August 21, 2020 · 0 Comments
By Constance Scrafield
Away from the bright lights and the enthusiastic applause, well known, well loved actor, Stephen Sparks is spending his time fruitfully with his wife, Shelley Hoffman, in their Toronto home.
“I love to cook,” he told the Citizen in a recent telephone interview. “I took home economics in high school. It was always a plan; I worked in a bistro on College Street at one time, for a while.
“I was also renovating houses with a crew,” he added. “We [he and Ms. Hoffman] bought a real fixer-upper in Toronto; fixed it up and sold it and bought this one. And how I’ve spent my pandemic is doing work on the house. There’s always something more to do: we’ve repainted the living room and stripped and stained the main staircase in the house.”
He commented with a chuckle, “My wife enjoys when our friends say, ‘Are you finished your renovations?’”
As chef of the house, Mr. Sparks likes best, “Italian – three to five ingredients. I got a smoker a few years ago and we have smoked bacon and squash –it keeps me out of trouble.”
Acting in Stephen Sparks’ life began in junior high school.
“I stepped into acting and drama class – I was sort of shy and really liked the acting. My high school had an excellent drama teacher, Mrs Brant; she was English and taught English class. I was the drama kid in a not artistic school; it was more blue collar,” he said. “I loved it. She did a big play every year and then a silly princess play. Then, she brought in a one act play about Jason and the Golden Fleece. It was hard hitting and emotional.”
He added, “She’s one of the reasons I continued on, as with a lot of my colleagues, who realized they could give acting a shot through a high school drama. Some in for a lark and then the other ones, for the discipline.”
He commented, “Theatre is intellectually challenging if you do it right. [Norm] Foster’s curiosity about how people behave is always thought provoking.”
Over recent years, Stephen Sparks and his wife have made forays into play writing.
He told the Citizen, “My wife is a television writer and she write scripts for children’s cartoons.
“All of us get an idea and we think we could write a play. I had this idea – something with my grandmother and Shelley said, ‘Let’s write it.’ We have coffee in bed in the morning together; one kisses the other one awake. One morning, I said something about a story that has to do with a kid on the farm and how the sale of their farm went. I often work in regional theatres and I’m often aware of farm land. Shelley is the driving force: she said, ‘I want to write this.’
And that’s exactly what the couple did.
“She went to visit a friend in Vermont. So, while she was there, she just pumped out the first 20 pages. The way we did it, was one person would write something down and gave it back – an idea and yes that makes me think of that. We’re collaborative.”
Their play, Buying the Farm, premiered in the Port Stanley Festival Theatre; and was produced in the Royal Manitoba Theatre centre.
“It worked all over Manitoba,” said Mr. Sparks.
Also, the show was staged at Thunder Bay’s Magnus Theatre, where, incidentally, Mr. Sparks and Ms. Hoffman met in 1998 and one presumes the sparks flew…
Buying the Farm was a hit, as well, in Kincardine, at the Blue Water Summer Playhouse.
“I have a few friends that run theatres. Putting together a season, there’s a lot of reasons why you can’t just put on any play. You have to balance your selections,” he said. “The pandemic quashed that and a second play. They’re the type of plays that would fit well in the theatres I work in. The first one is about a farm that is being eaten up by developers. It’s heart warming. Magnus Bjornson is the old bachelor farmer who owns the farm. It’s an Icelandic name.”
So, what was the inspiration for the character?
“Shelley’s best friend died and he left her his Equity RRSP. My wife and my mother love each other and she said, ‘We’re taking your mother to Iceland’ and we took her and saw the waterfalls and we had a great great trip.
“My mother is full blooded Icelandic, but born in Saskatchewan and my grandfather was an Icelandic cowboy farmer,” he remarked humorously.
“It’s really interesting creating something with your life partner,” continued Mr. Sparks. “There have to be fights because we have different viewpoints about how it should go and you’re collaborating, so, you have to pick which hill he’ll die on.
“We’ve been together for 22 glorious years. She used to be an actor and we met on a show at the Thunder Bay theatre. She’s what we call a recovering actor.”
He offered, “I will always act; it’s been hard making a career of it. Shelley’s self- employed and we’re making a go of it. We have our house in Toronto – which is amazing.
“Because I am sporadically employed as an actor, I was doing the bathroom in the first house, and had it taken apart; she had a powder room downstairs and the gym for showering because I got a job and was going to be away for six weeks. There has to be a lot of give and take – when I’m working, I’m gone.”
However, at Theatre Orangeville, it is a bit easier: “At Theatre Orangeville, I do the commuting during the run; during the rehearsal, I stay at the Lord Dufferin; so, it’s 50/50.”
As for the future, “Shelley and I are working on another play, for one. That’s how we’re being creative, just waiting for the pandemic, when we can go back to acting in the plays I’m booked for. Theatre will never go away. It’s always going to be there. It’s in for the long haul,” he promised. “Theatre never will shut down.
“That being said, I love what a lot of theatres are doing, being creative – holding things by Zoom; some performances are happening over the internet. Groups of friends that we know regularly get together that way.
“I got out of the house to see the Van Gogh Exhibit in the old Toronto Star building [1 Yonge Street ]. A computer adjusted animated showing of his paintings. It’s about a 40 minute program. This is the first thing I’ve done with an audience, but also at a social distance – beautiful variation of the work by Van Gogh.”
Saying, “It was a very moving experience and it seems pretty safe to me. There’s nothing you can touch; everybody must wear a mask but you’re still experiencing something together; there’s community, humanity. Just to see it live was incredible.
“Another thing that the pandemic has underlined, we’ve got to create internet infrastructure for rural communities. Hopefully there’ll be lessons, more independent financing.”
Reaching out, “I just want everybody to stay well and give those who make mistakes reminders. Please remember, I don’t want you to kill my mom [by not wearing a mask] and treat everybody with love.
“Mom’s in Edmonton,” he said. “They all just came home from a week on the lake and sent a photo of mom on a poodle noodle on the lake.”