Guest Artist "Snapshot" - John Innes

A National Theatre School graduate with an MA in Cross-Cultural Spirituality from Regis College, John has over 45 years as a working actor—including 12 seasons with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Since first appearing on our stage in 2015's Mass Appeal, he's made appearances on two Hallmark TV series: When Calls the Heart and Garage Sale Mystery, as well as lending his voice to the animation series Superbook. Bonus? A recent two-week visit to Ireland. “You gotta love research!” 

John Innes as Tony Reilly in Outside Mullingar. Photo by Dale Marushy.

Where do you call home?

"Most of my adult life I have been a gypsy, but currently I call Vancouver home."

What's your 'must-have' morning ritual?

"For a number of years now I have been an admirer of the contemporary Franciscan monk, Richard Rhor. He has a meditation on-line which I start my day with, reading and meditating on."

Favourite (theatre) shows you've been a part of?

"When asked what is my favourite role or show, I tend to say, "The one I'm working on." However, two of my most terrifying, but proudest experiences were: Stepping in for Brian Bedford as King Lear on the Stratford Shakespeare Festival stage, & playing Horst in the Canadian premiere of Bent at Manitoba Theatre Centre."

Favorite TV/Film experience?  (You were on AirWolf AND 21 Jump Street!  Pretty sweet...)

"My proudest moment in TV/Film was when a Hallmark TV movie which I had a major role in Christmas Lodge, won a Dove award (2013) as best family Christmas video of the year."

So you went to Ireland... you method actor, you.  What did you learn about the land you'd like to share? Any pleasant surprises?

"What can I say? I made a similar excursion to Ireland two years ago before I did a production of The Seafarer at Pacific Theatre in Vancouver - to soak up the distinctively Irish atmosphere and to become acquainted, first hand, with the various local dialects... I'm not a very good researcher when it comes to book or picture learning. Experience, for better or worse, has generally been my teacher. I needed to feel the land, breathe the air, listen to the local dialects, observe their dress, eat their food, etc...  Plus, for me, as a passionate traveller and an actor, any trip that I can call research is tax deductible. I fell in love with the people, especially the country folk, their earthiness and generosity of spirit. I was pleasantly surprised to be made aware of their connection with the Spanish, historically. (Another passion of mine.)" 

Do you have a favourite Irish saying?

"My current favourite Irish saying comes from W.B. Yeats 'There are no strangers here.  Only friends you haven't met.'"

Are you Outside or Inside? 

"Being adopted and of unknown blood-line, I have always considered and experienced myself as being Outside. However, as a rehearsing Christian, I have always found myself, my True Self, Inside... in the ever-embracing arms of the lover of my life.  And in reference to the first question [where do you call home], that has always been my True Home."  

Coffee or Tea, and how do you take it?

"One cup of coffee in the morning, black - except in Ireland where I can't, and don't want to, resist True-Steeped-Irish-Breakfast-Tea, clear. But no caffeine for the rest of the day or I don't sleep. Herbal tea? Yes - peppermint or ginger-lemon-honey.  

What are some of your non-theatre related interests? 

"Travel - my passion. Tennis - until the balls of my feet started saying no. Exploring my faith in a non-institutionally defined manner.  And being a face and a reminder of where we've come from and how far we have to go, in the Christian LGBT youth community as they struggle to receive full recognition, acceptance, and participation within the family, the Church and the broader community, in accordance with Christ's teaching, 'Love one another as I have loved you.'"  

John appeared as Father Farley in last season's 'Mass Appeal' and is currently playing the cantankerous Tony Reilly in 'Outside Mullingar'.  Don't miss the opportunity to see this extraordinary actor share his comedic gifts on our stage.  For tickets and information, visit rosebudtheatre.com

Setting the Stage. . . In Process with Designer Dale Marushy

Set Designer Dale Marushy shared his creative process on his design for Outside Mullingar - a modern day romantic comedy set in rural Ireland.

"The world of the play takes place in a landscape not so different from ours.  I spent many hours 'Google mapping' my way around County Westmeath, where the town of Mullingar (and our characters) reside.  The land is central to the story of this play, as are the social dynamics of an Irish home.

Marushy's set design for Outside Mullingar, in miniature.

Within that broader setting, we needed a house.  "Confines" of a kitchen serve as a central meeting place, and also, a battleground.  The interior (minimalist, hard angles) needed to contrast the open landscape (wild abundance), which became a metaphor for the show itself: characters wrestling to find congruity with their place in life.   There's freedom, but servitude.  To the land and each other.  

One panel of the giant landscape, graphic designed by Dale Marushy.

Early on, Morris and I brainstormed the idea of "outside" always being present.  Or how the kitchen could feel part of the land, while still an outsider on it.  This evolved into the house as an open structure with giant upstage scrim portraying an inescapably beautiful landscape.  The house still feels like a house, but we're always faced with the land, the struggles, and question of ownership.  Does the land belong to them, or do they belong to the land?

