Echo Weekly, August 07-13, 2003
GO JONNY GOAD: THE MAGIC, COMMITMENT & PASSION
By: Christopher Heath Robinson
They call him Jonny. But not in the sense of "Gosh - aren�t I intimately acquainted with a rising star of the stage." No. And certainly not like aging, velvet-jacketed, walking perfumeries who, over gin and tonic number seven, refer to the late Lord Olivier as �Larry� ("I was working with Larry in �47 when he was doing his Hal at the Bexhill-on-Sea Roxy, and I said to Larry -- blah-blah-blah").
No. Whether they earn their pay cheques on stage, back stage or in the front office, Jonathan Goad�s colleagues at the Stratford Festival call him Jonny because he�s just too down to earth and affable to be anything else. Now, this �down-to-earth and affable� business is becoming a bit of a cliche in the growing total of column inches dedicated to this young actor, and I apologize for adding my puny scribal weight to it, but it�s so very true.
And it�s not just a pleasant characteristic of a man who pays the rent with dollars earned on the country�s most prestigious Shakespearean stage. It�s a key facet of what makes him the actor he is. He�s almost embarrassed and apologetic when he�s discussing the magic, the commitment and passion that lies at the core of his ethereal art. But hey - if you�re going to be an accountant, you�ve got to be handy with spreadsheets. To be an actor, you�ll need at least a passing familiarity with magic, commitment and passion.
To be fair, Jonny Goad was born in Bowmanville and that doesn�t leave much room for arrogance. A nice enough city to be sure, but if you�re aspiring to world class arrogance then Paris, Milan or even Toronto are the places you want to grow up in. He grew up in a family keen on creativity and the arts. His mother was a nursery-school teacher and his father was an engineer with a keen interest in amateur theatre; a young Jonny Goad even shared the stage with his father (who passed away at the end of last year) on a couple of occasions. There is no wrenching story of a young man turning his back on the family business to pursue the stage in this actor�s background. All of the Goad family drama happened on stage in front of an audience.
With high school safely negotiated, Jonny Goad toddled westward on the 401 to attend the University of Waterloo, where he majored in social work with a minor in drama. Given UW�s well-known prowess in technical and scientific education, the strength of its drama programs is a secret not well known outside of the university community. But Goad has heaps of praise for the school and its facilities. The Theatre of the Arts, he notes, "was based on the stage at the [Stratford] Festival Theatre, and with seating for 550 is just the right size; you can hear everything spoken on stage." He�s also keen on the Humanities Theatre, describing it as "having a great proscenium" (a proscenium, for those interested, is your more traditional, classical stage, surrounded by a grand arch. I thought it was a part of your intestine - wrong again). Along with good facilities, UW�s drama department also benefited from its proximity to Stratford. It could draw great instructors from Stratford, and Goad specifically mentions director Joel Greenberg and stage combat guru John Stead.
After graduating from UW, Goad toddled back eastward along the 401, shot right past the Bowmanville exit and wound up at the National Theatre School in Montreal. Close to finishing the two year program at NTS, Goad experienced what he describes as a "crisis of faith": was it his own dreams he was aspiring to, or his family�s? So he decided to chuck in the scholastic/training bit, test his commitment and see whether he could hack it in the business. He was also, as he says, "getting into Med School territory, having spent 8 1/2 years in school."
So he turned his back on post-graduate study, that great snooze-alarm on the alarm clock of life ("What? Graduation? No! Just two more years!"), and sought fame, fortune, and coverage in the alternative press, via the stage. And he�s done well too. Hooking up once more with Joel Greenberg, he took a role in his Toronto production of the acclaimed comedy The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged). From there summer stock took him to Georgian Bay and Banff, and finally, five years ago, he joined the company at Stratford, taking part in Stratford�s prestigious Conservatory of Classical Theatre Training. This season he�s taken on three roles: Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, Costard in Love�s Labour�s Lost, and the lead in The Adventures of Pericles.
Pericles is a bit of an odd play. It was immensely popular in its time but has fallen off the map a bit over the last three-hundred years. It was the first of the romances that Shakespeare turned to towards the end of his career, tiring of histories and tragedies (well - who wouldn�t get tired of all that history and all that tragedy? Cheer up Will, I say! Maybe even try a nice bit of non-dramatic poetry).
The play is also a collaboration, with the most likely partner being a George Wilkins who had written a prose version of the story prior to nailing down the stage adaptation deal. All of this collaborative effort stuff was news to me until I had a chance to talk to Goad after a performance. And while it was news, it wasn�t entirely surprising. The first couple of acts struck me as a little episodic: singular and particularized little tableaus strung together by a thread that gets a little tenuous. It was like one of those Lonely Planet video guides to odd parts of the world. There�s a sense of "well - let�s see how you like what people in Tharsus get up to. Like that? OK, off to Pentapolis and let�s check out an actual tournament! Next stop? Ephesus for some spooky rituals with a real live Doctor of Physick!"
This is not, I add hastily, any sort of criticism of the production, which utterly impressed and swept away a beastly cynic such as myself. Rather, as Jonny Goad pointed out, it reflects the fact that George Wilkins probably wrote the first couple of acts, and he was keen as mustard to put on a show that people would like. And people - be they louse-ridden, drunken Renaissance people filling up some time before the bear-baiting, or your vermin-free, modern people up for the weekend from Cheektowaga for a bit of culture - like exciting fights and scary rituals and odd music and strange, exotic locales. So it wasn�t until later, when Shakespeare had dusted off George�s script and decided to put a bit of human heart in it (I mean, of course, a bit of metaphorical human heart. George Wilkins was quite capable of tossing in a bit of literal human heart if that�s what the people wanted), that the play really becomes - well, clever, funny, surprising and terribly moving. It�s an interesting opportunity to witness the genius of Shakespeare when we see his work mingled like this with that of a lesser-known dramatist.
And it�s also a great opportunity for Goad to exploit his feet-on-the-earth, grounded nature. He seems a trifle embarrassed, yet totally sincere, in discussing the more intangible aspects of acting. He doesn�t want to come across as some New Age crystal-fondler when he talks about the need for actors to undertake a "journey to the self" or how acting requires a "return to innocence." When he says that dramatic training is necessary to release "the actor within," he does it so apologetically, yet honestly, that you know you�re not getting fed a line of pseudo-mystic mumbo-jumbo, but just the thoughts of a man describing his job. There is a lot of ethereal brain-meandering needed in acting. But what Jonny Goad doesn�t lose sight of is it�s purpose; it�s vital in reproducing a grounded and tangible character on the stage. All of that magic, all of that deeply abstract thought, is critical to manufacture a character who, like Goad�s Pericles, responds rationally and humanly in the bizarre, otherworldly realm of a Shakespearean romance. Shakespeare put the human heart in The Adventures of Pericles, and Goad, with one foot planted firmly in the physical world and the other in the abstract (and it doesn�t even make his eyes water!), finds it and lets the whole audience have a good look.