Michael Green brought an electricity and intelligence to every piece of theatre he touched, whether it was explosively passionate or intensely cerebral.
The co-founder and co-artistic director (along with writer/director Blake Brooker) of one of Canadas best indie companies, Calgarys One Yellow Rabbit (OYR), Green was one of five people killed Tuesday (February 10) in a multi-car accident in Saskatchewan. Three others Michele Sereda, Narcisse Blood and Lacy Morin-Desjarlais were also artists.
The loss of Green, 58, will resonate across the country. Toronto audiences knew him for his tours here with OYR, most recently in 2008 with Doing Leonard Cohen and Sylvia Plath Must Not Die. He and the other company members gave wry, committed, engaging performances of Cohens poems coupled with a staging of his novel Beautiful Losers in the Plath work, which looked at the life and verse of Plath and fellow poet Anne Sexton, Green played Ted Hughes, Plaths commanding husband, with the right touch of acid and physicality.
Like the rest of the Rabbit performers, who include Denise Clarke and Andy Curtis, Green relied as much on his body as on his voice to create characters. Whether the work was surreal (Thunderstruck), poetic (both of the above and Dream Machine, about the Beats) or historic (Mata Hari, which I saw in Calgary), there was an easy skill to his work, a sense of entertaining and pulling in an audience without trying to show off.
The company even had the chutzpah to take on Edward Albee, staging an hour long compression ballet inspired by Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Green as the put-upon George.
Id sometimes run into him when he was in Toronto, usually at the theatre, and he was excited to see new local shows and follow the careers of western artists working in town. The focus on indie scripts was a natural for Green he guided the High Performance Rodeo, one of Canadas most respected indie festivals.
With warmth and an easy smile, Green just fell into conversation with me as if wed only parted company a few days before, rather than, as was sometimes the case, years earlier.
One of my favourite memories of his work: the outrageous and over-the-top Ilsa Queen Of The Nazi Love Camp, in which Green played a German colonel searching with his lover Ilsa for Hitlers offspring. The journey takes them to Albertas raging racist, Jim Keegstra, who in the 1980s taught that the Holocaust never happened. Rarely was a work so scathing, scary and funny, and a lot of it had to do with Greens performance.
Canadian theatre will sorely miss his wit and talent.