The set under construction in the shop.  Photo by Dale Marushy

It's a riff on exposure, which for me, is the journey of the play. Vulnerability, transparency, exposure: the invisible walls that support a true home. 

The set starts taking shape on stage.  Photo by Dale Marushy

To see the final product of Marushy's set design, and the beautiful story it participates in, come experience Outside Mullingar, presented by Rosebud Theatre.  www.rosebudtheatre.com

John Patrick Shanley on Outside Mullingar

Outside Mullingar is a relational comedy about love, death, home and hope: fulfillment of promises and the places we find reconciliation.

One of America's most celebrated playwrights, John Patrick Shanley writes characters with grace, humour and complexity.  With Outside Mullingar he set out to explore unknown (but personal) territory.

Judith Buchan, Heather Pattengale, & John Innes in Outside Mullingar.
Photo by Morris Ertman

"I always knew I'd have to come home eventually.  I'm Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other.  My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands.  He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s.  I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish music, but stayed away from the old country till I was over 40. I just couldn't own being Irish...

"When I finally went to Ireland, I had to go.  It was 1993.  My father was finally too old to travel alone, and he asked me to take him home.  When an old man asks you to take him home, you have to do it.

"When I sat with my father in that farm kitchen, the one that he had grown up in, and listened to my Irish family talk, I recognized that this was my Atlantis, the lost and beautiful world of my poet's heart.  There was no way to write about the farm, yet I had to write about it.  I listened to this amazing language these folks were speaking as if it were normal conversation, and I knew this was my territory..."
  Continue reading the main story
Read the rest of John Patrick Shanley on his Irishness and Outside Mullingar in the New York Times.


And come see Outside Mullingar, the opening show of our 2016 season.  For tickets visit Rosebud Theatre.com

An Actor's Diary: Outside Mullingar

Did you know we had a YouTube Channel?  Click on the link and subscribe to keep yourself updated on goings on in video land.

And check out our insider's video on the acting process.  Heather Pattengale is preparing for her role in our upcoming Outside Mullingar, by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, John Patrick Shanley.

This all adds up to a romantic comedy you won't want to miss.  Visit www.rosebudtheatre.com for ticket information and show details.

Something to Think On...

Wildwood Fire Returns!

For one night only, February 13, 2016, we're bringing back last season's homegrown hit, Wildwood Fire.

Written by RSA alums Lauren de Graaf and Kelsey Krogman, Wildwood Fire began as a student final project and honed itself into heartfelt entertainment through sold out runs.

June Carter Cash and her mother Maybelle Carter are set to play a concert in Rosebud, but Johnny has landed himself in the hospital.  What's a Carter girl to do when the show must go on?  Come and hear June Carter and mother Maybelle sing their way through the joys and tears that come with loving the Man in Black.

Starring deGraaf as June, and Alix Cowman as Maybelle, the two are also part of the dynamic folk trio, 'The Dearhearts'.


 For tickets visit RosebudTheatre.com

Remembering Robin Phillips

A giant of the theatre passed away a few days ago. His name was Robin Phillips, and he was a mentor to many, including myself. I’m compelled to share a bit of his story with you - our Rosebud Theatre patrons and friends - because Rosebud in just a few degrees of separation has been influenced by this man who led the Stratford Festival in what has come to be known as the “starlight years”. He also led the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, where I met him.

I was a young Edmonton director and designer when Robin came to Edmonton. Out of the blue, I received a call from the Citadel Theatre. Robin Phillips wanted to see me. He was looking for designers. So, this nervous Alberta-born country boy went to meet one of the English speaking theatre’s most prominent directors. (Robin Phillips just happened to be a designer in his own right as well. I didn’t know that at the time.) The next week, I was offered a significant number of shows at the Citadel, and thus began a working relationship with Robin lasting 8 years or so that informs my work to this day. 

I should mention that the year before Robin began as Director-General at the Citadel Theatre, he came to direct two productions. One was Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. A young Nathan Schmidt was among the high school audiences that attended. That show was the beginning of Nathan's fascination with the theatre and resulted in his coming to Rosebud to study. Nathan remembers the experience vividly. It mesmerized him.

Robin was a staging genius, moving actors on the stage in astonishing ways. He was an actor’s director, sculpting a world around the performer that wakened them to the moment to moment reality of a given scene. The performances he enabled were natural and electric, driven from deep within. And he was a lover of beauty, willing to break commonly held aesthetic rules to enable it. He was a lover of humanity in all of it’s colours, helping us all to see and help define it from whatever our particular roles in his productions were. He was specific while being open to whatever it is we had to offer. He only required that we offer all that we had. I’m reminded of the story of the loaves and fishes in the New Testament. I’m not claiming that Robin was Jesus, but there was something about the way he took whatever the creative people gathered around him offered, and then multiplied it’s meaning into a totality of expression that could take your breath away.  

