First-Person: Johanna Nutter on My Pregnant Brother (SummerWorks)

Starting SummerWorks
by Johanna Nutter
[ED: This article is a reprint from Ms Nutter's blog. You can follow the entire saga of My Pregnant Brother at the company website mypregnantbrother.com]

For those of you who followed my Good People blogs in Boston, you’ll understand why the picture at the top was a funny thing to walk past on my way to Theatre Passe Muraille. 

Strangely appropriate advice. See, I was on my way to the theatre for our tech meeting, the day before opening My Pregnant Brother at the SummerWorks festival here in Toronto. This is usually a really fun exercise in simplicity and Jeremy and I get a kick out of watching the faces of the house staff relax as they realize just how easy our show is to assemble and execute. It’s just a chair and some chalk. What?! CHALK you say? We’ll have none of that!  Yep. Passe Muraille has a strict NO CHALK policy. Lucky for us, the SummerWorks staff was already hard at work fixing the problem; they’d built a back wall and sheets of Masonite were on order for the floor. The folks at TPMB are super-efficient and we had a good time getting to know our new space.

Jeremy and I headed off to Tequila Mockingbird for a production meeting. Sitting under a beautiful tree on the upstairs patio, we worked on the programs, ate burgers, and drank Ontario beers with names like the Flying Monkey’s Smashbomb Atomic IPA. I went through a few mental convulsions trying to re-write my bio. I hate doing that. I much prefer writing other people’s bios, which is part of what I like so much about writing these blogs. 

For example: Cory. I could happily write her life story. She’s one of my dearest friends. We met in grade 10, when my mother moved us out to Victoria, BC. We were staying with my half sister’s half sister and her family in Oak Bay while we searched for our own place, and so that’s where I went to sign up for school. Leaving the office, I looked around at the students and whispered to Mum that if she could spare any money at all, we should head over to Eaton’s and get me some new clothes or these kids would eat me alive. So, we spent the family allowance cheque on a Polo shirt and a college cardigan with two white stripes around one arm, and off I went, armed to the teeth in respectability. Of course, I discovered a whole group of people who went to Oak Bay High School who didn’t get BMWs for their birthdays, including Cory, who sometimes drove a Bentley. This was because one of her father’s crazy schemes--and he had many—was dealing antique cars. He also ended up marrying one of our classmates, but that’s another story. Basically, Cory and I belonged to a select few who had fulltime jobs through school and I still feel safe knowing she’s around to give me her pithy advice when I need it. She was the one who told me, way back in grade 10, Johanna, after yourself everyone else comes first.

Cory lives on the Humber River, in one of these towers in front of the water. It’s pretty swanky. There was a time when I would have felt like I was on some kind of alien planet out here, but now I can appreciate being so close to the city that you can reach out and touch it, but so removed that you can walk along the water and spot finches in the bushes. We laughed about how calm and orderly Cory has made her life, considering the chaos from which she came. 

The next day, show day, I moved to a very different part of town. Chinatown East is where Joanne lives. A couple of years ago, Montreal company Tableau d’Hôte put on the whole Suburban Motel cycle by George F. Walker, and Jo played my daughter in Risk Everything. I gave her a really hard time. I don’t think I was ready to have an adult daughter. It’s a tribute to the mettle she’s made of that she didn’t quit and in the end, we became great friends and would work together again in a heartbeat. I hauled my suitcase up her stairs and was planning to spend the day postering when I got a call from Stefan, the head tech at SummerWorks. The masonite had arrived, but they had cut the sheets in half, and would I be able to come to the studio and paint them, as he had many other things he had to take care of. In half? Passe Muraille had also forbidden any screws in the floor so we were going to have to tape the sheets to the floor, and now we were going to have to tape them back together, too…that’s a lot of tape. Of course! I told Stefan. The studio wasn’t far from Joanne’s so I walked over there as fast as I could. When I got there, the sheets, paint, and rollers were lying on the floor waiting for me. I set them up and started painting. During this process I had a bit of a meltdown. I was mostly just stressed about the opening and the fact that the antibiotics for the walking pneumonia my doctor had suspected me of having didn’t seem to be working. And now here I was, breathless and alone, only a few hours from show time, doing something that a small part of me felt shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. When I realized that I was crying into the paint, I told myself is was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and get back to the task at hand. And you know, painting can be fun.

I had a great time getting over to Insomnia, where Joanne works and I was meeting Jeremy. It made me wish, probably for the thousandth time, that I had a camera in my eyes and I could take a picture just by blinking. There was a guy who had a face like Orson Welles, wearing his hair in a side ponytail and sporting a tube top and very short shorts. There was a teenage girl wearing mouse ears and a shirt with a big heart around the words “I’m a Keeper”, carrying a sock monkey. There was a young man with a pencil mustache in a sky-blue vest, purple shirt, and lavender bowtie. There was about a hundred people doing tai chi in front of Dundas station, and as I went down the stairs, a man in a big beard and an Iron Maiden shirt came storming up them saying, I’m not coming back down here, it’s ridiculous. On the train, there was a young man in skin tight jeans and cowboy boots, rolling and unrolling the sleeves of his checkered shirt and admiring the reflected result in the doors of the subway train while an escapee from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest looked on, sporting a lumberjack jacket and a white t-shirt with the words FOREVER FOREVER. And all around them, people trying very hard to look as normal as possible. The only ones I felt safe photographing were the tai-chiers… 

…and this man, walking into the Filmore.

So, after another great lunch (here’s a crazy coincidence: the woman who made my seafood linguini used to date my brother!) we headed over to the theatre. The sheets of Masonite had made it over and were installed. They did not look right at all. Because there was such a contrast between the mat black of the floor and the true black of the tape, and because so much tape had been necessary to install the sheets, the whole effect was of these rather ominous-looking bars. My Pregnant Brother: Prison Break. Stefan, Susie, Jeremy and I sat there rather glumly trying to come up with alternatives, each one involving more work and not being possible for opening. Then a thought came to me: what if we put more lines of tape, crossing the stage horizontally, so we would end up with a grid? We tried it and the effect was not that bad. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I would design dream houses on graph paper… 

So. On with the show. It was a small opening, about 25 people in the house, including Cory and Joanne. It’s a story about being a girl who had to grow up fast, so having two other girls in the house who match that description was really nice. And with all my worries about my lungs not being up to the challenge, as soon as I opened my mouth I discovered that the Backspace at Passe Muraille has the most wonderfully live quality and I could speak closely without straining one bit. They were a serious audience, but they were listening. And when they did laugh, they meant it. It was a good lesson for me, to do the show here, where everything is unchartered. A couple of times I found myself surprised by the audience, either by the absence or presence of an audible response, and I was reminded that I never want to know what’s coming, and I always need to be telling the story like it’s happening for the first time and that I’m telling it to the people who are actually there with me in the room. 

With the show officially open, after all the real-life drama of building a theatre within a theatre, we felt we deserved a party. And we gave ourselves one. The rest of the evening was a whirlwind of pints at the paddock, adventures in alleyways, opening party at the great hall where we hooked up with the gang from our sister show, Big Plans, karaoke at the savoy, a lost and found camera, and a bench in Trinity Park.

At the end of a long night, I caught some of the Olympics in a Chinese restaurant and I thought, I know just how they feel.

mypregnantbrother.com