Thrillingly amateur

After years in a busy family practice, this doctor once again gets her curtain call

By Elizabeth Wasserman

Dr Irene Simons is the very model of a kindhearted family doctor. Just ask her adoring patients, her three children, three-and-a-half grandchildren or her 86-year-old mother, Dorothy Smyth, who shares her Montreal home � along with a sizable coterie of rescued dogs and cats. When she's on stage, however, the 61-year-old GP and amateur actress prefers to follow the path of evil. In repertory theatre productions over the past five years, she's played the stuck-up Mrs Kirby in You Can't Take it With You, the psychopathic, domineering Ada Boynton in Appointment With Death, and axe murderer Harriet Stanley in The Man Who Came To Dinner. Asked to recall her favourite of all the lines she's delivered onstage, Dr Simons (as Ada Boynton) instantly thunders: "You will do as I tell you!"

Meanness may not be in Dr Simon's blood, but acting certainly is. Sitting in an office cluttered with family photos, pottery and, most strikingly, a vintage "Dealer's Choice" pinball machine, she recalls a thespian-tinged childhood in the salt-mining town of Unity, Saskatchewan (population: roughly 2,000). Both of her parents performed in amateur theatre there, and one of her last memories of her father, who passed away when she was eight years old, is from a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in a church basement. She can still hear him delivering Caesar's line, "Cowards die many times before their death; the valiant never taste of death but once."

PRAGMATIC OR DRAMATIC
She carried on the family tradition through her teenage years, attending a summer theatre program in nearby Fort Qu'Appelle, and starting a drama club in Unity that put on high school plays. At age 18, she faced a career dilemma: she was accepted both at McGill University's medical science program and at the National Theatre School in Montreal. She dreamt of the stage, but her mother advised her to be pragmatic. "'You're no Liz Taylor,' she told me," Dr Simons recalls with a laugh. "She was a widow with three children. She wanted us to have careers that would support us. And she was right � I was no Liz Taylor."

If it was medicine that stole Dr Simons from the stage as a teen, four decades later it's medicine that's brought her back to it. In 1999, one of her patients mentioned that a benefit he was acting in at Montreal's major English-language theatre, the Centaur, had lost one of its key performers with only two weeks left before the show date. "I can learn lines quickly," Dr Simons told him. The next thing she knew, she was cramming for the unlikely part of a boxing manager in a production called Finbarr's Final Fling. She rented all of the Rocky movies in preparation for her first (but not her last) cross-dressing role. "That performance is probably best forgotten," she says. "I was delighted with it at the time, but I've since seen videos."

From that point on, the roles just kept on coming. Without attending a single audition, Dr Simons has been drafted to perform in six plays and three revues. Last November, she had her first professional experience in Montreal's Saidye Bronfman Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara. It was a thrill to work with professional actors, she says, but compared to the lighthearted atmosphere of amateur theatre, it was a gruelling experience. Rehearsals regularly lasted eight hours, and occasionally as long as 14. "It's like the difference between being an ambulance assistant and being the emergency room doc," she explains. "You are held to a different standard. I was terrified that I'd come off as a fraud, that critics would say, 'This play was wonderful, but whatever could they have been thinking to include that rank amateur in the cast?'" Not only did she pull it off, she kept her practice open all the while. She saw her patients from 7am until noon, then swapped her white coat for a military uniform for afternoon rehearsals that lasted until 10pm. The schedule nearly did her in, but the critics loved her.

Union regulations and a basic human need for sleep would make a long-term double life as pro actor and GP impossible. But in any case Dr Simons prefers the freedom and eccentricity of amateur theatre, not to mention the juicy parts. How many middle-aged female actors get the chance to play Psycho's Norman Bates and Thelma of Thelma and Louise � in a single production? This doctor did, in a benefit called Centaur Salutes the Silver Screen.

METHOD TO THE MADNESS
It turns out that medical school may be a good choice for an aspiring young actor after all. Dr Simons' two callings have complemented one another quite nicely. "There's a lot of drama in medicine, a lot of showmanship," she says. "Some would say that doctors are just 50-minute stand-up comics." Her background has made her an effective method actor, too. "The last role I played was a villain, and to me it was obvious that she had borderline personality disorder," she offers as an example. "Having dealt with so many borderlines myself, I know how they act." In other roles she's put on an authentic limp, a Parkinsonian tremor and the symptoms of congestive heart failure. Though she's never played a doctor onstage, Dr Simons did have to perform a Clark Kent-style role change during one performance of Major Barbara, when a cup bounced off the set and clunked an audience member on the forehead. Dr Simons gracefully exited the stage, removed her military jacket and gave the dazed spectator a medical exam.

Dr Simons generally tries to avoid creating medical emergencies in the theatre, but admits it's largely the thrill of flirting with disaster that draws her to acting. "It's hard to explain the feeling of fear and exhilaration, just before you enter the stage. You are sure you are going to forget your lines, that you are just going to freeze. It's like being on the top of a roller coaster," she explains. "I imagine that it's something like skydiving," she adds, "though I wouldn't know."