40 questions we’re asking our artists about themselves. It’s a mixture of Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionaire and a high school yearbook. Here’s what Vincent Gale, Rupert in Let Me Call You Sweetheart, said:

BACKGROUND

 What did / do your parents do?

My mother was a music teacher

Siblings?

Two sisters. I’m the oldest

 Where do you live now?

East Vancouver

FAVOURITES

 Favourite book?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 Favourite movie?

The Last Waltz / Last tango in Paris

 Favourite piece of clothing

My Barbour Baufort Wax Jacket

 Favourite food?

Sashimi

 Favourite piece of music?

Elvis Presley’s Gtreatest Hits Volume II

 Favourite character (real or fictional)?

Owen Meaney

 Dream car

Audi A8L

Current car

VW Passat Wagon

WORKING LIFE

 What do you do after a show

Go to Stage Wine Bar

What do you do in your downtime?

Walk the streets of Victoria

First paid acting gig?

BBC TV Series called “The Lost Tribe”

 First acting gig?

BBC TV Series called “The Lost Tribe”

 If I wasn’t an actor I would

Play music

BESTS

 Best meal ever

A Florentine steak at a farmhouse between Florence and Siena

 Best show seen

The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of “The Black Watch”

 Best concert

Paul Weller in Hyde Park

 Most inspiring person you know

My father-in-law Doug Clement

SECRETS

 Five people (real or fictional / dead or alive) that you would invite to a dinner party?

John, Paul, George, Ringo and George Martin

Celebrity crush?

Gary Oldman

 What are you most proud of?

My son Max

The quality you most like in a man?

Sartorial elegance

The quality you most like in a woman?

Emotional stability

 What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Being on a beach in Maui with my wife and son.
Our thanks to Vince for being our first ever 40Q participant. Let Me Call You Sweetheart runs until May 19.

Thursday May 16 2013 to Saturday May 18 2013 in the Belfry Theatre Studio A

presented by SNAFU Dance Theatre written by Ingrid Hansen, Kathleen Greenfield, and Rod Peter Jr.

Fourteen-year-old social-rejects (and possible geniuses) Kitt and Jane host an interactive survival guide to the post-apocalyptic future. Kitt & Jane is a stand-alone sequel to the highly acclaimed Little Orange Man, seen at the 2011 Victoria and Vancouver Fringe Festivals.

Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8:00pm Ticket Prices are $15 for Adults and $10 for Students/Seniors (+GST)

Audience Advisory: Studio A is Open Seating, and latecomers cannot be admitted. Kitt & Jane runs 75 minutes, with no intermission.

For the audition, please prepare two audition pieces of approximately three minutes in length each. Our preference would be: one Canadian piece and one other of your choice – Canadian, classical, or contemporary American or British. Please no self-written pieces, or pieces from plays that have not been professionally produced.

Please submit headshot and resume to The Belfry Theatre before May 5th, 2013.
By Mail: 1291 Gladstone Ave Victoria BC V8T 1G5
By Email: auditions@belfry.bc.ca (file size not to exceed 5MB)
You will be contacted to book an audition time.  NO PHONE CALLS OR FAXES, PLEASE.

Audition time priority given to Equity Members and Equity registered apprentices.

If you’ve not been notified of an audition time by May 6th, this means we don’t have room to see you this time.  Erin Macklem will call you …please don’t call her.  Priority given to those who we have not met or have not seen recently.

 
Former Production Manager Keith Houghton will be taking on new responsibilities as Operations Supervisor for the Belfry. Alex will be joining the Belfry team later this summer.

Thurs, May 2
GVPL Esquimalt Branch 1231 Esquimalt Road
12.00 pm
Free event.

Tues, April 30
GVPL Nellie McClung Branch 3950 Cedar Hill Road
12.00 pm
Free event.

Thurs, April 25
GVPL Bruce Hutchison Branch 4636 Elk Lake Drive
12.00 pm
Free event.

Tues, April 23
GVPL Saanich Centennial Branch 3110 Tillicum Rd. (Pearkes Arena complex)
12.00 pm
Free event.

Join us on Monday April 22nd @ 7.30pm at The Belfry Theatre for a power hour book reviewing bonanza!

Five fast, furious and fun GVPL librarians return for the final Booksmack of the season. They’ll let their hair down, take off their glasses and speed review books and DVDs for giving – just in time for summer reading.

Free event.

by Adrian Chamberlain
Victoria Times Colonist
Sat Jan 14  2012
Page: C1 / Front  Section: Arts

It’s a safe bet most playwrights are fast asleep at the crack of dawn.

Not Joel Bernbaum.

On Friday mornings for two months, Bernbaum woke up at 4 a.m.

He’d gulp down an apple or a banana. By 5: 30 a.m. he’d have joined Rev. Al Tysick, the city’s best-known street worker, on his daily rounds visiting Victoria’s homeless.

Tysick, working with the Dandelion Society, would rouse people living on the street, some sleeping in doorways. He’d make sure they were all right, offering a ciggie, a coffee or a donut. And then he’d introduce Bernbaum, a lanky, freshfaced 30-year-old.

