Up Till Now: The Autobiography

Canada and eventually around the world.
    But I had my job. I worked at the Mountain Playhouse in the summer and at the Canadian Rep in the winter. We would do a different play every week, rehearsing and performing every day. They were almost exclusively laugh-a-second Broadway comedies. It wasn’t just laughs, it was laughs within laughs. When you’re doing a comedy silence is absolutely deafening; you not only can hear it, it cuts right through you. Oh no, what did I do wrong? That got a laugh last night, what did I do differently? When you’re onstage and you don’t get a laugh there is a clang in the mind of every performer on that stage; everybody immediately adjusts and tries to find the rhythm.
    I did those comedies for almost three years. I thought I had experienced the worst possible clangs until I had this great idea many years later. This was long after James T. Kirk had become so well known. This was one of those epically bad ideas that seem so good at the time, and only later cause you to question the very existence of life: I was asked to perform at the Comedy Club in Los Angeles and I said, “I’ve got a great idea. I’m going to go in there like Shatner thinks he’s Captain Kirk, and I’m going to go in there like Captain Kirk thinks he’s funny.”
    The owner of the club looked at me seriously, “Bill, that’s not funny,” he said.
    Now really, who’s going to know what’s funny? The actor who had spent several years performing light comedies in Canada or the owner of a comedy club that features stand-up performers every night? I said, “Let me explain this to you. It will be very funny because they will get that I’m Captain Kirk who thinks he’s funny, but he’s not funny, which is why he will be funny.”
    I remember that very strange look he had in his eyes. It was clear to me then that he did not understand the essence of comedy. I told all the usual Van Allen Belt jokes—you can probably imagine them: “Hey, a funny thing happened to me on the way to Zetar,” “Take my Klingon, please.” “A Romulan walked into the transporter room with a chicken on his head...”
    That audience laughed like a roomful of Vulcans. Oh my, it was just awful. The problem, I discovered, was that the audience did not grasp the intricate sophistication of my act. Rather than understanding that I was playing Captain Kirk who thought he was funny, but wasn’t funny, which was why he was funny, they watched me perform and instead decided, “Wow, Shatner’s terrible.”
    That was the worst comedic night of my life. But I had started preparing for it in Ottawa. I struggled in Ottawa. My father’s offer, there would always be a place for me, resonated in my head. It would be unfair to say I was a starving actor; I wasn’t making enough money to be starving. My father gave me a few thousand dollars, telling me, “I can’t do any more.” It was enough to help me survive but not enough to really live on. I know he must have been torn between wanting to help me but also wanting me to experience how incredibly difficult the life I’d chosen could be.
    After my third year with the Canadian Rep I was once again invited to join the Stratford Festival to play the juvenile roles. This time I accepted the offer. The Stratford Festival had begun when a Canadian named Tom Patterson, who lived in the small town of Stratford, Ontario, had a very strange vision: he was going to create a theater in Stratford using Canadian players to perform all the classic plays. So he went to England and actually managed to convince Sir Tyrone Guthrie, then considered one of the greatest stage directors in the world, that he should come to Stratford to run this theater.
    And so it happened, and Guthrie brought with him to Stratford some leading designers and actors in England. Alec Guinness starred in the first play, and the Stratford Festival almost immediately earned a reputation as the finest classical theater in North America.
    I packed my belonging—that’s not an exaggeration—into the back of a used Morris Minor my father had bought me and headed for the bright lights of Toronto. A Morris Minor was a compromise between a very small car and nothing. While driving to Toronto in a fierce rainstorm I crossed over a bridge; as I did, a sixteen-wheeler, water spewing out of its front tire wells, raced passed me going in the opposite direction. The force of the truck and the water almost blew me over the side of the