Great expectations Actors bring real-life experience to roles of new parents at Prairie Theatre Exchange By: Ben Waldman Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022

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This article was published 02/11/2022 (783 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Josette Jorge arrives at rehearsal at Prairie Theatre Exchange Monday afternoon with her full entourage in tow. First, there’s her real husband, Fane. Then there’s her stage husband, Raugi Yu, whom she’s known since they appeared as husband and wife in a 2003 production of The King and I.

And then there are her understudies, who were helping the Vancouver-born Jorge prepare for a lead role in Ins Choi’s Bad Parent — the Kim’s Convenience playwright’s highly anticipated new play — long before their mommy was ever cast.

Wearing a Paw Patrol baseball cap, three-year-old Kitson struts into the theatre like a boy on a mission. His objective: the chest of toys scattered across the carpet at centre stage — teddy bears, race cars and pompoms, which he counts first in English and then in French.

Jorge’s youngest understudy, Ren, has her eyes closed, strapped to her mother’s chest.

Yu’s two children are teenagers, too busy to accompany their dad on Bad Parent’s national tour, which had stops in Vancouver and Toronto in October (the show, which was originally scheduled for PTE in 2020, is a co-production Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre and Soulpepper Theatre Company). But Yu, 58, a Taiwanese-Canadian actor with more than 30 years of professional acting experience, always keeps his kids close. Wearing a black muscle shirt, his bare shoulders reveal tattoos of his children’s sonograms. “That’s Lennox at 22 weeks,” Yu says, gesturing across his torso at his right shoulder. “And that’s Torren at 19.”

Both actors are parents, first and foremost, which made their decisions to enlist in Choi’s latest production a relatively simple one: Rarely in their careers had roles been as perfectly crafted for their sensibilities as were Nora and Charles, a creative couple who have decided to finally add a line on their monthly budget spreadsheet for diapers and veggie purées.

In Bad Parent, a two-hander in which both Jorge, 39, and Yu portray two characters each, the new parents struggle to deal with the interpersonal challenges that arise from child-rearing. They aren’t quite ready for what they’ve been reading in What to Expect When You’re Expecting and other how-to baby bibles.

Not that anyone ever is quite ready, but in real life, Yu remembers with acuity the moment he and his wife decided to expand their family tree.

“I think my wife turned 30, and we were at a fancy restaurant for her birthday. She was like, ‘I want to talk about kids.’ I said, ‘Uh, like, today?’ So she said, ‘We can have ’em, or we can just go on like this.’ I said, ‘Let’s take a year and prepare ourselves,” Yu recalls, now wearing Kitson’s hat. “Within nine months, she was pregnant.”

The shift to future fatherhood led Yu to make quick adjustments to his personality.

“Every decision I made had to involve the baby,” he says. If someone cut him off in traffic, he would look over to the back seat and pretend there was a tiny human babbling. “It totally changed me. Otherwise, I’d be honking.”

After Yu’s kids were born, they needed a babysitter, and Josette Jorge was happy to help. She learned by watching Yu and his partner much of what she knows now about parenting. When she and her husband, a fellow actor, decided four years ago to get serious about procreation, Jorge knew exactly who to call.

Then in December 2018, Kitson arrived; he’s named for Kitsilano, the Vancouver neighbourhood where his parents had their first date. And in June 2021 came Ren, whose full name is a combination of her grandparents’ names.

Having young children while working as a performer — with long, arduous hours of rehearsal and tours — creates complications. And when earlier this year Jorge was offered an opportunity to read for the lead in Bad Parent, she had to seriously consider the pros and cons.

“I didn’t know if I could do a touring play with kids this young, breastfeeding one of them,” says the Filipinx actor. “But then I read the script and I said I have to audition.”

The story felt almost too real to believe it was not, both Yu and Jorge agree, and contained the signature emotional dialogue and ideas that Choi’s become well-known for, mostly from Kim’s Convenience, which was an award-winning play before it became a stereotype-breaking and beloved CBC sitcom.

In Kim’s, major concepts like the struggles of living in the diaspora, of being first- or second-generation Canadians of Asian descent, and of living in a multi-generational home, coincide with the universal struggles of finding love, running a business and existing in a tight-knit community. The titular Kim family was treated with respect and care not normally given to characters of their backgrounds on mainstream television.

Both Kim’s and Bad Parent reveal the intricacies of Choi’s writing, which transmits thoughtful consideration of serious issues through sharp comedic delivery and tension.

“It seems like we’re talking about something innocuous, and then, all of a sudden, we’re crying,” says Yu. “That’s part of what I like to call the wizardry of Ins. After 10 laughs, we find ourselves in a deep moment, and then, suddenly, we’re laughing again.”

“The audience will laugh about something in scene 2, and then cry about the same thing in scene 10,” adds Jorge.

For both actors, the opportunity to play Asian-Canadian characters who felt well-rounded was something new. “It’s very rare that a BIPOC person gets to take on a role like this,” says Jorge, referring to actors who are Black, Indigenous or a person of colour. “I’ve played many different styles of Asian, but never Filipino before on a stage.”

“In my 30 years as an actor, this is only my second time in a significant role where I get to play an Asian character,” the Montreal-born Yu says. “I told Ins, ‘You wrote one of these white guy roles, but you wrote it for me.’ (Charles) is a 360-degree guy. He’s real, and he’s Asian.”

One thing that rang true about the script, both Yu and Jorge say, is that it feels immediately relatable to anyone, whether they’ve been parents or not, and regardless of background.

But Jorge says parents will get an extra kick out of the play’s content, which crackles with stress, passion and humour. “Any parent will get this,” she says.

But what about the kids?

Kitson, for his part, says he loves his mom’s work, but he’s a little tired of waiting for her to wrap up her interview.

He climbs on her shoulders and begins pulling at her cheeks, curled up in a grin, before holding himself upside down with his feet wrapped around his mother’s neck.

“I’m upside down!” he screams. “I’m upside down!”

Jorge doesn’t miss a beat and continues the interview. This is all part of the job.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com