Toronto Star - January 7, 1996

"Canada's favorite orphan grows up Megan Follows at 25 has grown well beyond her career-starter role as sweetly naive Annes"
Sid Adilman

By coincidence, Megan Follows, still after all these years Canada's favorite orphan, finds herself brain high in mother- and-daughter roles these days.

A mother of two and separated from her husband, Follows, now 25, plays:

* The musically gifted autistic daughter of an oppressive and abusive failed concert singer mother, portrayed by Teresa Stratas, in Under The Piano. Sullivan Entertainment's TV-movie airs tonight on CBC.

* The wife of King Lear (and mother of Cordelia, Goneril and Regan), who is absent from the big tragedy but the co-star of Seven Lears: The Pursuit Of Good, Briton Howard Barker's critically heralded, revisionist play.

It opens Jan. 17 at Harbourfront Centre's duMaurier Theatre Centre, produced by Toronto's Necessary Angel theatre company and directed by its artistic chief, Richard Rose.

* By more amazing coincidence, Follows will play Cordelia in King Lear at the Stratford Festival this year. Her other Stratford roles this season: A reprise of Amadeus, in which she plays Mozart's motherly wife, and opposite Martha Henry in The Little Foxes.

* Follows also can be seen in her internationally applauded star role - not the first of her career but the one that established her - in the bright new home video version of TV's heart-rending Anne Of Green Gables (the first of two miniseries), also produced by Sullivan Entertainment.

Playing the autistic daughter in Under The Piano, she says, ``was tough because as written on the page it was very undefined as to who this character was.

``But there were specifics. She's echolailic. She echoes back dialogue she hears. Her verbal stuff is prompted by what other people say.''

Her character's most repeated word, ``absolutely!'' comes from her patient, loving father, played by John Juliani.

``It was challenging,'' she says of playing the character who grows from childhood to an adult able to work.

``And being real, it had to be authentic. I met the real woman on whom the story is based, in Boston. I spent a weekend there, with her and her sister (played in the TV-movie by Amanda Plummer).''

Follows also had an adviser on the set daily, Andrea Rifkin, who runs a Toronto group home for autistic children. ``Together with director Steven Scaini, we created the behavior.''

Stratas, in only the second non-singing movie role of her career, is known for her strict perfectionism that sometimes has sparked fiery clashes between her and co-performers, directors and conductors.

``I thought she was amazing,'' says Follows. ``The only thing that really mattered to her was what the goal was. So, with Amanda and me, who were directly involved in creating that performance level, she was fabulous. It was very hard for her to be so abusive to children. So we all had to say, `That's okay, that's what this is all about.' ''

And Follows notes, ``Unfortunately, we didn't have the luxury of time. We had two weeks rehearsal, tops. So, all accommodations were made. I was just grateful to get the part.''

Playing Clarissa, Queen Lear, is more problematic at this point for Follows.

``Barker's whole argument is the absence of this presence in the play, King Lear. Why is there no mother? Why is she never even quoted?''

In his introduction to the play, Barker notes: ``The mother is denied existence in King Lear. She is barely quoted even in the depths of rage or pity. She is therefore expunged from memory.''

And with a leap of psychoanalytic reasoning, he comes to this extraordinary conclusion that he backs up in his play: ``This extinction can only be interpreted as repression. She was therefore the subject of an unjust hatred. This hatred was shared by Lear and all his daughters. This hatred, while unjust, may have been necessary.''

The play, being performed with minimal sets but in period costumes, follows Lear (played by Stuart Hughes) from ages 7 to 70 - a pointed reference, no doubt, to Shakespeare's seven ages of man.

But says Follows, ``It doesn't follow a naturalistic timeline. Within one scene, you can jump eight years or three months. Lear's children come into it, before they're born!'' Oswald, Gloucester, Kent and the Fool, at the time, Lear's mandarin, also appear.

Lear family matters take centre stage.

While Lear, then a prince, marries Clarissa, a virginal 16-year-old, he is having an affair with her mother, who resents being usurped.

And he tries to drown the infant Cordelia in gin (no wonder she doesn't love him to pieces in the big play; maybe she has Repressed Memory Syndrome).

The wife's ``character is representative of the struggle for good,'' says Follows. ``But it's contradictory.''

And she admits without prompting, ``I would lie to you if I said I understood this play completely at this point. I'm still trying to figure it out. My head is spinning. This is an ongoing process.

``It's brilliant. What I can gather is that it's not so much about the answer but about the struggle to get to the answers about human nature, morality, who dictates what is good and right.''

The play is ``about Lear and all the forces that go on around him, his pursuit of good and how attainable or unattainable that is, about having a conscience or not. These are big questions. But it's actually very funny.''

Clarissa ``believes that he's capable of good. His struggle is between his self-serving, passionate instincts and his ideal of being a leader.''

Like King Lear itself, Seven Lears: The Pursuit Of Good is, at bottom, a moral fable that reverberates with contemporary examples.

Source: Toronto Star