"Megan Follows takes star turn on Vancouver stage"
Jennifer Moss

In Canada in the mid-'80s, the closest thing to Twilight mania was the huge popularity of the televised Anne of Green Gables miniseries. The then 16-year-old Toronto actress Megan Follows played the plucky red-haired orphan, Anne Shirley, to perfection. For many, there will never be another Anne.

But for a mid-career actor like Follows, the down side of this early celebrity is that she has had to work doubly hard to distance herself from such a defining role. Age helps. Since she has a teenage son at home, as well as a daughter who's just left for college, Follows hasn't been seen as a waif for some years now, no doubt to her great relief.

The other thing that has helped Follows redefine herself is the theatre and her willingness to branch out from her television and film career, leaving her dual nests in Toronto and Los Angeles behind and taking roles in plays such as This, a Canadian premiere previewing this weekend at the Vancouver Playhouse.

"I do a lot of theatre," said Follows, who comes from a theatrical family. Her mother Dawn Greenhalgh, father Ted Follows and sister Samantha Follows are actors. Her other sister, Edwina Follows, is a writer, and her brother Laurence Follows is a producer.

Megan Follows has appeared in everything from Romeo and Juliet (both at Stratford and in L.A.) to A Doll's House at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre, to various Canadian and classic works produced by Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company.

"I always love what I do because I find the theatre gods have a wicked sense of humour with the projects that come up for me at different times in my life," Follows said recently during a break in her rehearsal schedule.

This, directed by Amiel Gladstone, was written by Melissa James Gibson, a playwright originally from Vancouver, who also happens to be the daughter of B.C. politician Gordon Gibson. The enigmatically titled play deals with the dual mid-life crises of adultery and death, but with humour, Follows said. "One of the things the playwright does is she uses humour to guide us through very murky territory."

"It [This] encompasses so much — the word — or it can mean so little. That's what we're playing with," said the actress, who admitted to still trying to figure out the full meaning of the play's title. "As we keep rehearsing it becomes more and more apparent. She's a very clever playwright and the use of wordplay is much a part of it."

This did very well in New York last year. New York Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood called it, "the best new play to open off-Broadway this fall." But theatre in Vancouver can be a tough game, and the Playhouse isn't taking any chances about filling seats, which is presumably why artistic managing director Max Reimer shipped the script to Follows in the first place. "It was definitely an instant thing for me — in terms of liking the material," she said, "I read it and thought ‘I like this character and I like this story.'

Fighting a slight cold, Follows struggled to find words to describe her character, Jane, a bereaved widow trying to get her life back on track.

For Follows, there are points of contact between Jane's and her own life that help her access the character.

"The play begins as it's coming around to the year anniversary of the death of my character's partner.

"I have not experienced that but I have become single, and this will be just past the one-year anniversary for me. So I can relate to that sense of the transitions in life and loss, and grieving. And those are all themes in this play."

Based on Follows' career path, her role in This may help define the challenges of middle age in the same way her portrayal of Anne Shirley once wrote the book on childhood.

Source: The Vancouver Sun