In the Winter
Or, Remembering Brent Carver
Ned: I’m an actor, Madam.
Elizabeth: Then play the man!!
Ned: I don’t know how. It’s not my profession.
Elizabeth Rex by Timothy Findley
“Identification is a form of cognition.”
David Halperin
I met the great Canadian actor Brent Carver in March of 2016. I had gone to Hudson, NY for a weekend workshop in the Michael Chekhov Technique, and was gobsmacked to find the Tony winner in the front room of my bed and breakfast, telling backstage stories from a production of As You Like It. In college, I had obsessively watched clips of Brent’s work in Parade and Kiss of the Spiderwoman, but had never seen him perform live.
I’d have my chance. He and I were in town for the same workshop.
Michael Chekhov’s acting technique is described as “psychophysical.” Reading about it, I had been captivated by Chekhov’s conception of the actor as a kind of metaphysical adept, commanding powers of energetic radiation, imaginative transformation, and atmospheric manipulation. It was an approach that centered the actor’s body, accessing the invisible (or psychological) through the visible (or physical). As I read, an artistic longing was tapped that I didn’t realize I had. At that time, I thought of myself as a technician, a materialist. But underneath it all, there was an impulse I can only call spiritual; a felt sense that all these physical parts added up to something more, and a desire to express whatever that was. Chekhov spoke directly to that longing.
My body had always been a problem, for other people and for me. It wouldn’t stay solid, always breaking out in flutters and spirals, confusing everyone — parents, peers, P.E. coaches, acting teachers — to sometimes shocking effect. I felt like I didn’t have a category. Casting directors, gatekeepers in my profession, confirmed this by telling me that they couldn’t find a category for me, either.
So, my body became something that, at best, I could manage. Stifle the flutters, straighten the spirals, stay solid. That’s what I walked in to the Hudson classroom with.
Brent was gracious, soft-spoken, and beloved in the Michael Chekhov community which, I learned, he had been part of for some time. We did no scene study that weekend. We barely did any talking. Instead, our teachers led us through a series of physical explorations: what does it mean to feel ease? What does it mean to embody beauty? Once you’ve found it externally, can you internalize it? Can you mold space? Can you float? Can you radiate? Can you fly?
To the outsider, we probably looked like the worst stereotype of an acting class, rolling around on the floor and undulating across the room like rejects from the Ballets Russes. But if any of us wondered what the hell we were doing it for, we could look to Brent. When our teachers said “Fly,” Brent flew…though his feet never left the ground. Instructed to expand, he seemed to fill the room from wall to wall; to contract, he all but disappeared. And it did indeed seem that his eyes and hands radiated light. He was magic. I wouldn’t trade that time in class with him for front row seats to all of his performances in New York and elsewhere.
But there was something else that seemed more extraordinary to me: Brent’s embodiment couldn’t be categorized. He was powerful, but in no way macho. Michael Coveney described him as “firm, yet flickering…subtle…a waterfall…” Other critics said his presence was otherworldly, fey in the best and most mysterious sense of the word. There was a lyricism in his gestures that incarnated a presence entirely different from what I had been led to believe was appropriate for a Leading Man. And yet, there he was: indisputably one of the greatest leading stage actors of our time. Being in the presence of that artistic freedom touched the longing I felt when I first read Chekhov’s words, like a guitar string vibrating with a tuning fork.
I have a memory of Brent practicing a gesture of opening during a group improvisation, as if he was parting giant, gauzy curtains to pass through. His eyes, wide and glistening, looked to some distant place. It was a beautiful moment, and I longed to be part of it. I reached out and took his hand, to accompany him over whatever imagined threshold he was crossing.
At the afternoon break that day, we happened to walk out of the studio at the same time, and that’s how I found myself having lunch with a national treasure. We had sandwiches at a small, cute-ish cafe around the corner, and I had no idea what to do with myself. Here I was, sitting across a table from someone who was the embodiment of my dreams for a life in the theater, who carried a creative essence I found indescribably moving, and who I had fallen a bit in love with over the past three hours of class. Brent was the picture of grace: so generous in sharing his lunchtime with me, as I picked over my chicken salad and tried to still my trembling hands. Shy in the best of circumstances, I was fairly hopeless in this one. I asked about his early days at the Stratford Festival, about working with Robin Phillips, and I can’t remember what else. Starstruck fawning fangirl talk, in my memory.
Now, I wish I had asked him where he learned that physical freedom, how he came to trust his body in all its fluid magic. I wish we had talked of deeper things. I wish I could have discovered what he was looking at when he parted the imaginary curtains. If it looked like the faraway place that lived in my imagination, too.
But I couldn’t navigate beyond my barrier of shyness, the polite awkwardness it constructs in place of genuine connection. We finished our sandwiches (which he graciously paid for), and parted ways until the final hours of class that afternoon.
