Profile of Actor Stephen Ouimette
Canada's busiest Working Actor Directs 2 Plays at Stratford and Films TV Hit Slings and Arrows
Actor Stephen Ouimette on his Toronto CanStage production of Doug Wright's one man / woman show I Am My Own Wife.
Stephen Ouimette, who jokingly said to me he might be the busiest working actor in Canada, may indeed have taken on too much earlier this year, between directing two shows at the Stratford Festival, (Ghosts and Much Ado About Nothing), mastering the acting challenge of his life in I Am My Own Wife and filming the hit TV show Slings and Arrows.
Five days after I Am My Own Wife closed at CanStage in Toronto (Jefferson Mays played Charlotte on Broadway in 2003) Ouimette was headed to the director's chair at the Stratford Festival, but suffered a stint of exhaustion from his self acknowledged 'multi-tasking', sadly having to withdraw from directing duties.
Now he's feeling fine.
This is the first of three-part series about Stephen Ouimette, his character study, and his creative process while playing the role of Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf.
Ouimette has had many challenges in his long career, but one of the most difficult was to inhabit the simple black dress and pearls of German transvestite / cultural icon Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf. Ouimette played a multitude of characters in Doug Wright's acclaimed monodrama I Am My Own Wife - a transgendered tour de force I won't soon forget.
Did Doug Wright's piece feel like a verbal symphony to you?
This piece is very like music. There are movements, and I think it is important for the ear to have breaks every once and a while. My instinct was to just keep it going, keep it going, keep it going, and it was actually the director Robin Phillips who said we have to finish the section. We need to give the audience a chance to digest it, so I am going to build in a little space here so that you just can't keep moving on to the next thing, even though you think that is part of the gymnastics of it - to be able to just switch, switch, switch, switch, switch. Well, that is part of it in the scenes, but when a section is finished, you have to musically ... whew ... let that finish.
Like a bridge or a chorus?
Yeah, and that the quiet, the silence, can be as powerful as the spoken word, and knowing when to do that. It also helps the audience keep up with you, so you don't get ahead of them.
You and Doug Wright (who sent Phillips a letter in response to CanStage's Canadian premiere, but did not speak with Ouimette or Phillips directly) had a similar journey because Doug Wright had a crisis of creative conscious while he was writing this. He found out that Charlotte was not the person he thought she was. After listening to all her "necessary fictions", both of you had to decide what was real.
Absolutely. At the end of the day, I don't think he [Doug Wright] knew. I think he sort of had all the information and thought well, how do I decide what she was?
I don't think he could and I think that's perfectly legitimate, to say I am now going to show you all the layers of the onion that I found; now you make up your own mind.
At the end of it all, you just think ... you've got to be inspired by that will to survive. You have to be. It's impossible not to be, even if some of it might be that she went to lengths that maybe we wouldn't think we would go to, to get by.
But then again, you don't know. You don't know what you would do in that situation. We can sit and judge it and say well, she shouldn't have sold out Alfred, and she shouldn't have done this and that. But unless you are in that situation, you don't know what you would do to survive.
That's attractive to all people because, and that's what I think makes Doug Wright universal - that 'underdog' triumphing over huge odds in a heavy, heavy, political landscape - a woman who owned her being with authority and without apology.
