Copyright 1996 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.   
The Toronto Star 


October 18, 1996, Friday, METRO EDITION 

SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. D6 

LENGTH: 745 words 

HEADLINE: Lilies role lets Carver play dress-up again 

BYLINE: Sid Adilman TORONTO STAR 

BODY: 
  
   IN THE MUSICAL Kiss Of The Spider Woman, Brent Carver played an imprisoned gay window dresser dreaming about an one-time movie beauty queen and he won a Broadway Tony Award. 

In High Life at Harbourfront Centre last spring, he played a twitchy, druggy street guy and won a Dora Award. 

At the Stratford Festival and other Canadian theatres, he played roles from Shakespeare and other classics and sang and danced in his hailed one-man show at Harbourfront and later at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. 

In Lilies, John Greyson's movie of Michel Marc Bouchard's flamboyant award-winning play about teenage male lust, retribution and murder that opens in Toronto next Friday, Carver, for the first time, plays a mother - and a slightly mentally fragile one at that. 

"She" claims to be a countess, also that her husband is in Paris arranging a fantastic business deal when, in fact, she learns he is there but poor and cheating on her. And she enthusiastically encourages her teenage son to kiss and sexually love his private school buddy who returns the affection. 

This is set in 1912 but backgrounds events in the 1950s in an all-male Quebec prison where the inmates (Carver among them) force a bishop to face his implication in a murder back then when he was lovestruck and jealous of his schoomates' love. 

Carver was invited but because of other work could not play the countess in Theatre Passe Muraille's production of the play. 

"Then," Carver said at the recent Toronto International Film Festival where Lilies screened, "I saw it (the play) and I have a very vivid memory of sitting on a beach with my sheepdog on Lake Huron and thinking 'Wow!' It touched me so deeply that I was stunned." 

So when asked to appear in the movie as The Countess, "I just knew I would connect with it. It's very theatrical and very cinematic, and I thought how many chances do I get to play a mother. 

"We talk about masculine/feminine, so-called good/bad. Eventually it's one and its got to be one to me. In order to play this part, any part, we take on traits that people, parents and race give us." 

Though enthusiastic and prepared mentally, Carver admitted he "broke out (in body sores) in every which way a week before we started filming. But in the first week we shot The countess's death scene, a very vital scene, and I liked that because I don't think you act very well if you think it's particularly special. You have to think that every moment is special and not think, this is the big scene." 

But, he added, "As an actor, I never understand really what acting is sometimes. Like to play The Countess, I just thought I had to breathe and to stay connected to the Earth, whatever that means." 

Carver, who has appeared in "about 20 (Canadian) movies over the years ("Thank God some of them haven't been released"), most recently played a cat transformed into a man in Whiskers, a Montreal filmed family movie, and is now in Italy playing Leonardo Di Vinci for a Toronto-produced family TV drama series about inventors. 

And unasked he still explains why he abruptly - and to the shock of New York critics and producer Livent - left Kiss Of The Spider Woman and Broadway soon after winning the Tony Award. 

"Someone said, 'Wow! You were in New York! Why did you leave after nine months?' I said it wasn't; it was 12 months (including runs in Toronto and London). I did 500 performances, and I said 'that's enough.' It had nothing to do with leaving; it had everything to do with me. 

"I had a long career before that and played many parts, so I really felt that if someone thought that was it for me then I wasn't interested." 

But he disclosed he was asked back to Broadway, to replace a cast member in Angels In America "and to do stuff at Lincoln Center" but turned them down. Spider Woman, he said, "was an event that happened to me and I worked hard for it and I'm very thankful that it happened. I'm not upset." 

And then he mused about his celebrity status he tries to ignore: "Someone actually said you can be a star, you can be this or that. But I realized what's more important is longevity and being in the moment. I think it's interesting when someone plays a great part and then doesn't get quite the chance to play that kind of part again or be involved with that quality of people. 

"It's passage that's important and you have to be allowed to make your passage. Thank goodness I have made that passage and been successful." 

GRAPHIC: photo: FRAGILE MOTHER: Brent Carver dons a dress as The Countess in John Greyson's Lilies.