The Globe and Mail, June 17, 2005
Goad lives the free-spirited life
By: Kamal Al-Solaylee
When Tennessee Williams rewrote his 1940 flop of a play Battle of Angels as the relatively more successful Orpheus Descending in 1957, he had Elvis Presley on his mind for the lead character of the guitar-carrying hustler Valentine Xavier. When the play was adapted two years later to the big screen as The Fugitive Kind (by Williams himself), the role was adjusted considerably to fit Marlon Brando's already-iconic cinematic persona. Valentine, wrote Williams in an introduction to Orpheus Descending, is a "wild-spirited boy who wanders into a conventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a chicken coop." Presley and Brando, in their glory pre-cheeseburger days, fit the bill. But the all-Canadian, sweetly handsome Jonathan Goad? Let's pause over this one.
While it's undeniable that the Bowmanville, Ont.-raised, Waterloo University-educated Goad, 34, is one of the most electrifying young performers at the Stratford Festival, his signature style is not the attention-seeking but the effortlessly confident and emotionally truthful. Even in the current season, his seventh, where his other two parts are the volatile Dmitry in Jason Sherman's adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov (now playing) and the exacting Angelo in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (opening in August), the infinitely approachable Goad is not the first name that comes to mind when thinking of Valentine.
"What are you talking about? I feel every bit as cool as Elvis Presley," muses Goad before explaining in more detail the genesis of Valentine. "When Tennessee Williams first wrote him in the late 1930s, the only person he had in mind was himself -- a romanticized version of himself. He originally wrote him as a poet, not a musician. He probably melded Elvis with himself. I'm still getting to know this Valentine, the guy is hugely mercurial -- always from a place of great goodness but he really runs the gamut. His life experience ranges from being a wild boy in terms of living in the wilds by himself to a downtown hustler to a heartfelt musician to a real player of women to a purist in his values."
When director Miles Potter approached him with an offer to play Valentine opposite Stratford star Seana McKenna as Lady Torrance, the neglected wife of the local dry-goods store-owner, Goad "didn't have any hesitation or feel wrong for it."
It did strike him that a trip to New Orleans as part of his high-school band wasn't going to cut it as firsthand experience of Williams's mythical world of Southern protagonists, plantations and prejudices. He made his way there, rented a bike for a week and, like his character, drifted between neighbourhoods.
"It's a pretty astonishing environment even now, so I can only imagine what it was like during Tennessee's heyday. There's poverty like I never, ever encountered in what we call a First World nation."
Goad may still be figuring out the intricacies of playing Valentine and understanding the moral implications of his liaison with Lady Torrance, but he's very clear on Williams's relationship to both. "The thing that becomes apparent to me is that he adored these characters he's put in the centre of his play; adored them." Williams himself described their relationship as an "emotional record of his youth" and, three decades later, in a review of a 1989 revival, New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich sealed their fate as the culmination of a long line of Williams's "sensitive nonconformists who . . . must be destroyed by the bullying real world."
The play (whose ending contains a frightening but logical expression to the culture of violence and "corruption," an oft-repeated word in the text) leaves Goad no option but to embrace wholeheartedly the fragile and threatening atmosphere created by Williams. Performing at the U-shaped and intimate Tom Patterson Theatre further mixes up the ingredients in the truth-artifice divide in all acting.
"It's harder to lie in that space," explains Goad.
"On a proscenium stage, you can hide behind things. This is my third time I had an entire season in it. I find my relationship with it is more intimate. As problematic as it is, I adore that space. There's something about it, like a tongue thrust out to the audience . . ."
How much longer Goad will keep performing there and in the Stratford Festival in general is not yet decided. He still takes it on a year-by-year basis. "They keep offering me roles I can't say no to. But you try to keep yourself honest by not getting sucked in by the security of it. . . . I always thought of myself as an artist that would travel a lot more across the country and do more fringe and smaller-scale work." Maybe playing a free-spirited drifter is just a rehearsal (or a sign, since this is Tennessee Williams, after all) for what's yet to come.