I’m happy to report that the show was a great success and we nearly sold out our run. I also survived my sheer terror at having to say six syllables of Cantonese before a Hong Kong audience. I was convinced that there would be spontaneous outbursts of laughter. Mercifully, there was none. Performing this great role in this great play was a tremendous privilege that I’ll always cherish.

That said, I’m very glad to be heading home. On opening night, I received a wonderful e-card from my Gateway family. It made me realize just how much I miss them all.

And during my HK stint, my wife has been in Ontario and Quebec researching a new play that she’s writing. She’ll be back the first week of November. Long separations are fairly common among artist couples. Still, it’s been way too long and I can hardly wait for her return.

As soon as I land, I’m going to shake off the jet lag and catch our production of Sylvia. Looking forward to seeing our tremendous cast.

After looking a little shaky eight days ago, our play has settled into a very good place. Last week, we had a porous, meandering run that clocked in at 1:45. This week, we have a tight, focused piece that runs 1:25. We benefitted greatly from daily line runs that forced us to improve our pace.

Part of the fun of moving in to the theatre is seeing the set fully realized for the first time. We have a very cool, totally non-naturalistic set. The most noticeable feature is an empty door frame downstage left. This, of course, is the door from which Nora ultimately leaves her husband and children. In fact, as the play progresses, scenic elements like furniture and fixtures start vanishing until, in the end, only Raymond, Nora, and the door frame are visible on stage.

I’m also happy to report that I love my costume, a bespoke cream-coloured three-piece suit. There’s nothing worse in tech week than getting a costume that is ill-fitting or worse, that works against the character you’ve just spent weeks creating. In my case, my suit is not just tailored perfectly, it fits Raymond to a tee.

Tonight is cue-to-cue and we’re all stoked. More to come …

The paradox of acting is that no matter how different one may appear, the essence of a great performance comes from finding the truth of a character from within. The chameleon-like qualities of a Meryl Streep or Daniel Day Lewis are certainly praiseworthy but what makes their performances exceptional is how they discover and reveal themselves in their characters.

In portraying Raymond (Torvald), there are external characteristics I must consider. Raymond is an overseas Chinese who was educated in Great Britain and thus he talks with a certain clipped accent which is not my own. He is a gentleman of the 1960s and thus his posture is not like Jovanni’s. Raymond is a smoker, I am not. These externals must be executed with precision or my performance’s credibility will be undermined.

But, ultimately, these technical considerations do not a performance make. The heart of my performance will come from discovering and revealing as much of myself in my portrayal of Raymond. In the end, my performance is limited only by the range of my experiences and the depth of my imagination. Whatever I can bring to the table, I will share with everyone. This is what can make acting such a painful and harrowing experience.

This week I felt like a had a real breakthrough in discovering Raymond. I know this because I experienced that terrifying/exhilirating feeling of exposing my nerve endings for all to see. Playing Raymond is exhausting. In the third act of the play, one goes through a veritable roller coaster of actions and emotions. In quick succession, one goes from drunken lust to the pain of hearing my best friend is dying to Vesuvian anger at discovering Nora has lied to me to ecstasy at hearing that we will not be blackmailed. Then, to top it all off, when Nora leaves me, I am left alone and brokenhearted.

So if I am attempting to make each of these sensations as real and visceral to myself as possible, you can understand why I call acting painful and harrowing. Anyone who has had their heart torn asunder is not keen on reliving the experience. But that is what actors cheerfully strive for in exchange for dismal pay. What a strange lot of masochistic exhibitionists we are.

The other painful part of my journey is realizing how many aspects of Raymond do exist within me. I like to think I’m a decent husband and human being and yet how many of Raymond’s manipulative tactics are like my own? When do I treat my wife the way Raymond treats Nora? Often, the journey of discovering a character is also a journey of self-discovery. And we all know how fun those can be. I don’t know if my Raymond will be noteworthy but I suspect I’ll walk away from this experience a more patient man.

So, in short, this week has left me feeling miserable, enraged, humbled, and emotionally naked. I couldn’t be happier.

Normally, McDonald’s stands for everything I am against. I read Fast Food Nation, I watched Super Size Me. I even wrote a play decrying the globalization of food production.

But a local promotion proved too unusual to resist: for a limited time at Hong Kong McDonald’s, you can get French fries with seaweed seasoning. When you buy large fries here, they give you a packet of dried seaweed powder and a paper bag to shake the fries and powder together. How was I supposed to pass up the opportunity to try something that weird?

The verdict … really tasty. The seaweed adds umami to the salty, crispy, greasy goodness of fries.

Must try this on fries one day…

(You know what else would probably be good on fries? Nanami togarashi. At home, I put it on popcorn and it’s fantastic.)

