Up Till Now: The Autobiography

exuberant.” Chris Plummer got rave reviews, the show was sold out for its entire run. This was by far the most successful work I’d done; I was a member of a prestigious company, working with some of the most respected actors in Canada. Darn right it was penetrating and exuberant. Mondays were my only day off, and one Monday morning about two weeks into our run I got a call from the production office. Chris Plummer was suffering from a kidney stone; could I go on that night?
    Could I go on that night? Could I go on that night? Replace Plummer in one of the greatest roles ever written for the stage? Absolutely. Without doubt. Of course.
    Clearly I was insane. I had never even said the lines out loud, but merely muttered them between flushes of the toilet. I hadn’t done a single rehearsal in that role so I didn’t know the staging. I hadn’t even met some of the other actors. Any actor in their right mind would have said, sir, how dare you ask me to go there and risk my reputation. Or something like that.
    And they would have responded, of course we can’t. It’s impossible. We’ll call off the performance and refund their money and...
    Refund their money? Ah, there’s the rub. The production office tried to schedule an emergency rehearsal but finding actors on a day off is even more difficult than getting a profit participation check from a movie studio. At about five o’clock someone suggested I try on the wardrobe to make sure it fit. Fortunately Chris and I were about the same size so it fit me well.
    The odd thing was that the impossibility of what I was about to do hadn’t hit me yet. I was completely calm and confident. It neveroccurred to me that I was risking my career—not that I actually had a career, of course—but if this turned out to be a debacle I was the one who was going to get the blame for it. And it had the kind of big debacle potential that inspires comedy writers.
    Tyrone Guthrie wasn’t even there. Moments before I was about to go on Michael Langham, the director, asked, “Are you all right?”
    “Sure, I’m fine,” I said, thinking I knew the play. There are few moments in the life of a stage actor as dramatic as this one. It is the actor’s cliché: I was the unrehearsed understudy going out on that stage as a nobody and coming back as probably a bigger nobody. I don’t know why I wasn’t nervous. Certainly any rational person should have been close to panicking. Instead, I was excited.
    Stratford had a thrust stage, meaning it was surrounded by the audience on three sides. There are no wings. All entrances and exits are made at the back of the stage. So when you’re onstage you’re almost in the audience. If you forget a line there’s no way somebody can feed it to you—unless it’s a member of the audience.
    There were twenty-five hundred people in the audience, including most of the critics who had originally reviewed the play. Apparently they had learned that an unknown understudy was going on and didn’t want to miss what promised to be a memorable night in the theater. Finally the lights went down and I walked out onto the stage to begin the most important performance of my life. Whatever happened in the next few hours, if someday I ended up in the Ottawa River, I would have had this one night.
    I looked around the theater and...
    This is where we should pause for a word from our sponsor. I’ve spent so much of my life on television that I’m used to building to a first-chapter climax and cutting to commercial. However, as this is a book we haven’t sold commercial time. However, there will be space available in the soft-cover version.
    . . . and felt exhilarated. I had been doing a play a week for three years. I had learned the lines of hundreds of characters. I had been a comedian, a charlatan, and a convicted con man. That night I was ready to be a king.
    Perhaps the proper word to describe the way I was feeling is stupefied. I was completely calm, in the zone, Zenned out, at one with the stage and the audience. It came together in a way it never should have. A few years later I would be working for Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone, a place where unimaginable things happened for which there could be no explanation. Like my performance that night. I was “Once more into the breach, dear friends”-ing as if I had been playing this role for seasons. “Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
    A stage