Toronto Star, May 24, 2003
Leading man also plays clowns
By: Robert Crew
At the end of his first year at the Stratford Festival, Jonathan Goad received a good offer for the following season.
When he turned it down, he was asked to report to the artistic director's office.
"Aren't we meeting your needs?" a surprised Richard Monette asked him.
"What you have offered me is great," Goad replied, "but I see myself differently."
The festival had spotted a dashing young leading man, someone who would shortly be ready to step into handsome hero roles. Goad, on the other hand, also wanted to play commoners and clowns.
"I told Richard that I relate as much to the clowns as I do to the young princes," Goad recalls. "I think it was an important moment for me."
Which is why, in this his fifth season, Goad finds himself playing not only the title role in Shakespeare's Pericles but also Tranio, Lucentio's witty servant in The Taming of the Shrew and Costard, the quick-witted clown, in the late-season opener, Love's Labour's Lost.
As Goad points out, clowns tend to be the province of those actors who don't look like leading men.
"There is a lot of visual stereotyping," Goad remarks, "and clowns tend to go to older people. But I am more interested in playing a Mercutio than a Romeo. And I also love a lot of the darker characters."
Getting a handle on Pericles, a character who is more emblematic than real, has proved a real challenge. He is not simply a young Greek warrior.
"He is many things, a sort of Everyman in the way he stumbles through various adventures. He is thrown from here to there as he learns to be a prince."
In a bid to widen the audience for the play The Adventures of Pericles and director Leon Rubin has set it in the Far East with locales that include feudal Japan, ancient India and Bali.
It was an exotic play for a Shakespearean audience and this will be just as exotic for a modern audience," says Goad.
What he loves about the play is its "wild abandon." The cast jokes that Shakespeare wrote it in the bar, late at night.
He's been a fairly wild character himself - a rock climber, snowboarder and surfer who enjoys "running, climbing, falling over anything."
Graham Abbey, the festival's other main leading man, is the sort of guy mothers like, says a festival insider. "But the girls love Johnny. He's the bad boy on the motorcycle."
Director Miles Potter has relocated Shrew to the Wild West. And Goad believes this is one play that lends itself to such different kinds of treatment.
"It's a blast and works amazingly well. Now we need to know whether we are as funny as we think we are."
Raised in Bowmanville (his parents came to Canada from England in 1969, shortly before he was born), Goad got into theatre at an early age.
His father was an engineer but had trained in visual arts and had taken theatre classes. "He was a pure artist but he had a young wife who was pregnant," Goad says wryly of his father's career choice.
An "extremely good amateur actor," his father had a lead role in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum when his young son made his stage debut as Cupid, a little part that was written into the play for him.
By the time he went to high school, Goad had been in maybe 20 plays. Despite being encouraged to try law or medicine, he decided to go to theatre school.
He tried York University and left within a month, later took a degree in social work at the University of Waterloo, then signed on to Montreal's National Theatre School committed to becoming a classical stage actor.
He racked up impressive credits with a wonderfully fiery Hotspur in 2001 and fine work as Jack Cade and the Earl of Suffolk in the Henry VI plays last season. In Toronto this season, he starred in The Laramie Project, a critically acclaimed play with an important message.
Yet even now, he occasionally wonders if he's in the right job.
"I used to have much larger crises of faith about being an actor," he admits.
"But to this day, I still battle with whether I am doing the right thing."