Spotlight On...
Gina Wilkinson:
Confessions of a Playwright
My Mother’s Feet
 I have spent more than twenty years with other people’s
words in my mouth; taking them in like fuel and running on the
life they give. Sometimes, I have been a pack-horse with a burden.
Sometimes, gloriously, I have been plucked up and carried along,
bouncing and singing on the engine of language. I love words. All
actors do. We live or die by them.
And lo, it came to pass, that
I wrote down some of my own words. And lo, some folks at CanStage,
whose judgement (up 'til now) I could
happily vouch for, told me that my odd little rows of vowels and
consonants did indeed constitute a PLAY.
Oh dear. Oh no. Now some
poor sucker will have to take my words in his or her mouth and flourish...or
starve.
There are many new experiences that come to the first time
writer; all of them undignified, all of them physiological.
To
begin: The Handing Over Of The Script; actually letting the stack
of pages leave my shaking hands and be taken away by an Adult.
"Take my baby, please. I am not equipped to care for it myself."
I find I have a racing heart, nervous rashes, and chronic indigestion.
The
First Reading: I am sub-verbal with anxiety; my clothes are a tell-tale
map of sweat circles (Wear black! Always wear black!) and my breakfast
keeps making a nasty reappearance.
As the actors begin to read,
my heart-rate rises to a dangerous level. By the one hour mark,
I’m deaf as a stump. I can see Bonnie Green's and Iris
Turcott's lips moving, making some of their typically illuminating
observations, but I can’t hear
a word. The hum of blood in my ears as I face the enormity of my
shortcomings, blocks out all sound.
The First Public Reading: it is months later, and this staged
reading at the Berkeley Street Theatre is a result of another,
much more extensive workshop, with an extraordinary cast, Micheline
Chevrier, my brave director and Iris doing that voodoo thing she
does called dramaturgy. Under her shrewd eye (and waving hands)
I have been re-writing every night like a crazed...well...like
a crazed...writer.
I have accrued a massive sleep debt over the
course of the nine days and though I am actually on the verge of
hysterics, have forgotten
to wear certain essential items of clothing and am babbling like
a crazed...well...you get the idea. I fool myself that I look
cooool as a cucumber.
As the audience moves from the lobby into the theatre, I flee to the empty
balcony.
I don't remember a thing about that night. It’s as though
I received a blow to the head. Micheline tells me that I sat through
the whole
reading with
my head tipped sideways at an unnatural angle, like a person with a terrible
inner-ear infection, struggling for balance.
"
Shhh...", she kept telling me. "Shhh..." Apparently my body
was emitting involuntary squeaks and weird, drawn out groans, as I watched
the actors do battle on that stage.
Finally, I am afflicted with a frightening,
born-again love for that strange tribe of warriors called Actors. When I
watch an actor take a line of my dialogue,
a line that is a lump of sodden ash in anyone else’s mouth and turn it,
miraculously, to milk and honey, it engenders such a hot rush of feeling in
me, a ghastly kind of passionate gratitude, that I want to
rush across the rehearsal hall and lick them. Sometimes I do.
I have lost
my mind. I have lost my heart to this crazy, beautiful sickness called
writing and, I am happy to say, there’s not a thing I can do to save
myself.
Gina Wilkinson is a freelance actor, director and now PLAYWRIGHT who lives
in Toronto.
Gina Wilkinson on becoming a playwright
Saturday, March 12, 2005 at TheatreBooks. My Mother's Feet
Developed through the CanStage Play Development program
March 7 to April 2, 2005
Berkeley Street Theatre
By Gina Wilkinson
Directed by Micheline Chevrier
Starring Jane Spidell, Jerry Franken & Tom Rooney
http://www.canstage.com/2004-2005/box_office/index.asp
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