: I meant more like some wisdom you would like to share EC: Ha, First day of theatre school, well the first day we had in acting class our teacher said “don’t fuck your friends.” It is probably the single most effective way to ruin a production, to ruin the carefully built structure of your career. I speak very passionately about this because I’ve seen it. It’s just never a good idea.

G: What is the craziest thing you’ve had happen to you on stage? EC: well a calf was born but that was actually after I left the stage. The craziest thing was in the Outdoor Donnellys. This was an outdoor production which took place in many venues around town but it ended with this big fantastic central show on a stage in a big open field. I had this fantastic entrance riding in on a horse drawn stagecoach chasing a woman and as we rolled up in front of the audience I would leap from the stage coach down onto the stage and tackle the girl. It was this big stunt. The horses were moving at a canter and it was not an easy stunt to perform every night. One night, just at the moment we were hitting the zone I would leap from the stage coach the horses bolted and we just went galloping off into the distance while the action on stage came to a halt. It took the driver a long time to get the horses back under control and back to the performance area!