The Joy of Joe Ziegler

Joseph Ziegler and I shared a birthday, though I staked my claim to the date a full ten years before he did. I wouldn’t say the coincidence was the cause of our becoming friends but it helped. Each anniversary became an amiable contest as to which of us would email congratulations first. Joe Ziegler was also my late wife’s favourite actor. Her favourite performance was his Ebenezer Scrooge in what became Soulpepper’s near-legendary production of A Christmas Carol. One of its annual revivals also featured Joe’s equally illustrious wife Nancy Palk, not of course as Mrs. Scrooge – there was no such person, which was part of Ebenezer’s problem – but as an indomitable Mrs. Cratchit. Joe’s pre-reformation scenes (“No prisons? No workhouses?”) were notably fierce and uncompromising, and became more so each year, but of course what Arlene and I most treasured, along with the rest of the audience, were his joyous caperings, physical and vocal, after he had seen the light. He was a wonderful actor at expressing and inspiring joy.

All the same his greatest performance – and a strong contender for the greatest I have ever seen in Canada – was of a character incapable of joy. In January 2005 a brand-new Toronto troupe, The Company Theatre, introduced us to a then 44-year old play, A Whistle in the Dark, by an Irish playwright, Tom Murphy. It was worth the wait. The play was a fine one, the production (by another Irishman, Jason Byrne) a model of ensemble excellence, and in the centre of all the accomplishment there was Joseph Ziegler playing DaDa, expatriate patriarch, and bringing him to brutal, frightening, pitiable life.

DaDa’s numerous sons have mostly moved to England and he has come to join them and, he hopes, to control them. Reviewing the production for the National Post, I described the character as “a timorous windbag” and wrote of Ziegler’s performance: “He is at once immense and delicate, courtly when he first pays his respects to ‘the lady of the house’, very funny when he deplores the unhealthy effects of trees (‘all that carbon dioxide’), piteous when in his cups and revealing the depths of his own desperation, scarifying when he climbs on a chair to play the sentimental tyrant. Most terrible of all, and most brilliantly revealed by the actor, is his ability to shut out any fact or argument he doesn't want to hear, right down, in a moment of blackest comedy, to the play's climax.”. It was extraordinary; you could almost see, hear, the mind snapping shut against any fact or opinion it didn’t want, couldn’t bear, to acknowledge. 

It was a surprise performance; one long-time colleague and admirer of Joe’s told me that it was a role in which he would never have imagined casting him. As it happened, Joe himself was an ex-pat: one of those American-born actors, of whom Martha Henry was the exemplar, who came to Canada to study and to pursue a theatrically-centred career. He first made his mark at Stratford, playing principally romantic roles. He was, by all accounts, a fine and passionate Posthumus in Cymbeline, and I saw him myself, in my visitor days, playing the lead role of Berowne in one of Michael Langham’s golden productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost. (The cast of this one also included such future luminaries as David Ferry and Diego Matamoros.)   

And then of course – or fast-forwarding a decade or so – Joe and Nancy Palk were among the founding members of Soulpepper, the actor-driven classically-based collective – we’re talking 1998 here – that was to transform Toronto theatre. As it turned out, Joe didn’t himself act for Soulpepper until its third year; though he had already kicked off the second season as a director, with a richly-inhabited production of Our Town, one that was to return in equal glory when the company moved into its new home in the Distillery. His on-stage Soulpepper debut was as Arnolphe, the possessive husband-in-his-own-imagination of The School for Wives, whom he played, most refreshingly, as a modestly presentable middle-aged man, rather then the traditional senile pantaloon; his illusions became more plausible and his disillusions more poignant.

Forward again to 2007 and The Time of Your Life, which turned out to be the time of everybody’s life. Or at least, by his own account, the time of Joe Ziegler’s; he told me that sitting at the centre of that play and that stage (he spent nearly all of it sitting), interacting with a huge and lovely cast (he mentioned Patricia Fagan and Stuart Hughes, onlookers as he and Kevin Bundy competed as to who could chew the most sticks of gum at one time), he found himself thinking “there’s no place in the world I’d rather be”. In this revival of William Saroyan’s American classic –in some respects the American classic - he played a retired rich guy, providentially named Joe, who spends the time of his 1939 life in a San Francisco bar, drinking champagne, sending out for stuff, sometimes acting as his favourite people’s fairy godfather. He had some regrets, maybe guilty ones; a magically moving scene found him reminiscing about the wife and children he never had (“the third one was my favourite”). The ending found him, with some lovers united, some justice done, taking a final departure from the saloon, leaving behind what I described at the time as “an air of hopeful melancholy.” After all 1939 and its succeeding years were not to be the greatest times of anybody’s life and one eccentric fellow could only do so much. I cannot imagine the play being better done, or its protagonist better played. 

And there was A Month in the Country, the Russian classic not by Chekhov, in which he played the Doctor who makes an outrageously self-deprecating proposal of marriage (“if you get sick, don’t send for me”), made even more hilarious by the fact that the object of his attentions was played by Nancy. You had to be there: preferably on the first night.

The Zieglers got to play an actual married couple, the heartbreakingly tragic Willy and Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman which won Joe a long-deserved Best Actor Dora. Some years later Joe played, superbly, Joe Keller, who might be called Arthur Miller’s trial run for Willy Loman, in a fine production of All My Sons. This was at Stratford where, with pleasing symmetry, he did his last work. This included a memorably joyous and incisive turn as the disguised Sir Oliver in a terrific production of The School for Scandal. I remember too Arlene, my wife, murmuring “please come back” after Joe’s first brief scene in a contrastingly dismal production of An Ideal Husband; thankfully, he did return to show how he, almost alone in the cast, knew how to phrase Wilde’s words both to make us laugh and to make us believe.

He was one of the leaders of the profession; he was also a practical, jobbing actor and director. “I don’t”, he once said to me, “turn down much work”. Some of his best directing work was at the Shaw Festival where he excelled at finding the truth and the joy in plays often dismissed as tired repertory chestnuts: in When We Are Married and above all in Harvey. Back at Soulpepper he directed Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, which was intoxicating. My son Mitchell was assistant director on this, and he recently wrote that the experience taught him that “kindness is far and away the most important arrow in a director’s quiver…I don’t think I’ve ever seen a director care for a room the way Joe would. He also was driven by a truly curious spirit which made him infectious to work with and be around.” I believe it. That was Joe the director, Joe the actor, and Joe the man.