Brad Fraser

Diane D'Aquila Profile
By Brad Fraser

Long before such shock tactic plays as BENT, GIMME SHELTER, UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS AND THE TRUE NATURE OF LOVE and SHOPPING AND FUCKING came along Toronto's Michael Hollingsworth paved the way for a new breed of confrontational playwrights by creating a show that shook the city of Toronto to it's well bred Caucasian roots.

The play was titled CLEAR LIGHT. Produced by Toronto Free Theatre in 1973 the show elicited howls of protest from the media and audiences. After twelve performances the cops descended on the theatre with an ultimatum. Close the show voluntarily or be shut down for "giving an immoral performance."

Hollingsworth, current Artistic Co-Director of Video Cabaret and creator of the wonderfully ambitious VILLAGE OF THE SMALL HUTS series of multimedia Canadian histories, decided to write a play that used certain Artaud inspired ideas to make a psychedelic drug experience clear to a theatre audience. The show was filled with images that shocked mild Toronto. A woman gives a man a blowjob, spits it into a frying pan, cooks it and feeds it back to him. Another man runs out of the bathroom naked, blood streaming from deep lacerations in his flesh. Someone's put razor blades in the soap. Most varieties of sex, both straight and gay are represented. A baby is cooked in the oven and eaten by the cast. CLEAR LIGHT was a type of satire and savage commentary the Canadian theatre had not experienced before.

Toronto Free Theatre decided to close the show. According to Hollingsworth it was two years of driving cab before he could get another script produced, the theatre had it's funding cut and Martin Kinch the original director never really recovered.

All was not doom and gloom though. The brazen show launched or aided the careers of a number of notable Canadian actors including Nick Mancuso, William Webster and the beautiful and talented Diane D'Aquila.

Ms. D'Aquila is currently appearing in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and THE ALCHEMIST at the Stratford Festival. It's a long distance from those dare-anything days of early Canadian theatre to the most notable Shakespearean festival on the continent. Diane D'Aquila has traveled that distance without seeming to age a day.

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, partially raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she found work as a dresser for the Guthrie Theatre while she was in high school. She dressed noted Canadian actor Douglas Campbell. Tyrone Guthrie, theatrical legend and founder of The Stratford Festival, was there at the time, as were a large contingent of Canadians. Stage struck and defying her parent's wishes, Diane began casting around for acting programs when she finished high school. She considered a number of American institutions before auditioning for the National Theatre School at the urging of her Canadian friends. At sixteen she was accepted to the NTS and began her life of back and forthing between her native country and Canada.

Ms. D'Aquila speaks of those early years of Toronto theatre and new Canadian work with special fondness. "I think I was in Halifax working at the Neptune theatre when Martin Kinch, who had directed me at NTS, sent me a telegram that read "I have this new play. It's controversial, shocking, appalling, violent, mean, sexual…" and he went on with a list of about forty negative adjectives before ending it with, "Would you like to do it?" I don't know why but I accepted without even reading the script. I think maybe four hundred people saw the entire run of that show and I think there were four hundred complaints."

That offer brought her to Toronto for most of the seventies and the early eighties working for upstart new theatres like Toronto Free Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille and The Tarragon. She acted in the original productions of George F. Walker's ZASTROZZI, THE ART OF WAR and NOTHING SACRE. Diane counts Walker's work as some of the most consistently interesting. "I always get good reviews in George Walker plays. I don't know why."

Like most successful actors Ms. D'Aquila's job choice has kept her on the road while enjoying sporadic employment at the Stratford Festival. This season is her seventh and she would be quite happy to continue to work here for the foreseeable future. The security of the festival gig is important to the divorced mother of two school-aged children. However she's well aware of the capricious nature of her chosen profession and admits that she occasionally misses working on new plays. "I've been out of the loop for so long I think they've forgotten about me in Toronto though."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps Hollingsworth puts it best when he says, "Diana was one of those actresses who was willing to push the thresholds, no matter what she's doing. She's still doing it now. She's not scared to take chances." Not a bad legacy for a woman who started her onstage career stoned on acid, naked and eating a baby.