Fringe Character

TJ Dawe mugging for the camera at the Saskatoon Fringe Festival.

One of the country’s best-known theatre personalities, TJ Dawe has authored six shows (including Labrador, The Doctor Is Sick and The Curse of the Trickster) and a handful of adaptations of literary works. The script to his original show The Slip-Knot was recently nominated for a Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

In addition to being a prolific writer, Dawe is also a tireless performer — he devotes a good chunk of every year touring his plays. He’s been on stage at everything from the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal to the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina and is a mainstay of the Canadian Fringe theatre festivals. Dawe is currently on a cross-Canada tour of the Fringe circuit, which takes him to Toronto (July 6-16), Winnipeg (July 20-30), Saskatoon (August 5-14), Victoria (August 25-September 5) and Vancouver (September 8-18). His diary of this year’s Fringe circuit will be updated throughout the summer.

Part 1

I'm in Saskatoon. Flew here from Winnipeg and there was a thunderstorm so severe we couldn't land. My friends driving saw it from the ground and said it was spectacular. Closing night of Winnipeg, there was lightning like I've never seen. Like a ridiculously overdone special-effects sequence. Light jumping from one cloud to another, never-ending, like a stadium full of people taking flash photographs. And then, rain like the wrath of God. Anyway, our plane circled Saskatoon and bucked and bounced and I watched the wings go boing, boing, boing and then we turned around and went to Calgary instead. They put us on another plane there, and by the time we got back here, the storm had moved on. Now it's sunny. And the Fringe starts tonight.

There was a party last night for the performers, with free food. Everyone showed up. Actors are easy to reel in — just feed ’em.

Had my tech rehearsal yesterday. My show here is The TJ Dawe Box Set. I'm doing three different old shows (Tired Cliches, Labrador and The Slip-Knot) and one new one (Maxim & Cosmo) scattered over six performances. It sounded like a good gimmick when I dreamed it up all those months ago. Give people a chance to see one of my old shows if they missed it; give ’em a chance to see an old one they might like to see again. Maybe the insanity of the whole venture would be good for press attention or word of mouth. Yeah! That'll bring people in! But actually doing it is a hell of a lot of work. I only had three hours of tech rehearsal, and that's usually a full load getting the sound and light cues up to speed for one show, much less four. We'll have to review the cues for each show before the audience comes in each night. The technicians are working eight other shows — I can't expect them to remember every detail of mine. And I don't have a stage manager.

I have to find a bunch of cardboard boxes. The first show I'm doing is Tired Cliches. It's about graduating from university and finding yourself with nothing to do. I toured it in '98 and '99. You see, I'd recently graduated from university and found myself with nothing to do. It was the first show I wrote and took across the country. It did well, but looking at it, I can see signs of my inexperience. For one thing, there are sixty lighting cues. And sixty sound cues. My next show had two light cues and no sound cues. Much easier. You learn these things. For another thing, Tired Cliches has a set: a big pile of empty cardboard boxes. I use them as a crash pad. Jump off a chair into ’em three times a show. So I need a good amount, and they have to be strong and resilient — but not too strong. Once I had boxes that were originally used to carry plasma, and they were so thick they didn't give when I landed on them. Flat on my back. That first tour, I was so broke I scrounged in cardboard bins all across the country. Now I'm going to find a box company and buy ’em. They'll cost twenty or thirty bucks. I can afford that. They'll all be the same size, and I can get what I want. And they'll be new. No chance of finding packing chips in them, or meat juice stains, or a half-eaten sandwich.

And then, of course, I have to dust off the script in my mind.