By Mike Levin
There’s a strange connection between Dean Hawes, who penned Dreams of Whales, and John Koensgen, who will direct and act in the stage play’s inaugural world voyage starting October 20 at Arts Court.
That link isn’t the 1994 production of Rona Waddington’s Earhart that they were both in, nor the stage reading some years later in which Koensgen directed Hawes; it’s a lot more ethereal. While both have three-plus decades in professional theatre, Koensgen’s name seems to appear everywhere, often popping up with magical abandon. Hawes has virtually no electronic trace – an out-of-date resume and roles in two movies on the Internet Movie Data Base.
This seems strange for a graduate of both the National Theatre School of Canada and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre. He’s worked with companies in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and at the Stratford Festival. He’s toured England and Scotland as an actor and is perhaps best known for writing The Honeymooners, based on the backstage lives of actors in the 1950s American sitcom.
John Koensgen searching for magic. Photo by Mike Levin.
I asked Koensgen about this. He had no answer, except to say “he’s written lots, just never shown it to anyone.”
So maybe it’s time for the two men to work together on a play that one is anticipating with the exhaustion of an over-stimulated child and that the other wrote much of before he was out of school. Koensgen’s wife Laurie has a wonderful take on the play’s evolution:
When Dean Hawes dreams, he dreams big – of whales and world premieres. He dreams of sitting at the back of the audience opening night to see his dreams come true. Hawes remembers being a young man, alone on an Alberta road surrounded by wheat, looking up at the immense sky. He stood on land that was long ago the bottom of an ancient sea. He imagined whales and other monstrous fish, swimming over him and filling the sky. Years later this moment was the inspiration for his magical play Dreams of Whales. “Then suddenly a character appeared to me,” says Hawes. “A recent widow holed up in her farmhouse. Then another character: a timid dentist who has loved her secretly since they were kids and who knows about the whales… ” Like the dentist, Hawes has waited more than 40 years to bring this love to life.
Courtesy of New Theatre of Ottawa.
John grasped the play’s “larger reality with a huge heart” and is now focussed on how well its fanciful style will appeal to audiences. “It’s about finding love and how we use our imagination. You know, there’s some things on stage that don’t belong, animals talking to humans, and I want to discombobulate people, make them wonder, why is that that way?”
Confirming this will require strong performances from Koensgen (always a given), Mary Ellis, Brad Long and Shannon Donnelly yet equal contributions from set designer Sarah Waghorn and lighting chief Rebecca Miller because dream images become a fifth character.
Dreams of Whales will be the first production of its new season for New Theatre of Ottawa, which Koensgen runs solo with help from his wife. That’s why he’s caught in the exhaustion of an over-stimulated child. “I don’t recommend it even if it is a financial necessity,” he says.
Perhaps a little exhaustion will make the pill of belief-suspension go down a little easier. When Koensgen says “I’d like (Dreams) to be surprising and yet inevitable,” the message isn’t meant to be cryptic, just a tweak for your imagination.
