{"id":31248,"date":"2022-05-05T18:12:09","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T22:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=31248"},"modified":"2022-05-05T18:19:10","modified_gmt":"2022-05-05T22:19:10","slug":"theatre-auroras-lonely-planet-helps-actors-grapple-with-challenging-times-on-stage-and-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/theatre-auroras-lonely-planet-helps-actors-grapple-with-challenging-times-on-stage-and-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Theatre Aurora\u2019s \u201cLonely Planet\u201d helps actors grapple with challenging times \u2013 on stage and off"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Over the course of COVID-19, York Region teacher Chris Cluff saw his world close around him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remote learning paused face-to-face interaction with his students, COVID made going outside less attractive, and he looked on, as so many of us did, as friends waged battle with the virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy own personal operating system was telling me, \u2018Stay safe, stay home, stay out of rotation,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he\u2019s out there once again, this time wearing his actor\u2019s hat, as one of two stars of Lonely Planet, a play by Steven Deitz, which opens this Thursday, May 5, at Theatre Aurora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lonely Planet, which runs on select dates and times through May 14, follows Jody and Carl, two gay men in an American city living through the AIDS epidemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cluff plays Jody, the owner of a map store, who, despite opening the eyes of others to the beauty that can be found around the world, finds his life becoming increasingly insular, as his community wages war against an invisible enemy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sound familiar? It did to Cluff, as he eagerly set to work bringing Jody to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t get it out of my head,\u201d he says. \u201cI read the synopsis and thought, \u2019Wow, I feel like part of Jody\u2019s character. I was kind of living that story just after two years of being enclosed with COVID and being kind of stuck in a place, observing many of my friends trying to make decisions on what does it all mean?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the audition process, Cluff was asked to bring in a story about lived experiences coming through the pandemic. There was, of course, no shortage of experiences to draw upon and this process was punctuated by Cluff\u2019s discovery that he hadn\u2019t \u201creally reconciled what it meant to be out in the world again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is mind-blowing to go through my everyday life, which is still in pandemic style, and someone will say something that is almost word for word a line from the play \u2013 and they have never read it and they might not even know I am in it,\u201d he says. \u201cI won\u2019t be able to leave this damned thing when I am in the play because I am leaving it and going pack into the pandemic; it\u2019s twisty and mind-blowing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Delving into the characters, one thing that particularly struck Cluff about both Jody and Carl is how they care \u2013 Carl for humanity and Jody for the LGBTQ+ community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe thing that would be one of the greatest human losses and the equivalent to injury, long-term disability and pain would be the belief that we no longer have access to our communities and no matter what you may feel about wanting to socialize, we have a fear of each other,\u201d says Cluff. \u201cCarl\u2019s character does a wonderful job of reminding my character about that: you can\u2019t live in your head, you exist but you don\u2019t live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDeath and caring for people who are sick is part of living and that, for me, has been part of making it through my own personal pandemic. I have had friends who have become sick, people I know in my community who have died. It raises existential question of, \u2018How much was I there? Was I there for other people when I was so much trying to protect my own four-person unit in my house of my spouse and my two kids?  There is still a human expectation that we stay connected as a community in some way and Carl is consistently reminding Jody of that and you do see the cost in the play.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of us, he says, can possibly know how our own \u201cpandemic story\u201d is going to end, but there is a clear ending for Jody and Carl and the health crisis they are both left to navigate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going through this process, says Cluff, has given him a \u201cnew framework\u201d to think about all the \u201crandomness\u201d and \u201cabstract\u201d ideas that have come out of the last two years of the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis production has given me the opportunity to kind of test my bravery and it is a little bit of a litmus test: am I ready to be out in the world?\u201d he says. \u201cMaybe this can be a part of a broader process of what does it mean to be out in the world? What\u2019s wonderful is everyone\u2019s process of figuring out how much \u2018real world\u2019 they can tolerate. It\u2019s quite mesmerizing that we\u2019re in a play that is connected to something that is related to our current circumstances and we may not have full seats (in the audience given people\u2019s current comfort level of sitting shoulder to shoulder). How much more meta could it be?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lonely Planet, directed by Sergio Calderon, opens this Thursday, May 5, at Theatre Aurora. For dates, times and ticket information, visit theatreaurora.com or call 905-727-3669.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the course of COVID-19, York Region teacher Chris Cluff saw his world close around him. Remote learning paused face-to-face interaction with his students, COVID made going outside less attractive, and he looked on, as so many of us did, as friends waged battle with the virus. \u201cMy own personal operating system was telling me, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":31228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/2022-05-05-03.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-880","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-14 14:14:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}