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Interview with Gary Farmer
Gary Farmer began his acting career coaching Native kids with the Native Theatre School in Toronto. His first theatrical role was in Michael Cook's On The Rim Of The Curve, which was produced during the 1976 Olympics in Montréal. Since then he has played in countless Native theatre productions and toured throughout Canada's Northern Native communities. He has worked in radio and television production, and has published the journal Aboriginal Voices since the early nineties. He's appeared in the films Powwow Highway, Dead Man, and most recently, the award-winning Smoke Signals. He visited Playwrights' Workshop Montréal on June 12, 1998, and talked to Vincent Tinguely, Paula Danckert, Sean O'Hara and Deena Aziz about his experiences with Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing.
The Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts had a festival, down at the Shaw Festival, called the Native Arts Festival. I was a photographer, so Jim (Buller, founder of Native Theatre School) hired me to take photographs of the events. At the time, Tomson wasn't playwriting. There was this magnificent-looking man with hair down past his ass. He had this tuxedo on, with tails even, and this hair that was longer than the tails! He walked on, went up to this huge grand piano, kind of flipped his hair back and started to play this music. It blew me away. I thought, 'Wow, here's an Indian guy playing fucking grand piano!' A year or two later, James Reaney called me up. Tomson was at the University of Western Ontario. I was trying to get theatre going in my community with Project Circle Theatre; I was filled with this concept, and went back to my reserve, Six Nations, and started an organization to develop theatre in my community, along with the people. Because I saw early that with a play I could make people laugh, I could make them cry, and in doing that I could make them think. James Reaney used to do this stuff with communities: James would pull all these people together and do these plays based on their histories. So we were doing this play which was based on a book by John Richardson, supposedly Canada's first novelist! For [the Reaney adaptation] Wacousta, Tomson and I translated some of my dialogue for my character, Pontiac, into Cree, and I spoke Cree in the performance. But I never got to really work with him until we did this [Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing] workshop [at PWM]. Because Rez Sisters, his first piece, was all women, and René did the only male part. When we did Dry Lips, I was hanging out in Santa Monica. I had just finished a film called Powwow Highway. That's when I got my fifteen minutes of fame. I was in Southern California, laying on the beach every day. I'd fallen in love, and I wasn't going to go anywhere. [Tomson] sent me his first draft [of Dry Lips] . . . I was living in the [former] home of a famous silent movie star, a beautiful lush place with big stately rooms. And I remember sitting in there reading Tomson's first draft going, 'Whoa! This is wild!' So that's when we came up to Montréal. What was the workshop process like? I will never forget that first day. We all had done various things together in the past. Tomson had done some work in West Bay, Manitoulin Island [with the De-ba-jeh-mu-jig Theatre Company], and we had developed a few plays there. A play by Shirley Cheechoo which was like twelve, thirteen pages, and we turned it into a two-act play in ten days and it went on the road forever. We always kept bringing the gang together. So we all knew each other. When we got to this room in Montréal, I'll never forget all those guys like flies on shit to the part that they wanted, 'I want that, I want that!' I just let them go. Graham went to Pierre Saint-Pierre like [sucking sound], he just grabbed it. And Ron Cook, he's such a character, the first time he read Spooky Lacroix in that workshop, we just laughed. He would no sooner open his mouth than we were on the floor. Spooky Lacroix was Ron Cook. It hurt, when we went from the little two-hundred seat theatre [Theatre Passe Muraille] to the twelve, fifteen-hundred seat theatre [Royal Alexandria] because Ron couldn't come. Simply because people said you couldn't hear him clearly. It really broke my heart. The most underdeveloped character was Zachary Jeremiah Keechigeesik. He said like four words in the original draft. And that's pretty well what I was left with. Which was kind of always my role . . . strong silent type [laughter]. I like that, because I get to develop my own character. And through that process of development over time, Zachary Jeremiah Keechigeesik was turned into . . . well, if there was a protagonist, it was him. But there never really was a protagonist . . . How did you develop the character? Would you come up with ideas, and then Tomson would run into a room and write? My family was drawn back [to Canada] because they rented a store for five hundred dollars a month on the reserve, and they turned it into a million dollar business over time, just by hard work. I remember, being on tour in the early days: I would always think about ways I could open some kind of business. I was really driven by some kind of business sense. Tomson and I just turned that into [an element of the character Zachary]. I was really into radio stations. I still am, trying to develop radio in the Native community. The whole idea of Big Joey trying to start a radio station, that was my desire. But Tomson would twist it, he would throw something else at me, that whole bakery thing. He'd take the passion but he'd twist and turn it into something else. That was the process. I came into Montréal to do this workshop, and then I went back to Santa Monica. Powwow Highway was just breaking then. When the original production [of Dry Lips] came, I had an offer to do this film, kind of a weird film about this snake that goes under the ground . . . I remember that film! It's with Kevin Bacon. They offered me the second lead in that, which Fred Ward eventually did. I chose to do Dry Lips, because we had workshopped the play, and the play was magnificent and we knew it. But I gave up that movie, which I think would've taken my career in . . . A totally different direction!! [raucous laughter] I think I could've played that whole Hollywood scene. That would've put me up, and I could've played off all kinds of things from that. So I felt like Tomson's piece . . . Ruined your career!! [raucous laughter] Plus, the other thing I always thought about Dry Lips . . . here, he put seven Indian men in the same room. This play brings people together. And all these men are totally fucked, there's a lot of shit going on in the community. And we literally had to live with each other for two years. It was like hell! It was really hard. We were all at different stages of our lives. It was a pinnacle for us as a Native community, as Native performers.
