Suddenly Susan

Actor/writer Susan Coyne. Photo Tim Leyes. Courtesy Tarragon Theatre.

All at once, Susan Coyne is everywhere. At Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre this season, she starred in a return production of a challenging two-person play, Helen’s Necklace, as well as premiering her second play, Alice’s Affair (now on in the theatre’s Mainspace). Meanwhile, shooting will begin shortly on the third season of Slings & Arrows, a miniseries she conceived, co-wrote and acts in.

I first met Coyne several years ago while profiling her and her husband, Albert Schultz, the former Street Legal star and current head of Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company. In conversation, Coyne is Hillary Clinton to Schultz’s Bill; where he is expansive, she is precise; where he sets out to charm with funny anecdotes, her careful statements reveal a mind of great dimension.

The pair both trained as actors under intense, eccentric director Robin Phillips in the Stratford Festival’s Young Company in the late 1980s; they fell for each other while playing the title characters in Romeo and Juliet. (“Yuck” is Coyne’s succinct response when reminded of this.) In the late 1990s, both were involved in the founding of Soulpepper, now firmly established as the third “S” (after Shaw and Stratford) of the Ontario summer theatre season.

But again, rather like Hillary, Coyne has emerged from the world of acting to become one of the country’s best dramatic writers.

The mother of two began her gradual shift towards writing by translating Chekhov for Soulpepper and the Shaw; her work included a well-received condensation of the Russian’s sprawling, unfinished Platonov in 2000. Then, in 2002, the graduate of Queen’s University and the National Theatre School wrote an affecting memoir, Kingfisher Days, about a retired English teacher who fostered her imagination and love of literature during childhood summers at a Kenora cottage. (Coyne starred in a moving play version of the book at the Tarragon two years ago.)

Coyne doesn’t come across as haughty, although she is part of a powerhouse family — her father is a former Bank of Canada governor, her brother, Andrew, writes a political column for the National Post and her cousin, Deborah, is a constitution lawyer and former companion of Pierre Trudeau; they had a daughter together, Sarah Elisabeth. Instead, understatement and intense self-scrutiny are Coyne's trademarks. A typical reflection: “I don’t really feel like a writer, though I’m doing a lot of it, so I guess I am. I suppose that’s normal — I never really felt like an actor, even after I’d been doing it for 10 years,” she says. “I kept waiting for the hand of God to come down and say, ‘You’re anointed now.’”

Left to right, Martha Burns, Brenda Robins, Nancy Palk (standing), David Jansen, Brooke Johnson in Alice's Affair. Photo Michael Cooper. Courtesy Tarragon Theatre.

Her latest play, Alice’s Affair, focuses on a mentor with Phillips-like charisma, but without the legendary director’s ability to bring out the best in his charges. “I was fascinated by the phenomenon of the teacher who is more destroyer than creator,” says Coyne. Not only does the writing teacher (played with zest by Daniel Kash) quash the literary ambitions of Alice (played by Coyne’s longtime friend Martha Burns) — he also makes a pass at her. “When I started thinking about this, Naomi Wolf’s allegations [of sexual harassment] against [Yale professor] Harold Bloom were coming out,” Coyne explains. “I was interested in a situation where students bring their hearts to the table, and put them in the professor’s hands, and forget to say, ‘Um, I want that back.’”

Alice’s Affair is not as good as Kingfisher Days — though thought-provoking and filled with electric dialogue, it feels like a work in progress. In addition to playing the professor, Kash does a waitress in drag and Harry Houdini. Other secondary players also perform multiple roles; this moment’s psychic is the ghost of Alice’s great-grandmother in the next. And the literary references fly at the audience like Alfred Hitchcock’s birds: here comes James Joyce and W.B. Yeats; watch out, Ford Madox Ford and William James are winging this way. Alice’s Affair is a should-see, if not a must.

But Slings & Arrows — a series set behind the scenes at a thinly fictionalized Stratford — is an unqualified success. The Showcase program was recently picked up by the stateside Sundance Channel; Gord McLaughlin, a columnist at Toronto’s eye Weekly, spoke for many critics when he called it “one of the smartest and best realized programs ever made for Canadian television.”

Jointly scripted by Coyne and two comic talents, Kids in the Hall alum Mark McKinney and Second City’s Bob Martin, the writing is as good as television gets — by turns funny and solemn, nasty and generous, pensive and poignant. One example: When an aging actress reunites with a notoriously rakish old flame, she tells him: “I’m older now; I’m not like the young things you are used to. I was in analysis for seven years.”

Stephen Ouimette as Oliver Welles and Paul Gross as Geoffrey Tennant in Slings and Arrows. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

In addition to its humour, there is a depth to Slings’ portrayal of lives lived in the theatre — thanks to Coyne, no doubt. In one episode, the festival honcho (played by Paul Gross) leads a patently ridiculous seminar for a corporate festival sponsor; it focuses on how Shakespeare can help a bunch of middle managers do their jobs. When Gross bullies the guy from accounting into delivering a bravura version of a Shakespeare soliloquy, viewers find themselves in the embarrassing position of agreeing with their high-school English teachers: the Bard can be relevant, and more than that, he can occasionally lighten a dreary existence.

Most of the cast, including Gross and Martha Burns (who are married in real life) and Stratford stalwart Stephen Ouimette, have appeared together on many stages over the years. As so many British miniseries attest, there’s something special about stage training. And the acting in Slings, even down to the bit parts, is uniformly strong. Particularly marvelous are several old theatre queens, who distill the whole transatlantic theatre heritage in their bitchy throwaway lines.

Slings & Arrows was meant to be "more Chekhov and less television," says Coyne. "But I had limited experience of television. Before, it had always seemed like this giant machine, with the cameras and the production crew. You arrived and you didn't know anyone, you felt alienated. Here there was this huge pleasure in working with people with a common history, who know the same stories."

Slings & Arrows succeeds in breaking down the barrier between the two solitudes that are our theatre and television-production communities. Presumably, Coyne is still waiting for God’s hand to anoint her as a writer, but the rest of us no longer have any doubts.

Alec Scott is a Toronto theatre critic.