National Post - June 28, 2001

"You couldn't ask for a closer cast: Canada's theatrical Follows family is together onstage for the first time in Noel Coward's Hay Fever"
Pearl Sheffy Gefen

Hay Fever opens at the Gravenhurst Opera House on July 3, with four special preview performances June 27-30 followed by a meet the cast and audience feedback. It runs in Gravenhurst until July 28, and then gives five performances at the River Run Centre in Guelph, Aug. 1-4. Box office: 1-888-495-8888.

'Shut up," shouts Ted Follows to his rambunctious brood. "It's like old times," murmurs former wife Dawn Greenhalgh in her smoky voice. Daughter Samantha says soothingly, "It's OK, Dad, we love you." Daughter Megan, ex-Anne of Green Gables, grins. "My sister the peacemaker."

By neat coincidence, this is actually happening in a nursery. It's part of Rosedale United Church, the unlikely venue for an early rehearsal of Noel Coward's inimitable Hay Fever, about a zany theatrical family. It's being reincarnated by Canada's real-life theatrical dynasty, and marks the first time the entire Follows family, which papa Ted says used to be known as "the Fighting Follows," are all onstage together. They're colourful, talented and zestful, and though they may squabble, there's a lot of laughter, and their mutual adoration and respect is amazing.

The third daughter is Edwina, returning to her acting roots though she's now an award-winning screenwriter. Laurence, the Follows' only son, is both co-producing the show and acting the role his father played with the legendary Straw Hat Players 53 years ago at the Gravenhurst Opera House. On July 3, Hay Fever will open that venerable theatre's 100th anniversary season.

Joining the cast are Samantha's husband, Sean O'Bryan, star of numerous film and TV productions out of Los Angeles (and the only non-Canadian in the group), and Megan's partner, Stuart Hughes. The Toronto-born Hughes is a young veteran of the Shaw and Stratford festivals, Dora winner in two Tarragon productions and co-founder of Soulpepper Theatre Company (where he played Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire).

Noel Coward wrote Hay Fever in just five days, after a weekend at the New York home of Lorette Taylor (the original Amanda in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie), her novelist husband and their two children. That eccentric family is mirrored in the play, during a weekend when each invites a guest without telling the others. Bedlam ensues.

Dawn Greenhalgh, glamorous in red, is Judith, flamboyant actress and wife to David, played by her former husband, Ted Follows, who's also directing. They've acted together many times, both before and after their volatile 20-year marriage ended. A line in the play has a personal poignancy when Judith says, "You ought never to have married me, David." Offstage, Dawn says she's "more comfortable as an actor with him than anyone else. There's nobody I trust as much."

Samantha, star of Mike Nichols' touring production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, plays the daughter who is finding herself. Laurence is the artist son enamoured of a sharp-tongued sophisticate portrayed by Megan (pronounced "mee-gan"), lithe and lovely in a long black shift. She says watching her parents act together again "and being gentle with each other is the richest part of this experience for me."

Edwina enacts the bewildered flapper whom David wants to study. Sean plays a besotted fan of Judith's, and Stuart a diplomat who gets toppled from his uptight professional perch. The only cast member not of the Follows clan is friend Robin Craig (TV's Wind at My Back) as the maid-cum-theatrical dresser.

This extraordinary Follows festival was born when Laurence saw a revival of Hay Fever in London two years ago and thought, "Eureka, that's us." A tall, strikingly handsome Juilliard graduate who played Hamlet for director Michael Langham in 1988 at Lincoln Center, Laurence bulldozed his family into agreeing to this labour of love. Each made it known they wouldn't be available for other (more lucrative) acting jobs this summer.

Hay Fever is the first production of Two Man Group Inc., a joint partnership of Laurence Follows and Robert Missen, a distinguished artist's manager, impresario and sought-after tenor soloist with such groups as the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, the Elmer Iseler Singers, the Toronto Symphony and Tafelmusik. Follows and Missen plan to produce works in Canada with the hope of eventually exporting them.

"When I was producing commercially with Jeffrey Latimer, we spent huge sums of money bringing shows here [including the Dora winner Forever Plaid], but most of the earnings went back to the U.S.," Laurence explains. "We want to set up a centre, perhaps in Muskoka, where, say, Megan and Stuart can come in with a project, call in other artists to work on it, nurture the show and see if it can work commercially."

Ted, the father who infected his children with a passionate love of theatre, is now 74, a consummate actor and director on stage, television, radio and film. Clad in neat, navy casual, he's still the trim, feisty and intense personality of his younger days (when, I confess, I had a crush on him).

He co-founded the Straw Hat Players, Canada's first professional summer theatre, at the Gravenhurst Opera House in 1948, and the following year appeared there in Hay Fever. That cast included such future luminaries of the Canadian scene as Murray and Donald Davis, Kate Reid, David Gardner, Charmion King and Araby Lockhart. They were then young students at the University of Toronto who believed that the artist's voice would bring sense and peace and light into a world just recovering from war. A fine, if struggling, sentiment still.

Megan reached international stardom as Anne of Green Gables, a role she says she "had to fight like crazy to get. They said I couldn't do it, but my tenacity kicked in and I told them they'd eat their words because I was going to be damn good, and I was."

Imbued with fierce energy and keen intelligence, Megan has purposely sought to diversify her roles. One of her favourites was in Allan King's film Termini Station opposite Colleen Dewhurst, where she played an unhappy, hard-edged, part-time hustler in a drastic switch from her Green Gables image. Lately she's been concentrating mostly on theatre "because that's where the best roles for women are."

Her latest film is The Stork Derby, with a stellar Canadian cast including boyfriend Stuart Hughes in their first acting gig together. She's also making her first foray into directing, shooting a documentary on the experience of her family doing Hay Fever together.

She and Stuart have been together for five years, raising Megan's two children by her former husband, a six-year-old son and a nine- year-old daughter who's already determined to be an actress. (Megan also sponsors an African child through World Vision and recently went to Rwanda with her mother before hosting World Vision's fund- raising telethon.)

Aside from genes, Megan thinks she became a performer because, she reveals unexpectedly, "part of me is very shy, and in a family as dynamic as mine, if you wanted to survive, you had to come up with inventive and clever ways to get attention."

She attributes the family's close ties to her mother, Dawn Greenhalgh. "She's a very powerful force. It's a bit like walking through a minefield sometimes, but the rewards are great. I have enormous admiration for her. She has loved us fiercely and made sacrifices for us."

Greenhalgh, who was part of the Stratford Festival's inaugural season, says she and her children have weathered the upsets of family life by "being totally honest with each other." Her own childhood was turbulent. Born in Shanghai, where her father was an engineer, she was imprisoned in a Japanese camp during the war and forced, at the age of 10, "to watch the Japanese guards beating someone to death." She left China at 15, alone, ultimately reaching Montreal and the theatre, "the only place I felt I belonged, because I could live in my imagination." An actress of riveting stage presence, she conquered a heavy drinking problem shortly before playing the boozy Martha in 1982's Grand Theatre production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "It was my first year of sobriety. I couldn't have gotten the part or played it if I was still drinking, but I knew exactly what Martha was all about."

The rehearsal has been going on non-stop for six hours, interrupted only when the clan gets carried away with enthusiastic suggestions to each other. At which point, production assistant Kevin Vickery, who's also understudying all three younger men in the show, brings them gently but firmly to heel, and this happy band of brothers (and sisters and fathers and mothers) cuts the cacophony. The feast of the fabled Follows continues.

Source: National Post