Talking Dirty

Not very many actors in Canada get to have the experience of playing a character in a play much longer than 3 weeks. Sometimes a play that connects with the theatre going public can have its run extended by a week or even a month. Quite often even that’s simply not possible for a whole range of reasons and the play closes after its originally scheduled run. 

 In 1981 I signed a contract for a play at The Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver. It was a new Canadian play called Talking Dirty. The play had already been workshopped over a couple of years at that point but we were allowed a 3 and a half week rehearsal period anyway. This was very rare for The Arts Club where rehearsal periods were usually 2 weeks and occasionally even shorter. 

We rehearsed in the basement rehearsal room at The Vancouver East Cultural Centre. We opened, at The Arts Club Theatre, the old one at Seymour and Davie, on October 13, 1981. 

For the next four and a half years my life would be dominated by this play and the character of Dave Lerner. I played him 658 times in three different productions. The originating production in Vancouver for the first year, the Toronto production for three months a couple of years later and a tour which took us to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and Centaur Theatre in Montreal, a year after that. 

Looking back now I think doing that play for so long was a mistake. It wasn’t the only role I played during that time but it dominated my creative life. I didn’t give myself much opportunity to expand by continuously saying yes to another run of Talking Dirty. Lesson learned too late. 

That first year in Vancouver was amazing though. None of us involved in the show had ever experienced anything even remotely like it. Packed houses every night, line ups down the block for this wee little first- come-first-served 250 seat theatre. When we came to work every evening there would already be a lineup going up the stairs that we would have to excuse ourselves through. Many, many people came to see it more than once. I know this because we got cards and letters from them. All of us in the cast we recognized on the streets and in the stores. I remember walking down South Granville Street one afternoon along a wall of windows that looked into a bank. Several women working at the bank were walking along the inside of the windows as I walked along the outside. They were rapping on the windows and smiling at me and giving thumbs up. 

Halloween 1982. The new Arts Club Theatre on Granville Island was open and it was decided to do a production of Rocky Horror Show there. I was still doing Talking Dirty, coming to the end of my first stint. The Rocky Horror Show opened very late at night. I don’t recall how late but late enough that when I finally decided I should drive home from the opening night party it was after two in the morning. 

In those days this meant the bars had already been closed for a while and the streets were pretty empty and quiet. Which was a good thing because I was drunk as a lord. Which was not a good thing because the only other car on the road had red lights flashing on the roof as it came toward me. I was driving the wrong way on a one way street. With a police car pulling me over. Oh joy, oh rapture. Oh shit. One of the officers got out of the cruiser and came up to the driver’s door and asked for my licence and registration. He walked back to his vehicle and began the process of checking my documentation. Then, through my rear view mirror, I could see the 2 officers talking. After a few minutes they both got out of their car and came back to my driver’s side door. They gave me back my licence and registration and told me they thought I should turn around and drive home as carefully as possible. They would follow me for a while to make sure I was OK. Then as they turned to return to their cruiser the one that hadn’t said a word up to then looked back at me and said, “And we really enjoyed the play.” 

We used music from a local band’s first album to open and close the show and to this day every time I hear Too Bad by Doug and the Slugs I kind of shudder inside.