And breath was a big part of it. One of my fondest memories of rehearsals was watching Robin stand in the chorus of a given musical, breathing with them, reacting with them - conducting them in the beat by beat breath of a scene, a maestro standing in the midst of them, reacting to the story. I was his scenic designer when he began his foray into opera at The Canadian Opera Company. I watched as he placed his hands on opera singers diaphragms, helping them to discover how to better act a scene by wakening their breath to the story beats in a given aria. 

I used to meet him at the beginning and end of each rehearsal day. The mornings before rehearsal were spent placing furniture onto the taped floor in the rehearsal hall, then on the stage - arranging it in ways that would enable actors to perform naturally because the furniture placed them in exactly the right relationship with each other and the audience. The end of the day was just a check-in to see what had transpired in rehearsals that day - a constant reminder that the work we did together was ultimately focused on the performance of the actor as principle story teller. Rehearsal refined the story. If you weren’t connected to rehearsal, you weren’t connected to the core of the event we were collectively trying to create - hence my habit of daily checking in. 

Conceptually there was usually little discussion between us. I remember a day when Robin came into the design office at the Citadel and said “Gingerbread”, abruptly turning to leave the room. I said “clapboard”, and then shouted after him. “We’re talking about Music Man, yes?” … Without turning back, the answer ... “Yes darling”. And so concluded our director/designer conversation about The Music Man. In the weeks following, I designed the show and delivered the white paper model to Robin’s secretary. At the end of that day, I collected the model. A note was attached. “Lovely darling”. And so the process that became our production of The Music Man began. 

There were, of course discussions that were more involved. I spent a day at Robin’s house in the country outside of Stratford, working through cuts to the designs for Beatrice et Benedict at The Canadian Opera Company. We were over budget, so had to deal with creative restrictions. Somehow, after the initial indignant bluster, Robin was able to live with limitations. He was creatively fluid. He always found a way to be enabled by the realities of limitation. 

Sitting at his dining room table that day, I looked up to a shelf holding hand made books of each of his productions. He shared one with me, and it was an astonishingly beautiful account of the inspirations and creative journeys of that production. There were photos of sets, costumes, bits of fabric and more. It was, in a word, beautiful - a striking visual and written memoir of the show. 

His house was also an expression of eclectic beauty. It consisted of an architectural extension around an old log cabin - the old incorporated with exquisite taste into the new, all surrounded by flower gardens, immaculately kept by his partner, Joe. 

I’ve often pondered why it was that Robin was able to receive what we offered with such openness. I have come to the conclusion that he could stage a show with any set of variables. He saw the beauty in what was, and if it was inspired in some way, he was able to build it into something glorious - like his eclectic house and gardens. It was part of his magic. His aesthetic was so expansive that it could include any number of disparate expressions. 

In our production of Royal Hunt of the Sun, he engaged a First Nations artist named Jane Ash Poitras to act as a consultant on the visuals surrounding the production. Robin was enamoured with her paintings, so wanted to open up our understanding of indigenous South American culture by having someone who practiced the spirituality involved in the expression. The conversations she and I had about white exploitation and Incan spirituality created a rich creative cauldron from which the specifics of the designs for the show emerged. Our conversations were wonderfully honest debates about the nature of Christianity and the nature of First Nations spirituality. One of the props created for that show - a sun wheel - adorns my house/office in Rosebud.  

I don’t know how much Robin knew about my faith. It was not something we had time to discuss. There was always a show to get onto the stage. But I remember a wonderfully transparent conversation with him one evening where he described the church in the village he grew up in. With great fondness Robin shared his memory of Easter Sunday mornings, when the church was filled with white lillies. In that moment, I saw in him the wellspring of his love of the theatre. It wasn’t unlike mine. Something in what we were doing on the stage reflected what we had experienced as divine in our growing up. He remembered a rural church filled with white lillies. I remembered spring mornings with a rural congregation gathered on a river bank - all dressed in white - singing the refrain of “Happy Day” with every baptism that brought a sputtering person out of the muddy spring waters of Pipestone Creek in Millet, Alberta. And I believe with all my heart that we shared a common understanding - the belief that our humanity was connected to something inexplicably divine. 

Belief is ultimately what fosters great art. That was, and certainly still is my perspective, and it is the perspective expressed so eloquently by Robin in the following short film about his huge contribution to the theatre called Move Your Mind. I share it with you because his voice has been such an inspiration to me and countless other theatre artists across this country. We collectively grieve his loss while trusting that the Divine spark that inspired him holds him for all eternity - like so much starlight …

Move Your Mind: https://www.nfb.ca/film/move_your_mind

Morris Ertman