‘Drama nerd’ gets crack at Neil Simon
Ryan Parker identifies with newlywed role in Simon classic
This is a quirky story, part whimsy part inevitability. And its teller is genuinely delighted by the ending.
When Ryan Parker graduated from theatre school — and that’s another story with twists — his eye was caught by Barefoot in the Park, Neil Simon’s exuberant 1963 romantic comedy that was a valentine to his first wife. Parker was smitten. “I read it; I loved it; I thought ‘I can’t wait to be old enough to play Paul Bratter,’” half the newlywed couple trying to make a go of their new lives together in a Manhattan apartment.
“Recently, I was trying to figure out how to do it,” says Parker, who has one of those grins that make people at other tables in outdoor cafes wonder what he’s up to. “I told friends that if I started a theatre company, I wanted this play to be part of it. ... So bizarre! Jeff (Teatro La Quindicina artistic director Jeff Haslam) phones and offers me the part in Barefoot in the Park. I said ‘I’ve got to make sure I’m not busy.’ NOT.”
Parker laughs. He has a jaunty look to him; even his hair seems to be exiting from his head stage right in sprightly fashion.
Parker is himself a relative newlywed — he and his artist wife Claire Uhlick got married just before last summer’s Fringe, and honeymooned at the Venice Biennale — which only serves to indicate the principle that some things were clearly meant to be.
Teatro is a company whose forays into classic comedies by playwrights other than Stewart Lemoine and the Teatro circle of talents are rare. But now that they have alighted on Barefoot, Parker doesn’t have to start a theatre company. Which should save a busy man time, since he’s already co-created a band, the ukulele cover band The Be Arthurs with Sheldon Elter, and a sketch comedy troupe, Blacklisted, with Matt Alden that’s morphed into Caution: May Contain Nuts for the small screen. And did I mention Parker is a photographer?
All these developments are unexpected for a Sherwood Park kid who was one of those “high school students who skipped classes and hung with bad kids,” under the classic “I’m troubled! I hate life! Growing up is hard!” mantra. “Hey, maybe I wasn’t really a bad kid; I was ACTING!”
It was the compelling need for three more credits, he says, that led him to theatre. “It was the easiest option.” Then suddenly “a rebellious popular kid became a drama nerd.” He auditioned for the part of the ultra-nebbish Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors. And that role, during the course of which Parker discovered he could sing, had other invigorating sideeffects. “All my grades went up. I went to all my classes. I started to be interested in life, in everything!”
Parker’s arrival in Tim Ryan’s musical theatre department at Grant MacEwan University had a similarly topsy-turvy quality. “I thought I’d teach gym, but my (Little Shop) director forced me to audition. ... I sang On The Street Where You Live, and did a monologue from King Lear. I was 17; what did I know?” he grins. These days he and Farren Timoteo teach an audition course at MacEwan University, and encourage the kids to make their own choices and have confidence in them. It was something he learned when, at the “mature age” of 25, Parker went back to theatre school, at the University of Alberta, “one of the first decisions I made that was an actual decision.”
In music, Parker is selftaught. “When I graduated from Grant Mac I figured I’d need to know an instrument. Since I was touring by then, I went to buy a traveller’s guitar, but they were $500. And you could get a ukulele for 20 bucks.”
In that commercial transaction was born The Be Arthurs. But not before Parker “had spent a year pestering Sheldon,” who finally succumbed. “It’s the same tuning as a guitar, and he gave in.”
There isn’t another band quite like The Be Arthurs — not least because all four of them, including Chris Bullough, currently working on his master’s in directing, and Bob Rasko, a jazz percussionist, are actors first, with individual careers in theatre.
“Our repertoire is pop songs. We try to find really well-written songs that have been way overproduced, like Toxic by Britney Spears, and find the good song lurking inside.”
The Be Arthurs now write their own comedy songs for The Irrelevant Show. And they’ve just been enlisted as a skiffle band by Bob Baker for his Citadel production of One Man Two Guv’nors next season.
Parker’s first Teatro gig was East of My Usual Brain, an enigmatic 2007 mystery/love story probing the mystery of other people’s thoughts. And he’s done new Teatro musicals, like Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s and other comedies since then. Barefoot in the Park, he thinks, has similarities of style with Teatro, “the characterization, the way people talk, quick, witty, with layers to it.”
And now he understands, as never before, the situation of the Barefoot character he plays.
“I totally identify with Paul, struggling with age-old questions of committing to a relationship and committing to a job.”
“This style, the way the jokes work, spawned the sitcom. ... That’s the hard thing, after that many years of sitcoms, knowing how to find the real moment in a romantic comedy, not just a sitcom string of great one-liners and setups.”