ON STAGE
What: Bed and Breakfast
Where: Belfry Theatre
When: Opens 7:30 tonight, continues to Aug. 27
Tickets: $18 to $52 (250-385-6815)
They’re partners in both work and life. Despite this, Stratford actors Paul Dunn and Mark Crawford requested separate dressing rooms at the Belfry Theatre during their run of Bed and Breakfast.
Not only that, but when their two-man show played Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, Dunn and Crawford walked to the venue separately.
Are they on the outs? No, the two get along just fine. It’s just that these performers know themselves well enough to realize each needs his space when work and private life intertwine.
“We check in and chat a little bit [in the hour leading up to curtain]. But we’re kind of doing our own thing, right?” said Crawford, who wrote Bed and Breakfast.
“I think we’ve figured out a nice balance,” Dunn said.
The Belfry’s is the third production of Bed and Breakfast, which had its première in 2015 at Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque, Ont. The comedy is about a same-sex couple — an interior designer and a hotel concierge — who move from Toronto to a small tourist town. One has inherited his late aunt’s house, which they turn into a bed and breakfast.
The sexual orientation of the twosome creates a smidgen of friction in the conservative hamlet — at one point, an insult is lobbed from a passing truck. However, Dunn and Crawford are quick to point out that Bed and Breakfast isn’t intended to be an “issue play.”
“I’d say the play is more about them finding a place within that community. It’s certainly not a play that just paints small towns as homophobic. It’s more complicated than that,” Dunn said.
Crawford says the show is not at all autobiographical. But it does draw from his intimate knowledge of small-town Canada. He grew up on a farm near Glencoe, Ont., which has a population of 2,000. And Crawford, who acted for a decade before starting his playwrighting career, has many years of experience performing in rural locales throughout the country.
“I spent a lot of time in those places,” he said. “I have a lot of affection for the smaller communities and the people who live in them.”
Crawford originally didn’t intend to co-star in Bed and Breakfast. The first production was performed by Dunn and another actor, Andrew Kushnir. However, when Kushnir’s schedule didn’t permit follow-up runs, Crawford stepped in.
The trick, he said, was mastering his play’s technical demands. Each actor plays 11 characters. And it’s a diverse lineup, ranging from a six-year-old girl to an inarticulate teen, a 60-something mother and a “fiercely fabulous gay man.”
“With Mark, it was about teaching him ‘the dance,’ ” Dunn said. “Maybe halfway through the rehearsal process in Montreal, we found out what the dance was between us. We found what the show is for us.”
While Bed and Breakfast is intended as breezy summertime entertainment, one of Crawford’s recent plays did draw a whiff of controversy. This year, five Ontario elementary schools — all overseen by the Niagara Catholic District School Board — cancelled performances of his children’s play Boys, Girls and Other Mythological Creatures, which features an eight-year-old boy who dresses as a girl and questions his gender.
A school board official said the production company, Carousel Players, had not made it clear that the play examines gender fluidity. As such, the show was not age-appropriate, the official said.
The Globe and Mail, CBC and Reuters picked up on the story.
In an open letter posted on Carousel Players’ website, Crawford expressed his concerns. “I get afraid… when the motivating factor for canceling performances of this play is a few adults’ own fear, prejudice and hatred,” he wrote.
Last season, Dunn appeared in Gay Heritage Project at the Belfry Theatre’s Spark Festival. The play, which he also co-wrote, is a look at queer history and culture.
Both Dunn and Crawford note that as societal attitudes to homosexuals evolve, so does theatre about gay culture.
“Maybe in 30 or 40 years, people will go: ‘Oh, that old Canadian gay classic Bed and Breakfast — wasn’t that interesting how life was back then?’ ” Crawford said with a smile.
