Village Squire, 1978-08, Page 5Ted as Peg, the teacher's wife who is fed up.
Comedy
is
serious
business
Ted Johns makes
people laugh ... and think
One man shows have been the talk of the Western Ontario
theatre scene this summer.
Focus of the comments early in the summer was the
extraordinary work of Richard Monette in the gruelling
Judgement, a show that put both actor and audience through an
emotional wringer.
One might wonder, however, if it could be any tougher than
Ted John's one-man show The School Show in which he comes
home to his home county to the people he went to school with,
played with as a kid, takes on a controversial subject, and
dresses up as a woman. In a county where at least part of the
population already thinks actors are something less than macho,
that's bravery.
But Ted feels it's a big opportunity to come home to Huron
county. only a few miles from his boyhood home near the old
Clinton air base. He calls the opportunity brought when Blyth
Summer Festival artistic Director James Roy invited him to
initiate a one-man show at Blyth this summer "heaven sent".
Few people have the chance to perform where their roots are, he
says. _
So a few days before the opening of the show he was
understandably a bit uptight about the show. After all, not only
was he performing in his own backyard, he had virtually sole
responsibility for the show since he had researched it, written it
and was the only performer on stage, if you don't count Alex, a
papier-mache dummy who shares the spotlight in some of the
scenes. And on top of all that, he was dealing with a subject that
had stirred a more emotional reaction in Huron county than any
in recent years: the school strike.
While it was he who chose the topic for the one-man show the
final product is not what he started out to get, Ted says. His
initial idea was to deal with the subject of the little red school
house growing up. He wanted to stay away from the strike issue.
He was loath to deal with the strike because there were so many
facets to the argument, and so many figures that are involved
that hardly anyone knows about. One thing that he learned while
doing his research he says is the few people except the
negotiators for the two sides really knew what was going on.
But once he got into the strike issue he realized that he had to
deal with it and eventually it more or less took over the whole
play. The strike brought into play so many of the conflicts and
VILLAGE SQUIRE/AUGUST 1978. PG. 3.