Another tour of duty for actor
Wigston back in military garb for Lunchbox Theatre production
When one of its plays requires a soldier, Lunchbox Theatre routinely enlists Calgary actor Eric Wigston.
In Lunchbox’s production of the Robert Gontier and Nicky Phillips musical drama In Flanders Fields, which runs Saturday to Nov. 9, Wigston plays Canadian poet, teacher, surgeon and lieutenant-colonel John Mccrae.
In 2013, Wigston played a young bomber pilot in training at a Fort Macleod airbase in 1940 in Winn Bray’s That Men May Fly. Wigston returned to Lunchbox in 2016 to star in Lest We Forget, JP Thibodeau and Joe Slabe’s tribute to the Canadian military over the past 100 years.
Wigston says his tour of duty for
In Flanders Fields differs from his first two shows in that this time he is “playing a real person and one who wrote one of the most famous war poems of all-time.
“I didn’t know too much about John Mccrae when I was offered the role,” Wigston says. “Like most people, I knew his poem, but I didn’t know about his life. As a young man, all he wanted to do was study and write poetry. But to please his father and his older
brother Tom, who was a doctor, John studied medicine.”
At university, Mccrae met and fell in love with a young woman named Alice, but she died. He never had another relationship after that. “John enlisted in 1914 as a medical officer because he said he didn’t just want to watch people die. He wanted to save as many lives as he could.”
In Flanders Fields begins in the trenches and Mccrae’s life is told through flashbacks. In the trenches, John meets Alexis Helmer, who was one of his students in Canada. Nick Driscoll plays Alexis as well as John’s father and his brother Tom. Cassia Schmidt plays John’s mother and Alice.
When Wigston was looking for a way to connect with Mccrae, he read that “for a period of time, John stopped writing poetry. He was feeling stifled and didn’t feel creative. His poems were his way to feel complete. He needed to write them.”
“The military was the path he had to take, not necessarily the path he wanted ... to take, but he began writing again in the trenches.”
Wigston says he knew early on he wanted to be an actor and says he has “been fortunate to have been supported every step of the way by family and friends. Acting is my passion, but sometimes you don’t get to work as often as you’d like.”
There was a lean period early in his career when Wigston, his brother and their father bought a gourmet granola company. They eventually sold the company and he’s worked everything from construction and retail to bartending to support his passion.
Wigston is married to Calgary stage manager Emma Brager. In 2015, they sold things “we didn’t really need and took off to New Zealand. It was a working holiday because we worked in restaurants so we could afford to travel.”
When the couple returned to Calgary a year later, Wigston was cast in Lunchbox’s Lest We Forget. Earlier this year, he starred in Catalyst Theatre’s production of Vigilante at the Grand Theatre in Ontario.