Don’t expect George F. Walker to attend opening night when his play, Better Living, opens at Langham Court Theatre next week.
True, expecting the playwright to show up in Victoria would be a big, fat long-shot. After all, Walker — who penned such modern classics as Zastrozzi and Nothing Sacred — is a legend in Canadian theatre circles. He’s a bona fide big shot, renowned (and sometimes notorious) for comedies that are as black and surreal as anything Martin McDonagh dishes out.
Celebrity aside, Walker makes a habit of not attending his openings anyway. Not even when actress Marsha Mason kicks up a fuss.
Remember Mason? She was in The Goodbye Girl. Her husband was Neil Simon.
Walker, phoning this week from his Toronto home, recalled the time Mason was in one of his plays, Escape from Happiness. It was produced in New York off-Broadway.
Mason asked about him going to the opening.
“I said, ‘I don’t think I will.’ She got really upset. She said, ‘What do you mean you’re not coming?’ She said ‘My ex-husband, Neil Simon, goes to all his productions.’ I said to her, ‘Why the f--- would he do that?’ ”
He added: “It’s incredibly intense, the whole opening-night thing. It’s really far too much.”
Walker, 65, has won the Governor-General’s Award three times, the Dora Mavor Moore Award five times and the Chalmers Award nine times. His plays have been performed in the U.S., Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Heck, they’ve even been translated into Czech and Hebrew.
He’s a success by any standard. Yet Walker insists he’s not a “theatre guy.” Never has been. Not really.
Walker grew up in Toronto’s rough-and-tumble east end. His dad was a labourer who once managed a bath house. Before becoming a playwright, Walker drove a cab. He got into theatre by responding to a Factory Theatre poster requesting original plays.
“I never really felt comfortable in the theatre, partly because I have no background, partly because I’m working class with no history of it. I never really got out of that. But also, I just never wanted to be that, you know?”
Walker’s avoidance of opening nights is connected to a wider distaste for all the social trappings surrounding the theatre. Sure, he has friends in theatre. But overall, the whole social thing is “a bunch of hooey.”
Cocktails with the theatre set are the worst. Not that Walker has anything against cocktails.
“I’d find a corner in the theatre, far, far away, and I would take a bottle or a drink. And no matter how far away I was, no matter what corner I’d hidden in, I was found, constantly,” he said.
“People would gather around me, layers of people. And me in the corner, thinking all the time, ‘I’m not worth this kind of attention. It’s too embarrassing. Go away. Everything I had to say, you just saw.’ ”
For a decade, Walker more or less left the theatre. He turned to television writing, co-creating CBC’s This is Wonderland and contributing to such series as The Newsroom and Due South. In recent years, however, he returned to theatre writing, writing half a dozen plays. It’s a rich, prolific period in his career.
The new plays include Dead Metaphor, which last month opened at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, a respected regional company. Walker’s black comedy about a sniper returning from Iraq was met with wide critical acclaim.
He was, of course, invited to Dead Metaphor’s opening night. But, staying the course, Walker gave the same answer he gave Marsha Mason.
“People usually get mad at me for not going,” he said. “But they were pretty understanding.”
The Victoria Theatre Guild’s production of George F. Walker’s Better Living opens Thursday night at Langham Court Theatre and continues through to May 11. Tickets are $19 and $21. The box office is 250-384-2142.