One-on-one with DPG

On Friday, we introduced you to our hilarious Stanley season opener, Black Comedy (September 10 to October 11). Today, we chat with the show’s director, the amazing Dean Paul Gibson. Dean is an accomplished actor and one of Canada’s best and most sought after directors. He’s been behind many of your favourite Arts Club shows including this past season’s The History Boys as well as It’s a Wonderful Life, The School for Scandal, and A Flea in Her Ear.

You’ve directed It’s a Wonderful Life, The School for Scandal, and The History Boys for the Arts Club. Is there any common thread that runs through those pieces? If so, does it connect to Black Comedy?

What they have in common is style and heart, hopefully, and that’s what we want to exemplify, whether we’re working on the greatest comedies or the greatest tragedies.

At the Arts Club especially, you’ve had a lot of success with “comedies with bite”. Is there something about the form that speaks to you particularly?

I think that kind of represents a little bit of who I am. By that I mean, I think I have a pretty good sense of humour and I think I’m known for being a little bit edgy, a little bit outrageous. So, I take some liberties. But I think it comes from, hopefully, a place where there’s no malice involved, so that it’s all about having good fun. Ultimately, that’s what keeps me alive in my own life, having humour around me. Because without the humour, I’m dead. I would wash away in puddle of tears, I think (laughs).

You’ve also tackled tragedies—notably Othello for Bard on the Beach this summer. Do you have a preference?

No, I don’t have a preference, because when someone talks to me about you know, “you are going to be working on this play and that will be so easy to work on because it’s such a good play and such a well-known story.” Well, with that, comes a ton of expectation from people (and they all know how it should be done incidentally). But no, each play—it doesn’t matter whether I’m working on the greatest tragedy or comedy—is a lot of hard work and if I don’t invest 100% fully who I am, I can’t help but do that.

Photo by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Even if I’m working on a script that someone would consider trite or light-weight, it’s serious business; the serious business of comedy and finding the humour in tragedy, so that we have balance. Ultimately, we have to have balance. So both of those things, they gratify me enormously because they balance me. I love working in pathos, I work through that every day with my own stuff, and with family and friends, we see that and then we all laugh together at the end of it. That’s the way we know we’re alive, by having the whole gamut of emotions.

What are the most exciting things about directing Black Comedy? The most challenging?

An exciting thing about directing Black Comedy is going to be everybody working in broad light and pretending they can’t see each other (laughs). That is going to be exciting. And then challenging is going to be the physical business that comes with that kind of invention. How do they encounter each other and act like they can’t see that each other?

When you take on a new directing project, do you begin at the same place with each show in terms of deciding on an overall vision or direction for the piece?

Well, I guess, the script obviously. When you start with the script, you start looking for metaphors and symbolism, and who’s the protagonist, what’s the crux of it all, what’s the theme, what’s the idea, why did the playwright write the play, is it pure physical entertainment?

You know, Peter Shaffer is known for some of the great tragedies, with the exception of perhaps Lettice and Lovage, which has huge heart, but great physical comedy (you know, it was written for Maggie Smith), and then you pull that up to Royal Hunt for the Sun, or Amadeus, or Equus, and you just start thinking, ‘wow’. So, the fact that he decided to have his little nod to the broad farce is exciting. Because people want to pigeonhole you. It’s the same when you’re a director. They want to say, “Oh, DPG, that’s what he does.” But I keep messing it up. Because If I allow them, they’ll say, “that’s all you can do.” And I’m not that kind of an artist; hopefully I’m an artist that will continue to learn and grow, and sometimes my successes are greater than others, but at the very least, everything I work on has some kind of integrity.

How will the curtain-warmer, The Marriage Proposal by Chekhov, and Black Comedy fit together?

This is interesting. The curtain-warmer play that was written with Black Comedy wasn’t as interesting or exciting and Bill came up with the grand idea of coupling it with The Marriage Proposal, which interestingly was written by one of our great tragedians of the 19^th century, Chekov, known for his great dramas. And this—again like Peter Shaffer, here’s their parallel—he decides to do his broad comedy, which was The Marriage Proposal, and The Bear, and The Anniversary, and they made him money so that he could sustain. And it’s a very broad comedy, like Shaffer’s Black Comedy. So it’s really interesting that these two great tragedians decided to explore their comedic flair and both were enormously successful with it. It just shows that you are not only one thing. We are multi-faceted; we have pathos and humour that live in us side by side. It’s up to us to decide which part we are going to show today. We make a decision, a conscious choice everyday, of what we’re going to give the world.

And then of course, there’s the Russian influence. Both thematically are about a marriage proposal, and getting approval from the Father, etc., so there are interesting obstacles there. The Russian artists of the day influenced a lot of artists in the 20^th century, especially the new modern movement that was happening in the ‘60s, mid-century modern. And you can see how that’s reflected from the artists of the turn of the century, particularly somebody like Kandinsky.

You have a long history as an actor, and you’re appearing next season in The Drowsy Chaperone. Which do you like better—acting or directing?

Again, it’s like comedy and tragedy. Each one is so gratifying on a certain level, and each one informs the other so well. I don’t get to act as often anymore because I’m so busy directing, but I kind of like that, because I like being in charge. I like being able to hire people and create a team. To create something; to go after something; to make a show a project; I love that aspect. I’ve always done that. Since I was a kid, I took charge. I made decisions, and I wasn’t afraid of that. But at the same time I love to relinquish everything once a while and be an actor, and let somebody else make those decisions.

Dean Paul Gibson with The History Boys

Is it difficult to sit back as a performer and let someone else take the directing reins?

No, it’s more or less easy. I think sometimes other directors can be intimidated by that, but ultimately I just want to tell the story. I’ve got the same goal as them: do the best we can, with the best people, and have a really good time doing it. Because life’s too short.

Anything you can tell us about your plans for the show?

I invite the audience members to see what the common themes are between the two shows, and see how we’ve linked them together, see how we’ve sewn these particular ideas together to create an overall concept that fits both of these comedies from these two great dramatic writers.