Seana McKenna in rehearsals for Things I Know To Be True.DAHLIA KATZ/Supplied
Seana McKenna, one of Canada’s most decorated theatre actors, has been gracing stages across the country for roughly 40 years – and she still sees every role as an opportunity to experience and learn something new.
“The danger is having a preconception about a character and not realizing you do,” McKenna says. “You have to let go of that and find out what happens in rehearsal. You have to really receive before you can give something.”
This month, McKenna will be bringing her tried and true approach to her debut with The Company Theatre in Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know to be True. The play, at Toronto’s CAA Theatre through Feb. 19, tells the story of a married couple in their 60s who find themselves supporting their four adult children through a number of life-altering changes after they’ve flown the coop.
McKenna’s character, Fran Price, is a registered nurse with a blunt disposition, though ultimately she’s a caring mother who does her best to do right by her family. She’s efficient, but can be impolite – though, in McKenna’s view, she is simply doing her best with the tools she has, as most mothers are.
“I was talking to someone who said, ‘Oh, she’s pretty unlikeable,’” McKenna says. “And I went, ‘Really?’ Because I just saw a woman who had four kids and a job and was trying to cope.”
As a mother of a grown child herself – one who knows well what it is to juggle a family and a demanding career – McKenna can relate to the idea that a parent’s job is never truly done. She knows firsthand that a mother never stops worrying, no matter how old her child may be. She pulled from both her experiences as a parent and her relationships with her own parents for the role. The young adults in the play are just beginning to see their parents as whole human beings with their own lives and secrets, a transition McKenna remembers going through when she was young.
“I think when you start seeing your parents as individual human beings, that’s the first real step to growing up,” she says.
Fran and her husband Bob (played by Tom McCamus) have been married for 40 years – yet another detail that parallels McKenna’s real life. She and her husband, acclaimed actor and director Miles Potter, have been together for 43. The play, she says, effectively captures what it is to live a full life with someone. “You have your ups, you have your downs, you have your glides, you have your crises – it’s all part of it,” she said. “But the foundation is love, love that’s so deep it hurts.”
McKenna sees family, and life in general, as being constantly in flux. And though she admits humans usually have a tough time adapting to it, she does her best to embrace change with open arms. She has performed for live audiences consistently since she was six years old, a remarkable streak that was suddenly halted by the pandemic. McKenna had no stage opportunities lined up for two years and, though she did dabble in some television and film, she hardly worked at all. She returned to the stage in 2022, playing Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Stratford Festival.
“When you rev at that high a pace for so long, always knowing what’s coming up, you don’t actually settle down, you don’t actually breathe out,” she says. “It was nice to not know what was going to happen, not to have to think about work. I was not productive during the pandemic, and I felt no guilt.”
She relished the ability to spend time with her son and grandson. And while she had fewer social interactions during that time, she says the ones she did have were quantitatively longer and qualitatively better. She now questions the norms of an industry she once took for granted.
“Whoever thought eight shows a week was a good idea?” she asks, adding that the new-found focus on burnout and work-life balance is necessary. She believes industry changes are slowly being implemented, though, noting that the Stratford Festival began giving actors a double day off every four weeks last summer in an attempt to improve working conditions.
Still, McKenna admits she’s glad to be back in the theatre, and she’s particularly enjoying working in a cast with such a wide range of ages. In addition to teaching at several theatre schools and participating in the Stratford Festival’s official mentorship program, McKenna delights in sharing her wisdom with young actors.
“Working with young people is so good because it takes you out of your own pocket of safety and you’re not stuck in one strata of society,” she says. “When I go to the theatre, and I see young actors I’ve never seen before and I can’t wait to see more of them, I know theatre is in good hands.”
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