"Follows Goes Forward"
Robert Crew

Back in the 1970s, American playwright Sam Shepard lived and worked in a little house on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Bob Dylan visited him there and they made music around the piano.

Three decades later, that same house belongs to Canadian actress Megan Follows of CBC's Anne of Green Gables fame.

So it seems entirely fitting that Follows should be starring in a Soulpepper Theatre production of Shepard's 1983 play, Fool for Love, opening at Harbourfront Centre Theatre tomorrow.

Follows has never acted in a Shepard play before and has met the illustrious playwright-actor just once, when they were both shooting movies in Toronto; Shepard was playing Dashiell Hammett opposite Judy Davis in the 1999 TV movie Dash and Lilly and Follows decided she would try to meet him.

"A kind lady walked me over and there he was in this fabulous tuxedo," says Follows. When she told him that she owned his house, "it freaked him out, I am sure."

In Fool for Love, Follows stars as May, who is living in a cheap motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert when she receives a visit from former lover Eddie, who wants to resume their relationship.

Eddie is played by Follows's real-life partner, Stuart Hughes, one of the founders of Soulpepper, and the chance to appear in a Soulpepper production with him "was a huge draw for me," Follows says.

Then there was the chance to get better acquainted with one of Shepard's major works.

"The beauty of working on a play is the time that you get to delve in and explore and really appreciate the writer," she says. "What I am learning and seeing is how well crafted his writing is and just how cleverly the play is constructed. "It's like being in school."

Formal schooling was in fact intermittent for Megan, the youngest daughter of actors Ted Follows and Dawn Greenhalgh, who, at age 37, has been in showbiz for three decades.

Her father left the family when she was 11, and shortly afterwards she landed the role of Anne in the phenomenally successful CBC-TV series.

The Follows family confrontations, fuelled by alcohol and egos, have long since become the stuff of Canadian theatrical legend.

"When we were young, our upbringing was very volatile and my parents did a lot of drinking, but that's not part of my mother's life now," Follows says.

Follows went to high school in Los Angeles - where she has lived, off and on, ever since - but says she always felt a bit of an outsider because of her other life as an actor.

"When I was there at school uninterrupted, I loved it, then I would go away and work," she says. "Sometimes I didn't want to go to work.

"But then I would get into work mode and love it and I didn't want to go back to school."

Regrets? Not at all.

"I got a fabulous education in other ways. It is a real gift to be able to inhabit someone else's world, exploring it, living it, breathing it, embracing it, rejecting it."

Nevertheless, she is determined that her 15-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son by her first marriage will get the university education she missed out on.

Follows is now based in L.A. with Hughes and her family; the couple met 10 years ago while appearing in a Toronto production of Howard Barker's Seven Lears and have been engaged for three years.

"We are still trying to find the time to get married," says Follows, smiling.

Follows's dream is to create a television series based on her life and relationship with her mother.

She and sister Edwina are in the midst of developing a series of six half-hour episodes for TV, called My Mother's House.

A blend of biography and fiction, it is based on the time when Megan's marriage fell apart and she went back home to live with her mother.

"I have a fantastic relationship with my mother," Follows says. "She is a truly dynamic woman who has a wicked sense of humour and has had an extraordinary, epic life."

The series, naturally, will draw much inspiration from the Fighting Follows family and both mother and daughter plan to star in it.

"Dysfunctional family dynamics fascinate me," Follows says. "I find it a minefield of potential humour.

"It is either one thing or the other. It is either going to kill you or make you laugh."

Source: Toronto Star