Shows and Tell

Layne Coleman’s slim memoir consists of a series of narratives that function like short stories. The actor and former artistic director of Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille chronicles his life as a performer, husband, and father. From the opening pages, it is apparent that Coleman is a compelling storyteller, capable of spinning even the smell of honey-covered cheese crackers into a yarn about his childhood in rural Saskatchewan. “I had always wanted to write about the boy who lived on that land,” he admits.

Coleman’s seemingly impeccable memory and sharp attention to detail are striking, especially when it comes to events that happened several decades ago. In the second chapter, “The Audition,” he describes meeting a young woman on the street in Winnipeg while hitchhiking across Canada in 1971. The green-eyed university student invited the twenty-one-year-old traveller to join her for meat loaf in the Hudson’s Bay cafeteria. “She had only eaten half of her meal” when their conversation began to swell with sexual tension: “She handed me a cigarette, which I accepted. She asked me to light hers. I struck a match, and she took hold of my hand and drew it to her cigarette. Her touch excited me, and I could tell she enjoyed making me feel like I was not in charge of whatever came next.”

By helping him land a part in the amateur production she was working on, Coleman’s new lover introduced him to the world of drama, a craft to which he ultimately devoted his life. In 1980, he co-founded the 25th Street Theatre in Saskatoon; he ran it until 1983, when he moved to Ontario. For Theatre Passe Muraille’s 1983–84 season, he performed as Hamlet and, in the process, fell in love with the director’s girlfriend, the French Canadian journalist and novelist Carole Corbeil. The two settled in Toronto, married, and had a daughter, Charlotte. Corbeil died at forty-eight, leaving Coleman a single dad. (Losing her, he explains in his acknowledgments, was the inspiration behind the book.)

“The Undertow” is a moving description of processing grief while struggling with alcoholism. During his first winter as a widower, Coleman took a trip to Mexico with Charlotte. He secluded himself with a bottle of rum, pen, and paper — and reflected on the root of his pain, which stemmed from both the loss of his wife and an unresolved issue between them. Writing in her voice, he explores an affair she had with a poet she met in Banff. He imagines how she viewed their marriage during that time and revisits the acts of revenge and bouts of jealousy that followed. This chapter culminates in hard-won acceptance and a renewed commitment to supporting his daughter through the loss of her mother. “She needed a father,” he realized.

Coleman confronts his past with courage. Readers can sense the extent of his integrity in the uncomfortable details he includes, from his various relapses to his visit to a strip club while his sick wife was in hospital. In “Happy New Year,” he describes the scene with rigour, including the “very real smell of perfume” and the unsettling conversation he had with one of the dancers. The whole episode paints a distasteful portrait of Coleman. Rather than try to rationalize his behaviour, though, he makes it clear that he is embarrassed about this period of his life. Even back then, he was too ashamed to return to the bar after leaving his hat: “I’d felt pathetic and only wanted to escape.”

Admissions like this turn Coleman into a complex figure who can be viewed from many angles. We watch a fallible person endure moral victories and failures, because the author has the mettle to face and document his imperfections with authenticity.

Structured in fourteen disparate chapters, Coleman’s narrative sometimes lacks focus and direction. I found myself wondering what it was building toward. It’s not that the sections themselves are meandering, but they’re not tied together by an overarching question, mystery, or objective. An Open-Ended Run feels . . . well, too open-ended because it considers none of these things and provides readers with no resolutions. It just ends when it does, abruptly and somewhat arbitrarily.

But if reading this memoir feels a bit like sailing through the dark, at least the captain is wise and engaging. Demonstrating his command of language, Coleman constructs captivating images and metaphors. “Winter was a different kind of dream,” he writes in the opening pages. “It was when you noticed the light more, the hues and colours reflecting off the snow, which was like a magic quilt, a canvas that covered the painful memories of poor crops and the following despair, the catastrophes that arrived year after year.” Later, he remembers passing “a patio where I had sat with my French writer all those years ago.” He immerses the reader in an early memory of his late wife: “She had made the world a far better place. I was awake to the air then. It was like breathing in promise, and I spent the rest of my life chasing that feeling.” We may not always know where it’s going, but it hardly matters. An Open-Ended Run is honest, perceptive, and enthralling every step of the way.