The most memorable and lasting part of Mary Neill’s theatre class at Western in 1988 was meeting Donna. She was unlike anyone I knew, transplanted from bush country in Northern Ontario, free of pretense, calling cheese cake ‘Moose Milk Pie’, often accompanied in acting and directing class by her precocious two-year-old daughter, Julia.
I don’t know how many hundreds of times we walked through those side doors in University College on our way to Literature and Drama classes. But I’ll never forget the first show we did together... .
Let me start by telling you Donna is 5 inches shorter than I am. In the spring of that school year, we were both cast as singing, dancing, boob-bound boy-dwarves in a campus musical production of the The Hobbit. I was Gloin (with apologies to Tolkien. 😂) Through our many collaborative projects since, we’ve been equally ‘creative’ but were soon casting ourselves in roles that suited us perfectly. 😂
Donna learned to play guitar and became the award-winning singer-songwriter, actor, producer and drama teacher she is today. I became the big-picture thinker and creative collaborator I am today. .
After uni we established a young people’s theatre company that hired and trained teens to perform for families in the city through the summer months. It was the summer-dream-job of a lifetime for those theatre kids. We knew it. We created the job we wished existed for us when we were that age.
.
We conceived and created it sitting at Donna’s kitchen table. We raised six figures to fund and operate it on a shoestring for three summers before moving on. Since then Donna has gone on the co-write and perform an autobiographical solo show off broadway, and I’ve moved back into story craft in new ways.
Where did you go to college/uni? Who was the most important person you met there?
#
|
