Nicky Guadagni is trying to find an intimacy and honesty in her acting.
HOOKED by Carolyn Smart, adapted by and starring Nicky Guadagni, directed by Layne Coleman. Presented by Theatre Passe Muraille at the Backspace (16 Ryerson). In previews, opens Tuesday (April 21) and runs to May 10, Wednesday-Saturday 7:30 pm, matinees Saturday-Sunday 2 pm, stu matinee May 6 at 1:30 pm. $33, some discounts $17-$28, matinees pwyc-$22.50. 416-504-7529.
In the 70-minute play Hooked, Nicky Guadagni plays seven women - ranging from flapper Zelda Fitzgerald and serial killer Myra Hindley to writers Carson McCullers and Jane Bowles - who are all hooked on something.
"Well, I suppose we're all hooked on one thing or another, aren't we?" says the spirited, sprightly actor in the rehearsal hall of Theatre Passe Muraille, where the show opens this week.
"They're hooked on a man or a woman, on alcohol - prodigious amounts of alcohol. The amount Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald consumed in one week would probably be what you or I would drink in five years. And drugs! Doctors were ignorant and irresponsible about the way they prescribed medication back then."
Based on Carolyn Smart's book of poems, the play has been developed over years - an earlier version featuring five women played at SummerWorks - and was first performed in people's homes, with Layne Coleman directing.
One enormous house, Guadagni tells me, had a bathroom that held 24 people, and she played Zelda in a bathtub. She'd often play tortured writer Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept) while doing the dishes.
During those home shows, food was served between scenes, and there were costume changes and lots of props. Passe Muraille Backspace offers a different challenge: she's performing without any of that.
"I tried to get a scarf, but in the end I didn't need it," she says. "I'm wearing a simple slip-like black dress. I like seeing Pina Bausch dancers - that's what I love to watch, the human form. You don't need a scarf for that. This show is evolving into what interests me now about theatre."
Guadagni says audiences are intrigued by the transitions between characters.
"It's the inner workings of the actor that you don't often get to see, like being in a dressing room," she says. "I'm a very physical actor. I can transform myself physically very quickly."
Lights and sound will help alter the settings, which span continents and decades in the 20th century.
"It's a hard slog for an audience to have 70 minutes of an actor performing without any music," she says. "With music I feel like I'm lying in a hammock. It can do the mood and character transitions for you."
But ultimately it will be Guadagni - a veteran TV, film and radio performer - onstage for all that time.
"It's scary," she says. "Last fall I took improv classes because I wanted to be able to just stand there and talk. I realized with this piece I had to find an intimacy and honesty in my acting that weren't there."
Trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art - one of her first professional gigs was playing Miranda to Paul Scofield's Prospero in the West End - she says her education was very much about how things looked and sounded.
"Then I returned to Canada and everyone was talking about feelings. How did I feel while I was acting? That was a shock. This piece has added to my evolution as an actor, of being more honest."
Guadagni on discovering Carolyn Smart’s book of poems, Hooked, and becoming intrigued by the women:
On Myra Hindley (the “Karla Homolka” of her day) and Unity Mitford, two of the women in Hooked:
On her research into these women: