TJ Dawe - I see London, I see Tracks
Master monologist TJ Dawe is part Fringe superstar, part hobo
“Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony.”
So wrote Jack London in The Road, his 1907 memoir of the years he spent as
a youth riding the rails across Canada and the United States, talking with other
hoboes, scrounging for work when he could get it, begging for food and clothing
when he couldn’t and often landing in jail when he had the misfortune to
cross paths with an unfriendly cop or railway guard. The absence of monotony
is also perhaps the greatest charm of the Fringe plays of well-travelled Toronto
actor/playwright TJ Dawe, whose newest solo show is Tracks (Stage 11), an
ambitious 85-minute adaptation of London’s book, a little-read volume not
many modern readers will likely be familiar with, but which remains a fascinating,
only slightly romanticized evocation of a remarkable subculture.
The play is a change of pace for Dawe, who first came to the attention of Edmonton Fringers in 1999 with his hit show Tired Clichés, a distinctive mixture of offbeat storytelling and observational comedy punctuated every 15 minutes or so by Dawe diving backwards into a huge pile of empty cardboard boxes. At the time, many reviewers referred to him as if he were a stand-up comic—the most frequent comparison was to Jerry Seinfeld, whom the tall, lanky Dawe vaguely resembles. “People still call me a comedian,” Dawe says over the phone from his billet in Saskatoon, only one of many stops he’s making this summer on the North American Fringe circuit. “I don’t object to it, but I’m not a stand-up comic—I’ve never played in comedy clubs or anything like that. But it probably puts me on a footing that people understand—I mean, on one level, I’m standing on a stage and saying things that generally make people laugh. So to some people’s minds I’m a comedian, and if that makes it easier to sell my shows, then that’s fine. But I’ve always considered it theatre.”
A guaranteed box-office drawe with each subsequent show, Dawe, without ever
abandoning the wry, humanistic wit that endeared him to audiences in the first
place, has used the one-man format to do a lot more than deliver punchlines.
Labrador told the (almost completely fabricated) story of Dawe’s trip to
one of the harshest regions in Canada in hopes of learning about his family
heritage, while last year’s wonderful The Slip-Knot was an intricately
structured account of Dawe’s experiences working three very different but
equally tedious blue-collar jobs. In those previous shows, Dawe was ostensibly
playing himself and telling stories drawn from his personal experiences, and
so Tracks, which is set 100 years ago and in which he plays Jack London, would
appear to be a huge departure for him.
“Before the show opened,” he says, “I was acutely conscious of the many, many ways in which it was different from anything I’d ever done before and I was absolutely terrified. I was making concrete plans to cancel the tour—I had no faith in the show at all. But since it’s opened, I’ve started finding more and more ways in which it’s along the lines of what I do. It’s stories! This is a guy, with an audience, telling them interesting stories. Now, with my previous shows, I tell stories about everyday life and everyone can relate to them and there’s the laughter of recognition. Here, these are stories no one relates to. No one in the audience knows what it’s like to hop a freight train or to have to lie to the police or to watch justice being enacted in a gypsy camp. They’re extreme stories, but the show is still all about knowing how to tell a good story, how to pace it, how to give out information so that people can absorb it....
There’s a section in the book where London talks about how a successful
hobo has to be an artist. He has to tell his victim the story they want to hear
in order to get a free supper or a handout—or just not be thrown into jail!
He says it was a great education for him as a fiction writer. On the other hand,
Dawe’s decision to spend his summers travelling tirelessly from Fringe
to Fringe (this will be the 39th Fringe that Dawe has participated in!) probably
isn’t all that different from London’s decision to explore the country
via freightcar. Dawe’s first experience on the Fringe circuit was in 1994
touring Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone—“I was 19 years old,”
he says, “and we toured Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton and Victoria.
I had seen one Fringe play in my life and had never been in one. But now I was
travelling across the country, surrounded by all these vagabond actor types
who’d done many Fringes, stayed in many people’s houses and had so
many experiences—getting a good review here, having a vendetta with a critic
there. It was this crazy carnival of actors and art, and I was just smitten
by it.
“Now, when Jack London went on the road,” Dawe continues, “he was 16. And at that age—especially for a lot of guys—that’s when the world just opens up and you realize there’s more to it than just the city where you grew up. And it’s like, ‘Wow!!! The world is huge!!! I want to see it all!!!’ It was the same thing for me when I was 19—I’d never been on a cross-country drive like that before, and I was so excited! Jack has a moment in his book where he describes when the bug bit him. He was 16 and he fell in with a bunch of road kids and he started listening to their stories. And he talks about how their adventures made his life, which he’d always considered very adventurous, seem like 30 cents. Here was this new world of adventure that way just calling to him—and that’s very much what it was like for me when I first hit the Fringe circuit at 19. I thought those Fringe veterans were like samurais! It seemed like they could do anything!
London’s book is filled with all sorts of insider information as to which
cities have the best amenities and most hobo-friendly neighbourhoods (Ottawa,
for instance, is apparently the toughest city in North America to beg clothing)—and
so I ask Dawe to rank Edmonton in terms of the quality of its Fringe. I suppose
the question’s more than a little chauvinistic, but Dawe replies with such
genuine enthusiasm that I don’t think he’s simply trying to butter
up the locals. “It’s easily the best Fringe,” he says. “A
lot of people will cancel their tour if they don’t get in. The energy is
tremendous—to see that much interest and excitement over theatre is unparallelled
anywhere that I’ve ever been. One year, I was coming into Edmonton and
I took a wrong turn and had to stop at a gas station. I was nowhere near the
Fringe. But I asked the attendant how to get to the Fringe, and he told me right
away. No other city in the country would that happen.”
In other words, if Fringe performers are like hoboes, the Edmonton Fringe is Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Paul Matwychuk
The Vue Weekly
August 2002
