The kid from Cowley is having a great year
By John Charles
Edmonton Express in the Sunday Sun
28 January, 1996
Edmonton Express in the Sunday Sun
28 January, 1996
The opening lines, in a courtroom, describe Johnson's character entering a hospital with a dead infant in his arms and crying, "I have just killed my child." The child was brain damaged and, apparently in a moment of confused anguish, the father has smothered it.
"This play is one of the rare ones that really makes you look at your morality. It didn't necessarily make me change certain beliefs but it did make me question them. It makes a very strong case for both sides of this issue."
Terence Frisby's play played three months in London's West End last year, following a tour. The London courtroom setting has been changed to Edmonton, which involved minimal alteration since Canada's legal system is based on Great Britain's. The audience represents the jury. Rough Justice, in its North American premiere, opens in preview next Sunday on the Citadel's Shoctor stage.
"The big challenge for me is the constraint of the courtroom," the lanky actor said. "It demands that this man, pushed to the extreme, remain damped down. There are few gradations of emotion, just holding it back and then, when he can't, exploding. That fury has to be there when it's needed. I haven't had a role like this in a long while."
Johnson has had many choice roles, however. He last played the Shoctor six years ago in A Walk in the Woods, as an American negotiator trying to wage peace with his Russian counterpart. In England, he was Petruchio in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, and starred at Stratford in the bard's Comedy of Errors (playing twins) and Tennessee Williams' Cat on A Hot Tin Roof.
Johnson graduated from the University of Calgary in 1974 as a drama major, but ask him about high school plays and you learn he wasn't in any.
"My high school had 50 students total, so we didn't do plays. The big thing was basketball, and some skits at Christmas."
His hometown is Cowley, a village 100 kilometers west of Lethbridge where his family had a sawmill.
"I didn't know what I wanted to study, but I knew I didn't want to spend my life in a sawmill," Johnson reflected. "I looked through everything Calgary had to offer, science, medicine, physical education and I figured drama would keep my interest for four years."
After graduating, when he announced he was moving east -- "there just wasn't enough opportunity here in those days" -- his grandfather exploded.
"What the hell are you doing? This is God's country," he shouted. Indeed, Cowley had a hard time understanding why anyone would become an actor and move so far away. A friend reported that several years after he'd gone east a neighbor woman said quietly, "I can't imagine what's inside that young man's head."
When Johnson concludes Rough Justice he takes the redeye flight to Toronto, and that morning drives to Stratford to start rehearsing Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth and Shakespeare's King Lear.
"I played one of the tough guys at the bar in Sweet Bird in 1978, in a Toronto production, and a lot of people thought when I was older, I could play the lead (Chance). Now I'm doing it."
His proud mother had seen him in several plays, but his father hadn't until a few years ago, when he saw him in three plays at Stratford. "I was pleased that he really understood what I was doing was a worthwhile endeavor. He saw what a unique form of communication live theatre can be."
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