8. Art Johnson at the Edges of the Theatre
On the face of it, my father (b. 1906) appeared to have had little-or-nothing to do with theatre-and-performance, not as a performer and not as an audience member. And yet, in his old age, he gave me some memories that clearly showed this wasn't true. I have written about a moment when I witnessed my father wearing a false beard and practising lines in a mirror, a moment so unusual that I can close my eyes now and relive it. And I have written about his insistence that he attend theatre with his family when we were young, as if it was a necessary gift to us. These to memories suggest that he had an experience with performance hidden from us all.
But I also had the experience of sitting with him, in his old age, in the quiet of an evening, listening as he gave me three stray, brief memories. These memories were clearly important to him, vivid in his mind's eye, moments that he kept with him into his late-80s.
Memory: At one point during our late-life conversations, my father grew quiet--not his way, in general--and closed his eyes. He shared with me an image of himself, very small and crouched in the corner of the family living room at Christmastime. He gave me a description of a noisy, I'd say 'raucous' meeting of uncles and aunts, that included singing, and storytelling, and something like a play performed in front of everyone by the bolder older brothers-in-law. He had an image of a jug or pot of some kind sitting on someone's head as a crown, which should be a strong clue as to the tone of this performance. On the other hand, my father also remembered his father reciting Shakespeare, and other poetry, giving me the strong impression that it was unusual for someone in this house, in that family, to be capable of such a thing--as if the other family members were in awe of this skill. This was all he remembered, and he quite clearly cherished these images.
Memory: My father told me that, when he was a very small boy (he was born in 1906), he came out of his bedroom--the bed he shared with his brother and sister, sleeping head to toe to head to toe--and went down the hall to the bathroom. On the way back, he met a young woman who was boarding with them, someone he remembered as an actress, though how he would know, at that age, is anyone's guess. He remembered that she bent down and straightened his pants, or fixed his shoe, or something like that--and then he went on his way back to bed. This was a frail, fleeting memory, perhaps in part a dream. But it is all the more worth looking into for that.
Memory: My father remembered that, some years after these two memories, when he was a pre-teen, he would go down to this same local theatre in the summertime, with friends, and wait outside. They were not waiting for the end of the performance, or by the stage-door to meet the actors. They weren't there to sell a paper--my father was an inveterate newsboy in his youth. He and his friends were in fact there to see some free theatre. On hot summer days, the theatre still held performances, but without any air-conditioning, the auditorium could become unbearably hot. To help, the theatre had a series of large doors along one side, and they were opened to allow for some air circulation. These young boys were waiting for this moment; when it came, they crowded around the open doors and peered into the auditorium, toward the stage, and caught some part of the performance. My father remembered one performance in particular, of a play that included a flying bat, which he described as a light or a projection that moved around the stage. Whatever it was, the image stayed with him, even though he only saw it from an open door, in sunlight peering into a darkened auditorium, from an obstructed view.
Context: Let me consider these memories in order.
The first memory is about the men in my father's family. He grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, with four brothers and a sister, in a house with a large, extended family, all economic emigrants from Bristol, England. My grandfather's boot-making business bankrupted, and he attempted a fresh start. He did not prosper in Canada, and the family was always on the edge of poverty. My father remembered his father as a 'broken man' (his words), a fallen member of the middle class. But he also remembered him as an educated man, capable of reciting long texts from memory, who was older than the rest of the family, and treated with respect. He was clearly not like anyone else in the family.
On the other hand, my father remembered his mother's working class family very differently--they had all, for a variety of reasons, followed his own parents to the 'colonies.' His memories were all about his uncles, who he remembered as wonderfully alive, brazen and outgoing individuals, people he clearly idolized as a boy.
There is a juxtaposition of images here that carries weight. A small boy crouched in the corner of a room decorated for a holiday, with two kinds of performance available to him. An older man in one corner giving one kind of performance, recitations and readings, and another, very different, raucous and parodic performance going on in front of them both.
The second memory concerns a woman, but the context takes it into a larger frame that leaves all the men behind. My father remembered his mother, surrounded by a large, extended family on the edge of homelessness, creating hand-written bills, which she took down to the local theatre and posted, advertising their home as a rooming house for the touring actors. I have no idea when this happened or for how long, but he vividly remembered both sharing a bed with his siblings to allow for the extra income, and remembered strangers in the house, in the hallway, in the middle of the night.
These circumstances reinforce just how much the idea of 'theatre' was a part of this community, even for a community that could not, in fact, attend the theatre. My father took it as a given in his memory of his childhood that touring theatre was a part of the economy, bringing with it people who ate, drank, and slept as well as played their roles on stage. They were more likely to be a part of the class of those who could not attend the theatre than of those who could, and likely associated with the 'untheatrical' class anytime they were not in performance.
The footlights were not the only things separating the actors and crew from the audience. My father as a boy, and his whole family, shared a house and time and food and conversation--and bathrooms--with these strangers, and no doubt heard about their lives.
As for my grandmother, there are clues that make me think of her as familiar with performance, and not only in the home. My father's sister--my much-loved 'Auntie Grace'--was christened Ada Grace Mercia. 'Mercia' was unusual, the name of the 'heroine' in one of the most successful and widely toured English productions in the late 19th century, The Sign of the Cross. I believe that this name came from my grandmother's attendance at this production while in England.
This is the same woman who, in these later tougher times, after an economically-forced emigration, wrote up some leaflets and walked down to the local theatre to see if she should rent out her children's bedrooms to the travelling actors.
A person has to know something about the theatre to think to do that.
So--what did she know?
As for the third memory, the boy at the door of the theatre, these two earlier memories point to a culture of performance that would lead him to that door. He knew there was theatre, and he knew where it was and how to gain access to what it had to offer. I assume this was a general knowledge for him and his 'newsboy' friends--who could not afford to attend the theatre, but who sold papers to those who could. I also assume that he had sufficient knowledge of 'the news' to know what had been advertised to play at that theatre, when it started and ended, and perhaps some general publicity from the paper, and from street posters. He would know something.
Addendum: This particular theatre was called the 'Terminal Theatre.' It was called that because it was built as part of an actual terminal, to a recent development in transportation, the electric railway--or the 'tram.' These were not simply streetcars, but larger vehicles that ran on tracks far out into the country. Suburbia hadn't developed yet, but this kind of transportation did allow people from the countryside to travel for the day into the heart of the city, to bring goods to market, and to shop. And, if they were doing well enough financially, to be entertained. The people who built this transportation built a theatre just at the hub, where all of these railways converged, so that people could move effortlessly from their transport to the entertainment, even to the point of a covered awning to protect them from wet weather. This was all quite new when my father crashed the party. Of course he and his friends knew about it, because this would have been a focus for their salesmanship.