Anyway, I apologize for my moment of weakness.

I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing some of this on my days off from rehearsal. Three Sundays ago, we had a visit from Julie Nolan, the co-artistic director of Red Leap Theatre in Auckland. Sean took us on a gentle hike right here on Cheung Chau – gentle, mostly because we were quite hung over from an Italian feast the night before. We went past a couple of subsistence farms right in the heart of the island and then saw some beautiful rock formations right by a monastery on the south tip. (I apologize for the lack of pictures. When I’m appreciating nature, I get quite forgetful with my camera.)

After our hike, we went to the market and bought some of the daily catch – a fresh garoupa and twelve scallops still in the shell. We took our seafood to the best dai pai dong on Cheung Chau. The chef – whom everyone simply calls sifu (or master) – steamed the fish with soy sauce and ginger and stir-fried the scallops with lots of garlic. Simple preparations that let the fresh seafood do all the talking. Heaven.

Sharon, Andrew, Jovanni, and Marjorie by Clear Water Bay.

Two Sundays ago, it was a three hour hike on the High Junk Peak County Trail with Marjorie and our friends Andrew, Lee, and Sharon. We got some spectacular views of Hong Kong Island and Clear Water Bay. After some very hard hiking on a brutally hot day, we headed to the fishing village of Po Toi O for a feast of seafood (notice a trend emerging?). This time, it was a big plate of steamed prawns still in their shell. We shelled them, dipped them in a bit of chili-infused vinegar, popped them back, and washed them down with Tsingtao beer. Again, heaven.

And this past Sunday was part of a four-day weekend (it’s day four as I write this on Tuesday morning). September 30 was the Mid-Autumn Festival, a traditional Chinese holiday that celebrates the fall harvest. And October 1 is the national holiday of the People’s Republic of China.

Fresh prawns + Tsingtao beer = happiness.

So on Sunday, I visited with my good friend Jo (who played Annette in the production of God of Carnage that I directed) and her family. We headed to the beach on Repulse Bay. No seafood this time, just a wonderful picnic of charcuterie. It was a family event with lots of kids running on the sand with traditional lanterns and the modern equivalent, glow-sticks.

All of this is to say that Hong Kong is much, much more than just hustle and bustle. There are pockets of tranquility, there is respite from the crowds, and there is a great deal of natural beauty here.

Well, as Kern and Fields wrote …

I know I’m becoming a real islander because instead of racing to arrive ten or fifteen minutes early, I now know how to time it so that I calmly stroll in thirty seconds before they raise the gangplank.

Fishing boats near Cheung Chau pier.

As far as daily commutes go, the ferry from Cheung Chau is pretty glorious. When you leave Cheung Chau, you see a picturesque fishing village. When you arrive in Central (the ‘hub’ district of Hong Kong where most of the corporate headquarters and the Legislative Council reside), you get a million dollar view of the incredible Hong Kong skyline. The ferry beats a bus or train any day.

Or ferries, I should say, for there are two different ferries that operate between Cheung Chau and Central: the ordinary ferry and the fast ferry. The ordinary ferry takes between 50 to 55 minutes; the fast ferry, just 35 minutes.

Despite the longer time, I’ve actually come to prefer the slow ferry. The fast ferry only has cramped passenger seating. The slow ferry, on the other hand, has an upper deck with tables and chairs which means you can dine on the ferry in a leisurely fashion.

Congee – the ultimate Chinese comfort food.

On a typical day, I take the 8:40 am slow ferry to Central with a typical Hong Kong breakfast of congee and an iced milk tea. I get my congee from an outdoor stall (called a dai pai dong or 大排檔 in Cantonese) near the Cheung Chau ferry pier.

When I order from here, it occurs to me that I probably wouldn’t have done too well on Cheung Chau four years ago when I didn’t speak or read a word of Chinese. Cheung Chau still has many restaurants, cafes, and dai pai dongs where no one speaks English and the menus are Chinese-only.

It wasn’t until 2008 that my wife and I started studying Mandarin. We studied in Toronto for two years before we moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake. After a two year hiatus, we’ve only recently begun studying again with a tutor in Richmond.

Anyway, after two years of tutelage, I am nowhere proficient in Mandarin and I still don’t speak much Cantonese. But I’ve learned enough to read a menu (Mandarin and Cantonese share a written orthography) and order in Mandarin.

So my morning congee transaction usually goes something like this. I order in bad Mandarin (“pi dan yu zhou”, or fish congee with century egg); then the owner – who understands Cantonese and Mandarin – translates for me and repeats my order in loud, slow Cantonese (“pei daan jyu zuk”); and, bingo, I get my delicious congee and I learn some new Cantonese vocabulary.