Were you a different person when you came out of the play's two-year
run?
I certainly was. I kind of sobered up a bit. Not that I ever drank much, but by the middle of the second run I was totally sober. Sober from everything. It was hard. I think what I learned most from the whole thing is that theatre's sacred. Acting is a very sacred thing. I had a sense of that, but I hadn't realized how true that is. It was during that whole period too, 1990 - I don't think we remounted it until 1991 - when René passed away, just after the first run. I'd been working down in Navaho land doing a film, a real mediocre film called Dark Wind. I learned all kinds of things down there. I played a Hopi. A Hopi! They're smaller people, so we used to joke about me being the world's biggest Hopi. The Hopi have clowns, and these clowns are really sacred. They make the community think. The Hopis are really into reggae music, and the clowns came and took the reggae music away. They take things away and you have to starve without it for a while, and it really grinds home why you like that music. Why do Hopis like reggae music? [Laughter]. You get Black Uhuru and all the heavy bands coming direct from Jamaica to Hopi land. Meanwhile they're surrounded by two hundred thousand Navahos who are into Country and Western music. They're really wild people. I learned a lot from them, watching the clowns and being exposed to that culture really helped me. We always talked about theatre being based on ceremony and ritual, but it just went right to home for me there. I studied clown for a couple of years with Richard Pachenko, before he passed away. He took the best of European clown and brought it over here and applied all kinds of Native American concepts, to come up with masks and all that. Things just started to fall into place for me, every time I took the stage it literally became very sacred for me, a sacred act. [During the re-mount] I just went in this other direction than everyone else was going. It was hard for me, living in that dysfunctional environment we were living and portraying every night. Big Joey kept being more like Big Joey, he just kept going and going and going and going. By the time we got to Toronto it was like, 'Fuck, I don't know if I can hang on.' But we did. I haven't really done much theatre since. Even in film you only get a decent script every seven years. Between Powwow Highway and Dead Man it was exactly seven years. What effect did Dry Lips have on the Native audience? They were totally split. People hated it. I remember Lenore Keeshig Tobias saying something like, 'I don't want to see no more big fat ugly women flying across the stage!' They would say nasty stuff. And then this whole thing about Tomson being a misogynist came up. I'll never forget that first play we did, that Wacousta play back in the seventies. It's amazing how green you can be as an actor, you don't understand what's going on with the company, what's going on with the director, the writer, and all the subtext, the emotions that fly when you do theatre. It's pretty astounding. It's people's lives, it's people exposing themselves. And I didn't really understand [the reaction to Dry Lips], I was like this green guy sitting there going, 'What's wrong with everybody? ' A lot of them [the Native audience] loved the comedy. We knew Graham's strength. Graham's an astounding comedic actor. I still don't think the cinema has really discovered that yet. There's one scene you can pull from Maverick that's priceless, it's classic Graham. He has that power, and he knew he could carry that first act. We all knew that Graham could make that first act just fly. So Pierre Saint-Pierre's got everybody [in the audience], so when that second act comes through, which has been my tour-de-force, my strength, it's kind of like slapping an audience. 'You stupid fuckers, read this, just take a look at this.' We really used that to its maximum in that play. It was structured that way, and most Native work is. You laugh and cry at the same time. You don't know what to do, eventually. Do you have any last comments? I think it's shameful that we can't seem to get Tomson's Rose up. We've got all these magnificent, rich theatres, which I see time after time taking shots with stuff that I don't think has a lot to say. And then you've got something like this piece, which has great music, the book is strong . . . I just think it's a crime. If anybody's reading this web page, they should get the boards of some of the major theatres in this country to get behind that play. Because [Tomson]'s not writing any plays. He's writing screenplays or he's writing books, but it's really stopped the movement of that set of plays which he hoped to write. It's a pretty big budget, but it seems that it should happen. 
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