He quickly sketches in elements of his youth that others might choose to dwell on, including the fact that “my parents divorced when I was fourteen or fifteen. It’s a foggy time,” as well as “I have an older brother who lives in New York. I had a complicated but ultimately very close relationship with him.”
But then he gets down to what he obviously feels is important: “I had a bit of a schizophrenic life, in that I was raised in a Jewish home but sent to an Anglican school, Upper Canada College — eleven years.” He smiles. “That has a lot to do with what I am, that split in my personality.”
Those words suddenly open the door to the whole Brooks oeuvre, from the heroes of his own plays (Insomnia and The Good Life), through every character in the MacIvor canon, and on to the protagonists of Miller’s and Mighton’s works. Split personalities, divided souls, creatures of mixed loyalties: that’s what you’ll find in every Brooks production.
The depth of the influence of this period in his life becomes even more obvious as he starts to explain a traumatic adolescence that is one part normal teenage angst, one part social and religious tensions, and one part physical grief from the delayed onset of puber-ty. “I was a very late bloomer,” he says simply. “I was in swimming class, which we were still doing naked in grade seven. Those were the most awful classes imaginable, because I was three, four years behind some of the kids.” His embarrassment is palpable as he recalls that time. “Your sexuality begins to slowly…blossom is not the word I would use in my case. And that creates a different terrain. You look at yourself in the mirror differ-ently. You start to measure yourself in terms of your sexuality. The girls at bss [Bishop Strachan School, sister school to ucc] terrified me — those statuesque blondes who seemed to be in control of themselves in a way that was absolutely foreign to me. I didn’t feel included, because I was different.”
A large part of that difference was being Jewish. “It was always around. There’s a latent anti-Semitism that is just culturally embedded in people in ways they don’t understand. Things slip out of people’s mouths, things kids have heard at home. And when people are angry, sometimes they say things.” But he soon learned to search deeper for the source of his sense of disenfranchisement. “It was more my own sense that I was different,” he says. “I have a different sense of humour, I speak differently, and I think that deep in my soul there’s a different ambition, a different sense of what’s important, day to day, moment to moment.
“In the early days of computers, you used to have these questionnaires you’d fill out in career counselling, and mine came back with no matches. There were too many contradictions. Isn’t it interesting that I ended up in theatre?” But that was still a few years in the future. He dutifully went on to the University of Toronto but found his social problems increased, even in a mixed setting. “I needed to learn how to be with people. I was profoundly self-conscious, didn’t know where I fit in, how to dress. My hair felt wrong, everything felt wrong. I felt wrong in my skin.” He thought change was the only option open to him, and so he went travelling for a year, starting in Europe and winding up in Israel, working on a dairy farm on a kibbutz. He borrowed guitars and busked his way back to Canada. Then, on his return to the U of T campus, he met the man in charge of the theatre department, Steven Martineau, who would change the course of his life.
“He was a very special guy,” Brooks recalls fondly, “Oxford educated. A hippie. But a kind of rigorous hippie who was way ahead in his thought.” It was 1978, and he enrolled in the U of T theatre program. Martineau’s theory class was what Brooks describes as “a revelation. When I listened to Brecht’s theoretical writing, I felt all of a sudden I was hearing something I had thought about without knowing I had thought about it. It’s pulling something out of you that feels familiar. It appealed to my sense of order and justice, to the anti-sentimentalist in me, the person who didn’t like cheap emotions and cheap tricks.”
In 1981, Brooks dazzled the campus with a multimedia show, called Evening and loosely based on All About Eve, that starred actor Maggie Huculak. Once the door was open, the career began. There were early plays he wrote, like The Return of Pokey Jones, and then his partnership with the actor Guillermo Verdecchia, which would yield shows like The Noam Chomsky Lectures and, later, Insomnia. But it was the idiosyncratic work he started with the Augusta Company (Brooks, Don McKellar, and Tracy Wright) that eventually led to his first great partnership, with Daniel MacIvor.
MacIvor had already embarked on his successful career as a solo artist, working with director Ken McDougall, but he felt the need for a change and began to collaborate with Brooks. “It seemed right from the beginning,” MacIvor recalls. “It was symbiotic. I think we complement one another. My weaknesses are his strengths.”
“We’re opposites in a lot of ways,” observes Brooks of MacIvor. “He lives six lives for every one I live, although within that one life I lead degrees of kinds of lives that he doesn’t. Not that one is better than the other. They’re just different.”