Bernbaum is in the midst of a project never before attempted in Victoria. It may be unique to Canada.

Commissioned by the Belfry Theatre, he’s creating a play about homelessness, using only taped interviews as dialogue. It’s called verbatim theatre. Every single word in the yet-to-be-completed play will have been, at some point, uttered by a real person.

He’s casting a wide net. Over the past year, Bernbaum has interviewed not only people living on the streets, but policemen, business owners and social workers. He’s also talked to students and teachers in elementary and high schools. And he’s done “streeters,” that is, quizzed passersby on street corners.

He may knock on your door, too. Bernbaum is now visiting various Greater Victoria neighbourhoods, sitting down with homeowners and chatting about homelessness.

He has, amazingly, completed about 500 interviews. Bernbaum estimates he has 3,000 pages of transcripts. It’s a huge task. A team of students from the University of Victoria’s department of Applied Theatre is helping with transcriptions.

Some Victoria residents – perhaps wondering if Bernbaum will ask about their relationship with God or sell them carpet-cleaning – have closed the door in his face. Yet, overall, he’s found a surprising number of people will talk about homelessness with a complete stranger.

“Overwhelmingly,” Bernbaum said, “people just want to share their story.”

The play is to be titled Home is a Beautiful Word. An in-progress version will be performed as part of the Belfry Theatre’s Spark Festival in March. Artistic director Michael Shamata said the finished version of Home is a Beautiful Word will be included in the Belfry’s 2013-14 season.

Bernbaum, a Saskatoon native, uses the phrase “verbatim theatre journalism” to describe his project. He seems well placed to create it. He holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in journalism from Carleton University. His MA thesis was What They Said: Verbatim Theatre’s Relationship to Journalism. Bernbaum is also an emerging playwright who completed a theatre program at the Canadian College of Performing Arts.

Verbatim theatre is an interesting form, with origins dating back to the wide availability of portable tape recorders in the 1960s. Of late, we’ve seen a fair bit of this style of theatre in Victoria. A year ago, the Victoria Theatre Guild staged a powerful version of The Laramie Project.

One of the most famous examples of verbatim theatre, this drama was based on interviews conducted after the 1998 hate killing of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.

In 2011, the Belfry hosted The Middle Place, a verbatim theatre piece about young people living in homeless shelters. Last year the company also hosted the verbatim play Kismet: One to One Hundred, based on interviews with 100 Canadians. In 2009, Victoria’s Uno Fest offered another wellknown play in this style, My Name is Rachel Corrie, which used the diaries and emails of the late Rachel Corrie, an American student and protester.

When it comes to verbatim theatre, there are varying levels of “purity.” The Laramie Project is arguably less pure, as it’s based on the interviewers’ own journal entries and news reports as well as interviews. Bernbaum says his process is about as pure as it gets. He vows to use only words uttered by the people he’s interviewed.

“I wanted to use real voices from the community. What better way is there to address the issue?”

Tysick says it was Bernbaum’s integrity and genuine interest in helping that convinced him to introduce the playwright to the homeless. Tysick often gets approached in this manner, sometimes by graduate students writing a paper. He doesn’t always say yes. He’ll allow outsiders into the street world only if they truly want to help the homeless (as opposed to scoring a good mark).

“People on the street are not just animals to be looked at,” Tysick said.

In person, Bernbaum comes across as moral and earnest, fired up about the possibility of theatre as a vehicle for social change. It’s unsurprising to learn he’s a past volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. He once helped build a house in Malaysia.

With Home is a Beautiful Word, he’s keen to step aside and let others have their say. More than once, Bernbaum downplayed his role in the project, making it appear he’s merely the catalyst for his play.

“This is a lot bigger than me; we’re facilitating voices that have not been heard,” he said. “This piece is really by the citizens of Victoria.”

Of course, there’s no way an artist – whether it be a writer, a playwright or a documentary maker – can avoid leaving his fingerprints on any given creation. With documentary-style theatre, the results may not be as unbiased as one might think. Someone is doing the editing; someone is selecting what’s to stay in and what’s to be left out.

There’s another limitation, too. Bernbaum suggested to me his door-knocking interviews provide an accurate reflection of what Victorians think about homeless. I countered by saying it provides a good reflection of what those willing to talk to him think about homelessness.

Still, the immediacy and vast scope of Bernbaum’s unorthodox project will no doubt give us insight into our city’s homelessness problem like nothing else.

Anxious to protect the anonymity of his sources, Bernbaum didn’t want to speak specifically about their stories, or let the Times Colonist photograph or interview these people.

When I asked Bernbaum what he’d learned since embarking on this project, he didn’t hesitate.

He’s learned to be less judgmental about others. Not just those living on the street – everybody.

“I realized how silly it is to judge,” Bernbaum said. “It’s kind of pointless. You have to stay open … You can’t really predict what’s inside someone’s head, whether they’re on the street or not.”

achamberlain@timecolonist.com