Profound as it was, one workshop didn’t (couldn’t) solve my body for me. It wasn’t really until this writing that I was able to articulate all of the above: both my troubled relationship to my own embodiment, and the deep impression this artist made on me. If only I’d done it a bit sooner. It’s just over four months to the day (as of this writing) since Brent Carver died at age 68 in his hometown of Cranbrook, British Columbia, cause undisclosed.
To those of us peripherally connected to him, this news was a great shock. He was famously private. I can’t help wondering whether his passing was sudden or if he had been ill for some time (even, perhaps, when I was sitting at lunch with him that day in March 2016). It is easy, and even comforting, to build a narrative out of the scant details surrounding unexpected loss. How do you mourn the passing of someone who was technically an acquaintance, yet who feels — because you witnessed up-close the depth of their work — like an intimate? It is so tempting for me to imagine an alternate timeline, one where Brent and I did not go separate ways after that workshop, where I accompanied him back to his room at the B&B that evening, and then later to the cottage he kept in Niagara-on-the-Lake. That awkward lunch the start of some marvelous artistic love affair, our paths crisscrossing over the years as lovers and friends and twin souls.
But this is all projection, of course, making assumptions about things that Brent never (or rarely) spoke publicly about, and certainly not in any conversation I had with him. It’s a way, really, for me to mediate what I feel was my failure to connect with him, if not as a friend or a lover, then at least as a mentor. No, I did not know Brent Carver, though I glimpsed him once: firm, yet flickering.
What remains, thanks to the internet, is a fairly considerable public archive of Brent’s work. I was inspired to write this while watching his performance in Timothy Findley’s play Elizabeth Rex, available on the Stratford Festival’s streaming service. He plays Ned Lowenscroft, an actor in Shakespeare’s company who specializes in female roles. Elizabeth I (played by Diane D’Aquila), grieving the execution of her lover the Earl of Essex by her own order, seeks solace in the company of actors. The evening is, in part, a sparring match between her and Ned, as she challenges him to “play the man” in strength, and he presumes to teach her how to play the woman in mourning.
Dated binary gender politics — and the improbability of the scenario — aside, it’s a wonderful showcase for the things that inspire me in Brent’s acting. As Ned, he’s both translucent and mercurial; he’ll open a wound and then cover it with an impish smile or eruption of giggles. The character’s queerness gives him full license to run the emotional and physical gamut, unbound by strictures placed on most leading male roles, especially in the classical canon. You can see the remarkable, improvisatory freedom that characterized his work, the beautiful unity of body and imagination — what Chekhov called the sense of the whole. My favorite moments are when he plays Queen Margaret or Cleopatra, and that raw, faraway look comes into his eyes. Ned seems to be briefly possessed by these characters, who open an inner window to something unfulfilled in his offstage life.
There’s also footage of his concert performances on YouTube. I love his aching renditions of Janis Ian’s In the Winter and Queen’s Who Wants to Live Forever. Granted, I’m drawn to the moody and the elegiac, especially in this circumstance, and there are other examples that demonstrate the more buoyant regions of his range. But something deeply personal seems to reach out through time and cyberspace in these performances, borne on voice and gesture, something that strikes to the heart.
Again, it is easy to impute the longing and heartbreak in the work to be autobiography on the part of the performer. There are small but significant changes to the lyrics of In the Winter that suggest a personal story. But all I can say for sure is that, as I watch, it’s my biography he seems to sing. Which is, of course, what great actors do.
There is no satisfying coda to this story. I saw Brent once more, at a summer conference for the Chekhov Technique that same year. We exchanged pleasantries in the breakfast line and I marveled at him from afar, simultaneously longing to make a deeper connection and not wishing to appear starstruck. Four years later, as I hibernate through this season of plague and tragedy, I’m deeply sad to know he is no longer in the world.
I wrote above that one weekend workshop could not solve my body for me, and that’s true. But the hours in class with Brent seem to have left some impression on my nervous system, lessons stored away for a time when I could unpack them with some understanding. There’s nothing to solve, of course. My body, if I trust it enough, if I love it enough, could lead me to the artistry I’ve always felt was just beyond my reach. Whether that artistry is legible to the American theater industry is another matter entirely.
But the theater is hibernating, too, and there’s no way to know if or when I might act in it again. Any work I do now stays between me and invisible witnesses.
I’m usually a morning person, but lately my internal rhythm has been spiking in the evenings. It didn’t make sense until I realized it’s the time I would normally be working, if I was in a play. The body remembers. I find myself improvising physical odes and rituals. I stay up to all hours, undulating across the living room. I flicker, I float, I radiate, I fly. I watch Brent Carver’s performances on the internet, so far away.
And I wish I could part the screen like a gauze curtain, reach out, take his hand, and cross that impossible threshold.
