Home for a test
Michael Spencer-Davis returns to the ’Peg for a challenging role in Apple
Grant Burr

Apples for his teachers never got Michael Spencer-Davis anything more than ‘theatre brat’ status as a teenager at Prairie Theatre Exchange’s school.

Now the actor will try to woo his audiences with Apple, which opens PTE’s new season.

Spencer-Davis never thought he would find success in theatre but always knew he wanted to be an actor. The epiphany struck him while attending a local theatre production.

“Yeah, I want to be one of those guys up on the stage,” Spencer-Davis remembers saying to himself.

So from PTE he went on to a bachelor of arts in drama from the U of W and a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Alberta.

Now in his 40s and based in Toronto, he’s enjoying the opportunities he has to return to the city where his love for acting first developed. Spencer-Davis was last back in Winnipeg for MTC’s 2004 production of Humble Boy and says he is continually impressed by the strength of Winnipeg’s arts scene.

“The theatre community is really thriving here,” he says. “There’s a real cohesiveness to what’s going on in the city.”

Apple playwright Vern Thiessen will also experience a kind of homecoming when the production opens on Oct. 12. Spencer-Davis and Thiessen met as students at the U of W and took similar routes through the University of Alberta’s fine arts program. Thiessen’s play Einstein’s Gift was recently performed in River City as part of last year’s Winnipeg Jewish Theatre season.

Spencer-Davis and Thiessen have been friends since those days at the U of W, and they have developed a working relationship wherein Thiessen’s writing skills serve as a venue for Spencer-Davis’ own acting talents.

In Edmonton in 2003, Spencer-Davis appeared in the world premiere of Einstein’s Gift at the Citadel Theatre. Now the actor has a chance to take on another challenging script from Thiessen.

In Apple he plays a middle-aged man who struggles to maintain his already strained marriage after losing his job. Spencer-Davis feels the play deals will real-life issues very honestly, something he hopes audiences will notice as well.

“There’s a simplicity to the story, but at the same time there is something completely recognizable and completely human,” he says.

That familiarity springs from Thiessen’s natural dialogue. No soliloquies here — the natural rhythms mean sentences often consist of only four or five words, much like the way people talk every day.

Spencer-Davis says that in addition to the natural dialogue plenty of life’s “unspoken moments” are built into the play, leaving the three actors to interpret what’s really going on.

Discovering the best way to play those moments gives Spencer-Davis the thrill for which he became an actor.

“I love being able to arrest an audience,” he says. “I love those moments when suddenly everyone understands what has been said.”