(On a complete tangent, I’ve become addicted to my iced milk tea. And I’m proud to report that a competition for the best milk tea in Hong Kong was won by Canada’s own Harvey Lin.)

Of course, it’s not always congee for breakfast. There’s also a dim sum stand by the pier. And a few bakeries. And several excellent cha chaan tengs. The thing you quickly discover about Hong Kong is there’s never a shortage of food options.

Hong Kong skyline at dusk

After rehearsal, I often get some dinner from the City Super in the IFC Mall on my way back to the Central Piers. The takeout counter there has both Western and Asian foods, including an excellent sushi bar. After a day of rehearsal, a perfect way to unwind is on the deck of a slow boat with a hamachi roll and a cold bottle of Asahi beer as the sun sets over the Hong Kong skyline.

Keep your fast ferry, I’ll take slow any day.

Though it’s been absolutely great here, it’s not without its costs. On Monday, I missed our first readthrough of Sylvia. We’ve got a wonderful cast lead by the equally wonderful director Johnna Wright. It’s hard being away but I always enjoy reading the rehearsal reports from stage manager extraordinaire Lorilyn Parker. Anyway, I hope Johnna and company are having as much fun as I am.

So we’re just coming up on the end of week three on A Doll’s House. We’ve sketched out the blocking for the entire play. For the past two days, we’ve been working on the transitions – that’s the term we use for all the business that goes on between scenes.

There are many different ways to handle transitions. Back in the day, the most common solution was to make the stage dark or drop a curtain and have stagehands reset the stage as required. Today, we consider this to be pretty old-fashioned and not terrible artful. The more modern preference is to make scene changes in plain view of the audience, often choreographed to some transitional music.

This is what we worked on Wednesday and Thursday. But wait! – all you Ibsen scholars say – there are no scene divisions in A Doll’s House, just two act breaks. You would be right. However, in Marjorie’s vision of the play, we will perform the piece with no intermissions (in its edited form, it should come in at about 1:45). That means we need to have transitions between the acts. Between act one and two, for example, we have a transition that not only resets the stage, it also shows the passage of time between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. (All of the action in A Doll’s House takes place between December 24 to 26. I suggested that an alternative title is The Worst Christmas Ever.)

Along with the act breaks, Marjorie has created an interesting prologue. The conceit is that Nora is walking along a busy Hong Kong street years after she has left her family. She passes by a dollhouse in an antique store on Hollywood Road and this ‘triggers’ the memory of that eventful Christmas past.

We’ve replaced the short interchange with Nora’s children with a stylized movement sequence involving the children. This elegant bit of staging has the benefit of: (a) advancing action more compactly; (b) simplifying the acting track for the children; (c) cutting down on rehearsal time with our stage kids who are in school right now; (d) supporting the idea that the whole play is Nora’s memory.

The final transition solves one of the classic problems of A Doll’s House: all of those damn letters. Ibsen uses letters quite frequently to advance the action in this play. Torvald sends a letter to fire Krogstad. Krogstad sends a letter to expose Nora as a forger and blackmail her. Krogstad immediately sends a second letter rescinding his intent to blackmail the Helmers. (Apparently, Norwegian postal carriers at the end of 19th century worked on Christmas and provided same-day service. They must have formed a union in the 20th century.)

Back when Ibsen was writing, the Aristotelian principles of unity of time and place were sacrosanct. Today, in the film and media generation, we’re far more accommodating to the idea of ‘jump cuts’, i.e. moving locations and not having stage time equal real time. And we’re also more likely to laugh or at least be jarred by having two letters read in quick succession, one of which causes Torvald to reject Nora, the other which causes Nora to leave Torvald. It’s a little too deus ex machina for modern sensibilities.

Hence, the final transition which, without adding any dialogue, implies some passage of time between these two letters. It also shows that Mrs Linde’s love has redeemed Krogstad. It’s quite a lovely addition.

Marjorie led us in a very interesting exercise in order to build our prologue montage. We looked at each of our characters in terms of archetypes. So for Raymond, he is an archetypal father, king, tyrant, fool, etc. Nora is an archetypal wife, daughter, mother, princess, lover, etc. We each picked two archetypes for our characters and created gestures for them. This gestural language then was incorporated (with underscored music) in our prologue sequence. It all sounds pretty abstract but it actually created a poignant visual.

Today, we are stumbling through the whole play and tomorrow, we have a runthrough. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting more about life on Cheung Chau and some reports from my days off. Talk soon …

The only problem with acting so infrequently is that you forget how damn hard it is. When you act regularly, you sort of get into a groove and you go from gig to gig with confidence and a familiarity with the flow of rehearsal. And when you don’t … let’s just say it aint like riding a bike, you definitely can forget how to act. On Friday, we got up on our feet for the first time and once again, I felt like I had to shake off the rust.

Our rehearsal hall in the Sheung Wan Civic Centre

We began our rehearsal quite benignly. Marjorie led Bonni and me through some improvisational exercises. I’ve always enjoyed games and exercises as an actor. One of the things that gets rusty as an occasional actor is a sense of play and spontaneity. I find that games are a wonderful catalyst to accessing creative impulses.

We started by improvising scenarios that created a backstory for Nora and Raymond (this earlier post explains why Torvald is now called Raymond). Backstory is a useful tool to help an actor flesh out a character’s biography. You essentially create a history for the character. The only stipulation when you create backstory is that you must honour all the facts about the character that the playwright provides. So if Ibsen writes that Nora went straight from her father’s house to living with Raymond, you can’t create a backstory that imagines her bachelorette days as a fashion model.

So Bonni and I improvised scenes of the couple’s courtship, their wedding night, their first fight, etc. None of our scenarios are now set in stone for our backstory. The exercises were more useful for creating a vocabulary for how Nora and Raymond interact. We also made some interesting physical discoveries. Ibsen uses a great deal of bird imagery to describe Nora. Bonni discovered a wonderful fluttering quality: her Nora is constantly in motion attending to domestic tasks. I, meanwhile, see Raymond like a bull or ox – grounded, direct, and often intractable.

Though I had a lot of fun doing the improvs, afterwards I wondered if some of my choices were too obvious or on-the-nose. Was that the rust creaking? Or was my doubt just the usual melange of neuroses and self-recrimination that is acting?

After the improvs, we dove into the text. The real challenge in playing Raymond is not to judge him and to find the love that informs the way he dominates and marginalizes Nora. To Raymond’s mind, he isn’t being domineering, simply caring and protective. Let’s face it: Raymond is a boor by late 19th century standards; by today’s standards, he’s a total douchebag. The key is not to fall into the trap of playing him like a douchebag. He has layers of goodness and grace and that’s what I’m constantly looking for.

Meanwhile, the Cantonese accent improves slowly but surely. I find it helps if I maintain it not just while acting but the whole time I’m in the rehearsal hall. So if I ask Marjorie a question, I’m still speaking with an accent. Once I’m more comfortable, I’ll switch to speaking with the accent 24/7.

As a reward for a hard day’s work, Marjorie and I met with our friend Andrew for xiao long bao. (If you need a primer on the perfect bundle of joy that is xiao long bao, check out here or here.) We went to Din Tai Fung in Causeway Bay which has a reputation for having some of the best xiao long bao in Hong Kong.

This is how to make the perfect xiao long bao.

The original Din Tai Fung is in Taipei but they now have restaurants around the world (alas, none in Richmond but we don’t exactly lack for good xiao long bao).

Anyway, the Din Tai Fung in Causeway Bay is enormous – it looked like there were several hundred happy diners. Despite the size, we waited over forty-five minutes for a table. While we waited, we caught up with each other and we watched the dumplings chefs preparing the xiao long bao with laboratory-like precision.

Definitely worth the wait.

Once we were seated, the food came pretty quickly and the verdict … pure heaven. We started with cold appetizers: marinated cucumbers, tripe, and ma lan tou. They were all simply amazing. It wasn’t that there was anything fancy about the preparation – these are all fairly standard dishes – it was that they were executed perfectly.

The cucumbers, for example, were the best marinated cucumbers I’ve ever had. The cucumbers were cut to a perfect half-inch thickness which soaks up the marinade but still gives a satisfying crunch. And the marinade was perfect as well – smoky from a hint of cumin, a little sweet, and a little zing from some chili oil. The tripe was also the best I’ve ever had, smoky and earthy, sliced perfectly so it wasn’t in the least bit chewy. The ma lan tou was good but not great. I thought it was

Behold perfection.

slightly underseasoned. Still, a refreshing cold dish on a hot day.

Next came the star of the show: the xiao long bao. Oh mama! I’ll try to describe what makes a perfect xiao long bao: you need a dumpling wrapper that is robust enough to hold a soup filling but that isn’t tough or doughy. You want a fragrant broth and a flavourful ball of pork in the

Also amazingly great: their pan-fried dumplings.

centre. And it needs to be at the perfect temperature so it doesn’t scald your mouth. Well, Din Tai Fung just hit it out of the park in all regards.

I dipped my dumpling into some ginger-infused vinegar, popped it in my mouth … and then the starbursts began. Extreme food happiness. They exploded with flavour and yet felt light, like you could eat a dozen yourself (don’t worry, I didn’t).

I normally would never wait that long for a table but, honestly, it was totally worth it. I’d wait that long again – in fact, I may next week!