A Vancouver playwright takes a Toronto actor on a walk around the seawall of Vancouver’s False Creek where the actor learns how the city’s immersive theatre scene is reflected in the Creek’s rising and falling tidal waters.
The article is the first of a series of six that will take readers on five revelatory excursions through various parts of Canada’s laid-back west coast city PLUS a ride on SkyTrain, the regional rail system that penetrates the city’s booming exurbia. The writer offers not a pedestrian experience, but a moveable feast and an all-senses take on art and culture in Vancouver and its surrounds in dialogue with specially chosen friends.
Not long ago, a Toronto actor, friend of mine, came this way for the first time since 1971. In those days he was a lanky and unencumbered youth with a weed-fumed urge to see Lotus Land for himself.
Back then, he carried a backpack crammed with high ideals and a thousand hopes for a future full of leading roles in brilliant plays. He returned to Toronto, to his fated life (for wasn’t Canadian theatre really a Toronto thing?) and enjoyed success and failure in equal measure.
To his What’s new? question I suggested a walk around False Creek, a three-kilometer long, saltwater inlet that keeps Vancouver’s downtown from chafing-up against the rest of the city. At its narrowest, about a hundred meters wide, three hundred at its widest. Three bridges carry vehicles and pedestrians from one side to the other, while scores of walkers, runners and bicyclists make their way around a walkway – a seawall – that wends its way along the Creek’s bays and coves. In some of those, small craft bob at anchor, but in the largest coves, there are mazes of docks where power launches rise and fall on the tides beneath the yachts of the rich and the super rich.
To read more about Vancouver’s False Creek the full story in Spencer Magazine’s Winter issue, please click here!
