Behind the screens

Actors Ben Ratner and Loretta Walsh shake out their arms and take a few deep breaths before running through a 15-minute scene from their upcoming production of Dinner With Friends.

U.S. playwright Donald Margulies’ Pulitzer Prize-winner is an actor’s favourite, with two couples eating, laughing, fighting, confessing and making up, in a story that is set over several days.

“It’s one of those plays where couples in the audience end up looking at each other sideways,” Ratner says.

Dinner With Friends kicks off with Walsh’s character telling the other couple that her husband (Ratner) has left her for another woman, launching doubts on all sides and divided loyalties.

The production grew out of scene-study work at the Haven Studio, where Ratner and Walsh teach classes drawn from among Vancouver’s film and TV actors, who work out their thespian muscles exploring theatre scenes.

“For most film and TV actors, stage is a luxury,” Ratner says. “It’s something you do every few years in order to feed your soul. Acting class is a place where you get the opportunity to do material that as a film and TV actor you may never get a chance to do. It’s a place to work, like a gym, where you keep sharp,”

This day, feeding the soul involves a tentative reunion between the estranged couple that devolves into insults, accusations, a screaming match and a knock-down physical battle. Ratner and Walsh are sweating and smiling at the quarter-hour mark.

Scene work usually stays in the classroom, but sometimes it’s the seed for something bigger, as when Walsh produced and starred in a 2010 production of Kenneth Lonergan’s crime drama Lobby Hero.

“Ben was the one who inspired me to do Lobby Hero, because I did a scene from the play here in class and thought, I love this play,” says Walsh, an Australian who came to Vancouver five years ago after acting and teaching in Australia and Toronto.