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Actors have their dream roles.
For Calgarians Karen Johnson-Diamond and Griffin Cork, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again always ranked high on their list of must-do plays.
Pleasure is the gentle two-person play Michel Tremblay wrote in 1998 as a tribute to his wonderfully eccentric and flamboyant mother, who inspired and nurtured his love of the arts. Cork is Johnson-Diamond’s real-life son, so the play speaks to them from the heart, as much as it does from the page.
They are performing Pleasure at Rosebud Theatre until Oct. 26 under the direction of artistic director Morris Ertman, who says the play reminds him of the creative influence his mother had on his life as one of Canada’s preeminent theatre professionals.
Cork recalls he read Pleasure at university when he chose to study Tremblay in-depth for one of his drama classes. “I told mom that, before she retired, we had to do the play. I thought we’d have to self-produce a production for a limited run. I never dreamed we’d get a full-scale production like the one Rosebud is giving us.”
Johnson-Diamond has been a mainstay in the Calgary theatre scene since the early 1990s when she moved with her husband, fellow actor Kevin Cork, from Edmonton. He gave up theatre to go into financial management. They had son Griffin in 1996.
Cork says his first real memory of his mother as an actor was when she starred in Theatre Calgary’s 2004 production of The Miracle Worker. “She used one of her lines from the play to teach me about projection and enunciation. It was as if she was welcoming me into her world,” he recalls.
“When you’re a kid, and your parents are the coolest people in the world, you want to be like them. You want to like and do the things they do. My parents were into acting and computer games, so that’s where I wanted to be. My mom sent me to Quest Theatre’s drama camps and the provincial Arts Trek summer camps where she was a teacher. We had different last names so people didn’t make the connection and that’s how I liked it.”
Johnson-Diamond insists she wasn’t grooming Griffin to be an actor. She thought these camps would enrich his life. “I would have supported Griffin in anything he chose to do, but when he said he wanted to take theatre at university, I gave him the pep talk about how difficult it could be. I told him about the 10-year rule, that he’d probably have to wait that long for his career to take off, which is how long it took for mine. He certainly broke that rule.”
Cork graduated in 2019. Four years later, he starred in Theatre Calgary’s production of Forgiveness, for which he received both a Betty Mitchell and Calgary Theatre Critics nomination for outstanding work in a leading role. In his five years as a professional actor, he has starred in Stones in his Pockets, Chariots of Fire and All is Calm for Rosebud, and the world premiere of Heist at Vertigo.
There are moments in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again that resonate strongly for both mother and son because they feel like deja vu.
“There is a point where The Narrator, who I play, says to his mother, who is so afraid he’ll be crushed and disillusioned by a life in the arts, that he has no intention of failing. I had that exact conversation with my parents, and those exact sentiments, when I told them I’d decided to take theatre at university,” says Cork.
For Johnson-Diamond, the deja vu moment comes during one of Nana’s rants about her in-laws. “Nana says she’s pretty sure her sister-in-law’s family doesn’t have as many laughs every day as we do. That could be me, just as much as Nana, speaking, because we always laugh. Griffin is not just my son, but one of my best friends. He’s always been a friend of my theatre friends, and part of my theatre community, so I know what Nana’s family are missing, and it touches my heart.”
Johnson-Diamond and Cork say they are grateful to Aaron Krogman, an actor and instructor at Rosebud Theatre, for suggesting Ertman use a real-life mother and son in this play. Both were already known to Ertman as Johnson-Diamond had directed the world premiere of W.O. Mitchell’s Magic Lies: An Evening with W.O. Mitchell for Rosebud, and Griffin had starred in three Rosebud shows.
Cork says he can hardly wait to get on stage for each performance because he “gets to show off the incredible talent of my mother, and how much I respect her. She has a good 75 per cent of the lines in the show. Like the audience, I get to sit there and enjoy every moment of her stage time.”