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The theatre has always been a part of my life. I had my first drama lessons with Dora Mavor Moore at the New Play Society in Toronto. As a kid, I saw Toby Robins play Peter Pan at the Eaton Auditorium. My mother, the actress Beth Amos, took me to the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto to see The King and I with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner. I found the music annoying because it interrupted the story. I remember sitting at the back of Prudhomme's Theatre in Vineland (near St Catharines) when I was about nine watching my mother in a matinee of For Love or Money. But I was never stage - struck and I did not harbour any theatrical ambitions for myself. My brief stint as an apprentice at the Red Barn Theatre on Lake Simcoe, doing eight shows in nine weeks, convinced me this was no way to make a living, and I wisely decided to go to university and study Chinese.
In 1968, after graduating, I found myself again working as a reluctant apprentice, this time at Theatre Toronto in a small studio space on Isabella Street. Overworked and underpaid, I did one small part at the Royal Alex and numerous theatrical experiments with music, dance, and improvisation in the studio space. At the end of the season I had the opportunity to audition for the great British director Clifford Williams. He said, "You people should be doing your own plays." I did not know what he meant. Who would write these plays? What would they be about? Who would want to see them? I asked these questions not because I had a Canadian identity problem, but because such an activity had never occurred to me.
By 1972, I had decided to quit theatre. For five years I had been working sporadically as an actress, only occasionally finding the work interesting. That spring I had looked forward to doing "Lizzie" in The Rainmaker at a new summer theatre in Nova Scotia. The show was cancelled. I cried for a day. Then, out of the blue, a director I hardly knew, Paul Thompson, asked me if I would like to move to the country for the summer and create a...