by Dan Lalande

In show business, particularly in a market the size of Ottawa’s, survival is spelled, “versatility.” One-trick ponies are the industry’s road kill; to the multi-talented go the spoils ― er, jobs. And nobody is busier these days than the local theatre community’s jack-of-all-trades, David Whiteley.

Whiteley’s moniker boasts more dashes than a verbose Morse code sender: actor-writer-director-producer-translator, reads the current version, and it’s a list that keeps on growing. This year alone, Whiteley the director is bringing local audiences the annual A Company of Fools production; Whiteley the producer, meanwhile, will be helping to breathe new life into the once endangered Gladstone theatre as a seminal force behind Plosive Productions, the company behind the recent production of The Importance of Being Earnest, and that will be renting the space come fall.

”I experience directing as far and away the greatest challenge of the various roles I take on,” Whiteley says when asked which of his initiatives he finds the most taxing, “because you have at least a toe if not a hand in everything. And you bear the greatest amount of weight. That’s the joy as well as the challenge of it.”

“But if you want sheer exhausting, thankless, never ending, Sisyphusian challenge in a theatrical context, let’s talk producing!”

The former, at least, is made easier this time by one of the best casts the Fools ― Ottawa’s Bard-bashing, park-roving, much-loved clowns ― have ever had, including wily old hands Richard Gélinas and Catronia Léger in the title roles of Antony and Cleopatra… uh, wait sec ― Antony and Cleopatra? That driest, darkest and arguably least performed of all of Shakespeare’s plays? That’s the Fools’ show?

“Many of the things that make it challenging make it great material for us,” maintains Whiteley. “All that passion and all that action and all that history are hard to take in through a reverential, full production. With the Fools, there’s the freedom to play, to trim and streamline, and most of all, to laugh when the over-the-top passions move us to laugh. But there’s also plenty of great human feeling in the play and we want to be authentic to the truth behind the ridiculousness.”

The show will run through to August 20, at outdoor venues across the city.

As for Plosive, that’ll start in September, as part of a four- to six-show season at the aforementioned Gladstone, a joint effort with farce master John P. Kelly’s SevenThirty Productions. While Kelly and company will provide laugh-loaded fare like a comic take on The 39 Steps and the dark comedy I Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Fell, Whiteley’s outfit will treat audiences to David Mamet’s tight, confrontational Speed-the-Plow and yet another Christmas-themed mock radio show, something slowly but surely becoming a Yuletide Ottawa tradition.

“Ottawans need more theatre,” says Whiteley, “and theatre needs more Ottawans” ― and both, if he can keep up the pace, need more David Whiteley.