this vfs student wrote this profile on me. She got 80%.
Jeff Gladstone
Artist Profile by Elaine Murphy
Guitar, djembe, Nigerian percussion, balloon animals, rapier, scimitar, mime… For Vancouver actor Jeff Gladstone, these are just a few of his special skills. While the word djembe (a goblet-shaped drum covered with goat skin and played with bare hands) is not in the lexicon of the average North American, the curious skill seems well-suited to Gladstone. “In Calgary I took drumming lessons from this guy who had an African band… He called me up and was like, ‘Hey, my band broke up and I want to start a new band. Will you be in my band?’ So I was like, ‘Okay.’” Gladstone was in the band for six years.
When listening to Gladstone, his blond hair flopping over his forehead, his sneaker-clad feet alternately crisscrossing, left hand gesturing casually, it is easy to understand why this array of skills and interests can seem so fitting. He once took on the task (with two friends) of condensing the history of the world into a one-hour play, The Big Rock Show. Gladstone enjoys picking and choosing the things that he believes will most interest and inform an audience. The Big Rock Show contains, among other things, a puppet Napoleon, the history of all Israeli cultures (“there’s like, 30”), and the story of Pope Joan. Yes, Joan. “She’s this woman Pope that they think existed, and she disguised herself as a man but she got pregnant and gave birth in the street and the whole town was like, ‘Oh my God!’ and they stoned her to death, dragged her behind a horse and burned her and erased her out of all the history books.” For Gladstone, it seems, life is all in the details.
Take, for instance, the recent Vancouver International Improv Festival, at which Gladstone performed nightly. When asked how long he had been doing the show, Gladstone answered, “This was the first time I’d ever done it,” then continued on to discuss his first acting teacher (Keith Johnstone, at the University of Calgary) and some of his accomplishments; “houses and factions and styles” of improv, and the practice of sharing control.
A question about the role of a workshop director reveals where a director is from (“…he’s from… I can’t remember. L.A., maybe. No, no, no. He’s from Chicago. I think.”) and the types of exercises they practiced. The international ensemble of improv actors had four days of workshops with their directors, and it is here that Gladstone’s passion for his work is revealed. He can’t resist demonstrating an exercise wherein an actor opens a door. “How you open the door would inform maybe who’s there, right? So if it kind of opens fast, it’s this, and then you just say goodbye and you close it… You’re not supposed to act anything, but when you watch it, you get all these ideas… Oh, that’s his dad and he always gets really drunk and embarrasses himself… And it all just comes from the one moment of opening the door.”
He confirms that the workshops were his favourite part of the festival, offering the actors the freedom to experiment and fail and learn from that failure. Though he no longer gets nervous onstage, he does acknowledge the pressure to be funny, which doesn’t suit him. “I don’t like having to come up with jokes. I’m not good at it. The improv that is valuable to me is the stuff that breeds good acting. Good stage moments.”
Gladstone is no stranger to the stage, with more than 25 shows to his credit. How then, does one balance the two, improv and theatre? “For me I find them almost like, identical. And I’m kind of the only person who does. It goes back to me in university, when I’m starting to think about this as a career. My acting teacher was an improv teacher, you know? So we used improv to develop character and work with text, and used acting lessons to inform improv. And to me improv is a theatrical venture. You can do it in bars and it becomes more like jokes, who’s got the better jokes. But improv in a theatre can be as dynamic, and thought-provoking and hilarious as any theatre play, too.”
He speaks sincerely and professionally about his passion for theatre and the responsibility a performer has to the audience. As evident in his effort to search out interesting and obscure world history facts to put in The Big Rock Show, Gladstone cares about the audience’s experience. “When you’re working on a play with people and they’re like, ‘Who cares if it makes sense? People can just get out of it what they want,’ I find that lazy. If you’re specific in your work, the audience, I think, is going to feel something specific and you’re going to give them an experience, you know?”
Indeed, Gladstone is an engaging speaker, intelligent and energetic, his passion for art and theatre and Nigerian percussion thoughtful and sincere. He seems to want the audience understand and to care, and it’s a challenge not to. But don’t tell him that. He finds the moments when people have approached him to tell him that a play changed their life or influenced him or her upsetting. “I don’t like to hear it. It kind of fucks me up because I think like, as soon as you think you’re good or you’ve arrived or you get something, it’s all gone.”
As an actor, improviser, singer, musician, and playwright, life is sometimes a balancing act. “My musician friends always say, ‘You should do acting!’ and the actors always say, “You should do music!’ And maybe they’re all right, but then I don’t know what to do... I try to keep flexible, because I want to keep working.”
With mainly acting credits to his name, it’s interesting to note that Gladstone is presently busy producing the Here Be Monsters theatre festival he started. “The whole idea of the festival is that it ties in improv and theatre and all arts together, and they’re all interwoven, sort of like creation, how to create art. That I love.” It is evident in the way he gestures animatedly as he speaks, the way he smiles more and speaks faster, that this is Gladstone’s passion, these myriad details that all combined create something special and whole.
The one credit missing from his lengthy list of job titles? Director. “The reason I’ve never directed is because I wrote and directed movies when I was seven. A few of them,” he laughs. “Star Wars. They were all about Star Wars. Based on Star Wars. And I was really mean to my friends. My one friend was supposed to come as the robot and I was like, ‘You have to come dressed all in tin foil!’ He came with this tin foil helmet, and this amazing Pamper box with dials and a whole outfit and tin foil gloves, and I was so mad. I was like, ‘I said all tin foil!’ And I was really young, but I’ve always never wanted to be a director because I didn’t want that part of me to come out again.”
It’s all in the details. I’m sure George Lucas would understand.
