NOW On Vol. 16 No. 28 (July 18-24, 1996)
Cover Story

ellen-ray hennessy

Mega-watt performer flips gender switch in revealing dramatic duet

By JILL LAWLESS

Loud, lanky and often outrageous, Ellen-Ray Hennessy epitomizes the Canadian actor's schizophrenic life. She does movies and television, commercials and voice-overs, for the landlord -- and theatre for the soul.

Hennessy is a frequent and arresting -- at times cardiac-arresting -- presence on the nation's TV sets. She has a lead role in Disney's new series Flash Forward, hosts Discovery's Trail Mix travelogue, and this year received a Gemini nomination for One Last Look In The Mirror, on Bravo. Her jet-fuel voice animates several cartoons, and her elastic face graces countless commercials.

But Hennessy is just as likely to be found squeezing her outsized personality into a cramped backspace or shabby studio, helping to create a new play with a small but ambitious company.
Classically adept

An 11-time Dora nominee, she's worked in all the city's major theatres, on plays by prominent writers like Dave Carley, Brad Fraser and Morris Panych. She's adept at the classics -- for two summers she played plucky Twelfth Night heroine Viola for Canadian Stage's Dream In High Park. But she always returns to the Theatre Centre or Buddies in Bad Times, to the creativity and intensity of threadbare live theatre.

She's back at Buddies, in the boozy but eerily smoke-free Tallulah's Cabaret, for the latest show -- of more than 130 -- in her two-decade career. Sex Is My Religion, a powerfully compact two-hander by Vancouver playwright Colin Thomas, explores the heartrending rift and heartbreaking bond between a gay man with AIDS and his estranged Christian fundamentalist mother.

Hennessy approaches the play, as she does everything else, with passion. She cuts a famously manic figure, onstage and off -- at one point in a recent interview she fills a Harbord Street restaurant with scared-elephant noises as she reprises a recent animated role as Babar's mother. But when she talks about her art, she's absolutely focused.

"Theatre is a brutal, horrifying, fucked-up, shithole of a business," she says, with real passion. "I've seen it destroy actors because they give so much, time and time again, and their only solace is a few drinks in the bar after the show. Eventually, it catches up with them and they lose themselves. That scares me. That and being alone.

"But it's also fabulous. You claw at your soul to find an opening that will say something truthful.

"Theatre is my religion," she continues intently. "People go to church to find salvation, truth, love, an answer. I believe we can find all those things in theatre. During 20 years in this business, I've run screaming -- and I've come back every single time.

"I go off and do film and TV, and I remain cold. Soon I find myself back in the artist-generated theatres -- the Theatre Centre, the Fringe, the small theatres where the heart exists because money is not an issue. You reach a point in your career where people go, 'Elly, you don't have to be doing that anymore. You've got two TV series. Are you nuts?' But that's where the secrets are. It's where the life is, the real struggle for art, because there's no money and there's no time -- there's just desire."

Sex Is My Religion, a soulful small play with a big reach, is the kind of theatre on which Hennessy thrives.

Thomas, best known as a writer for young audiences -- his Flesh And Blood is a tough and excellent play for teens about sexuality and AIDS -- is a hugely sympathetic, sensuous writer with an elegant, economical way of sketching love and pain.

In this piece, he tackles the heart's terror of solitude and the complexity of human desire, creating lonely, emotionally impoverished characters who look for affirmation -- middle-aged Marge through faith, her son Jim in sex.

"Marge uses god and religion, Jim uses sex, I use theatre -- it's all the same thing, a way of feeling full and complete," notes Hennessy. "She's a fundamentalist Christian and he's a wild gay man. He believes she could never understand him. But they understand each other much better than they know.

"It's a play about loneliness and mortality, but also about eternity and serenity -- the things the human soul searches for. It's a healing play that speaks to all people who have experienced love in family and have felt loss in family. It embraces the spirit of those who lose -- the one who dies and the one who is left behind."

Thomas' deceptively simple piece is a pair of monologues, with a twist -- the two characters speak each other's words. So it's Hennessy's Marge who tells Jim's story.

It's an ingeniously simple, beautifully theatrical conceit -- and a challenge for the actors.

"I could play the mother very easily -- the female voice comes flowing out of me -- or I could easily play the boy," says Hennessy, who has tackled drag roles with zest, most memorably in Sky Gilbert's giddy Suzie Goo: Private Secretary. "This is a much bigger challenge for me.

"But as an actor, you have to break down your own frame of reference, do things that feel weird. You want to go to the safe place, but the safe place is boring. The only time theatre works is when you're off balance.
Human contact

"I don't want my audience to feel safe. I want to keep them surprised and on the edge. The prospect of making someone feel something, in a world where computers and TV have ripped us from human contact -- that is what excites me.

"Olivier said the work of the actor is to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself. We've got to get on that little wooden O and scream as loud as we can into the face of our audience -- 'Wake up!'"

Hennessy craves the stage's high artistic stakes. So although she welcomes the financial reward and wide profile offered by television -- she hopes to head to L.A., temporarily, later this year -- she'll never be satisfied with the "wacky next-door neighbour" TV roles for which she knows she's perfect.

"You have to beware of being pigeonholed. I play the psycho-killin', wacked-out bitches from hell, the strong, aggressive women. If you excel at being a large, zany type, people want you to be that all the time. They look for 'an Ellen-Ray Hennessy type' -- I've actually seen that on breakdowns for commercials and films in Toronto. And I've auditioned for those parts and not got them. Apparently, someone out there is more like me than me.

"But I have a desire to show people I'm vulnerable. Within me is a tiny person the size of a peanut whom I keep hidden. I've developed a persona. You discover what works, from being onstage, and that becomes a part of you -- the funny gal, the outrageous party girl.

"When I do softer parts, I always get the same response -- 'I had no idea you could do that kind of work!' As if the other times I was just being myself. What they don't know is, that is all an act."

Clearly, Hennessy gets absorbed in her work -- to the point, some might say, of recklessness. She's endured everything from pneumonia to personal injury in pursuit of perfection.

And for all her energy, she can be a remarkably subtle actor, as she showed as Elsa Lanchester in Sky Gilbert's Strange Little Monsters.

"People think I'm a drama queen because I'm impassioned," she says. "I'm an image-based actor. There are images in Sex Is My Religion that just soar, for me. It's so tactile. Every time I read it, something new drips forth from the pages. It's hitting me on a subterranean level, behind that little door I keep bolted. It makes me go places I don't want to go as an actor. I attack every show with vigour, but this one will cost me something."