TORONTO — It's late in the day on the set of the Paul Gross miniseries Slings and Arrows. Our lead is getting punchy.''Will it ever end?'' he moans between takes, his slightly tattered trench coat flapping as he swings from a light rig.
It's fitting that Gross doth protest too much, considering this eccentric drama swirls around the staging of Hamlet at a Stratford-esque theatre festival.It's also ironic, given the fact that Gross spent the previous day in Ottawa, lobbying to ensure the TV industry as he knows it isn't faced with the ultimate to-be-or-not-to-be crack-up. Gross, of course, never wants it to end.
Now that he's back at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, on shoot-day 35 out of 42, the political adrenalin continues to course through his veins. Gross could hold forth on Canada's labyrinthine and clumsy funding system for hours.
"The problems have been growing for years," he says, during a rare moment of calm. "I only woke up to them about a year and a half ago. I'm not very political by nature."
Gross was joined by actors, including Gordon Pinsent, on Parliament Hill, where they gave Paul Martin and anyone else who would listen an earful.
"The immediate and acute problem is the Canadian Television Fund is a mess. And then there is the systemic problem . . . which has had the effect of relieving broadcasters of their obligation to make dramatic series. We've dropped from 12 to four," he says, gingerly scratching the fine salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin with a piece of uncooked spaghetti (the very ethical craft services' coffee stir-stick replacement, if you're wondering).
The stubble is an excellent fake, since Gross made his Ottawa trek clean-shaven and suit-and-tied. The glue is driving him nuts, but he mustn't disturb the tiny flecks of hair artfully poised on his face. There are still two scenes to finish. A lot is resting on his shoulders here, too.
The six-part miniseries feels like the assembly of a Canadian TV supergroup. In addition to Gross, star of Due South and Men With Brooms, it features such Canuck lights as Martha Burns, Don McKellar and Stephen Ouimette. It was written by Soulpepper Theatre Company's Susan Coyne, Kids in the Hall's Mark McKinney, and Second City alumnus Bob Martin -- all of whom do double duty as actors in the series. It's produced by Rhombus Media (Last Night, The Red Violin, Long Day's Journey into Night) in association with the channels that will air it in the fall -- The Movie Network, Movie Central and Showcase.
Gross plays Geoffrey Tennant, a beleaguered and somewhat broken theatre director who took leave of his sanity during a performance of Hamlet and never acted again.
After the artistic director of the "New Burbage Theatre Festival," played by Stephen Ouimette, gets killed by a pork truck, Tennant steps in to take hold of the operation. He's fettered by bean counters and dark forces who envision the festival as a theme park. He skips out on directing a production of Hamlet, leaving that to the character played by Don McKellar, and heads off to teach a Shakespeare-in-business course.
Tangled in there is a complicated love twist, courtesy of Gross's real-life wife Martha Burns, and the comic struggles of the Hollywood-type actor (played by Luke Kirby) thrust into the role of Hamlet. Oh, and Ouimette returns as a Hamlet-esque ghost.
Rhombus producer Niv Fichman is chuffed at the microcosm-ness of it all.
"Paul had done Hamlet and the Hamlet subplot is based a little bit on him.
Paul and Martha are married and they play estranged lovers in this. Susan and Martha are great friends. Stephen is an old friend of Paul's and Martha's. Don, I've been working with for 10 years. This was a way for us to all come together. It's a great convergence."
For good and bad, it's also a model of the direction Canadian TV dramas might be going.
"I have nothing against TMN or Showcase, but it's weird that a cast of this quality and a group of scripts this good are not on a major network," says Gross.
Regardless of its final destination, Slings and Arrows gleefully seizes on TV and film's sister world, the theatre, as fertile ground for a warm-hearted poke.
The theatre community may bristle at the real-life parallels -- consider, for one, the fact that current Stratford artistic director Richard Monette was famously struck by stage fright as an actor in 1988 and veered into directing.
"It's not a direct send-up of Stratford. We don't want them mad at us," says director Peter Wellington.
Wellington calls himself an arriviste when it comes to the theatre milieu, but after lurking about backstage at Stratford, talking to actors, he was hooked.
"I got enthralled by the stress and the predicament," he says, "It's still acting and ego and insecurity, but nothing compares to the terror of an opening-night performance."
Add to that the peculiar power of Hamlet, and you're in even nuttier territory.
"There's a funny fraternity of people who've played Hamlet," says Gross. When he played the Danish ditherer at Stratford in 2000, actor and Hamlet veteran Brent Carver was there doing Fiddler on the Roof.
"We'd cross each other . . . and he would check in with me: 'How are you?' 'I think I'm losing my mind,' 'Yeah, you're a month in. It's going to get worse for two more months. Then you're going to start to feel better.' He was pretty well right."
Gross describes his 90 performances as an experience unlike any other, his last performance being delivered through tears.
"You have no control over it. Other people have said this, but the play picks you up, hurls you around the room. You cannot rein any of it in. Your emotions run crazy.
"It's kind of frightening. It's also depressing. It's a horror to watch the machinery of the universe grind this great humanity to dust."
So, Gross sympathizes with his Slings and Arrows character and, if I'm not mistaken, even rationalizes his manic ways.
"He isn't really crazy. He's the most sane one of the lot, so he appears slightly crazy."
Gross grins as he realizes he's right in character.
"Which is sort of Hamlet too. People say he's nuts but he doesn't think he is." Right.
In another scene shot earlier in the day, the Hamlet curse afflicts the young Hollywood import playing the prince. Kirby and Gross are holed up in a dressing room, the latter trying to calm the former, who thinks the play is just too damn big.
They're running through the soliloquies in shorthand: "O, that this too too solid flesh," "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I," "To be or not to be," et al.
"We had to find a way to guide the audience through Hamlet," says writer and creative producer Bob Martin, flipping through the script. "Actors actually think of it this way."
After Gross rattles off six soliloquies, he quips, "And the rest, as they say, is silence."
Kirby replies, "I think there's some dialogue between them."
"Filler. You nail those six and everybody goes home happy."
There's another chunk of script in this scene that Martin says he's fond of. It's a rant by Gross's character about the lot of actors, being dependent on a fleet of writers, directors and others.
"Whenever you bring that many people together, odds are you're going to be screwed by someone. Usually someone wearing a tie."
Gross clearly relishes delivering this one, as if he's directing the vitriol toward Parliament.
Hours later, after an "I was perfect!" delivered to no one in particular, he eyes my notebook.
"We're out of sync with the rest of the world. Five out of the top 10 shows in Australia are homegrown. Hollywood is actually one of the few self-sustaining entertainment industries in the world."
Wellington wants another take of the classroom scene. Politics will have to wait.
Gross strides confidently into the Shakespeare-for-corporate- raiders scene. Facing a room of extras creepily good at portraying business blandness, his character abandons the dry take-a-lesson-from-Shakespeare plan. And, for now, the Bard's lines as well.
"Why don't we just get naked," Gross says, straying from the script and sending the lectern-on-wheels he's been leaning on for a spin-out.
Behind a wall, Wellington is watching his monitor, a wide grin on his face.
At least in this corner of the TV-production kingdom, all is unfolding according to plan.
