John Koensgen and his continuing transformation. Photo by Mike Levin.

By Mike Levin

There’s a trace of trepidation in John Koensgen as he prepares his newest role. When he picked up the script for Educating Rita, he realized, “boy, these people sure talk a lot.” Not that Koensgen doesn’t like lines; he is, after all, an actor. But it’s the language that’s made him blink, the complex sentence structure and the nuanced words that play England’s upper class off against its lower. So finding resonance in a version of theatre’s most archetypal theme of transformation will be, he admits, a big challenge.

To be fair, Koensgen’s work on, behind and around the stage has been a series of overlapping assignments for the past two years. It’s fatiguing, in the same way that diabetes drained him so badly in 2004 that he came very close to quitting altogether. But then, as now, the challenge of pushing his own boundaries is why he’s survived almost 34 years as a professional.

Koensgen plays the professor to Sarah McVie’s Rita in a two-character play that entered life as Ovid’s Metamorphosis in AD 8 and has pupated dozens, if not hundreds, of times, mostly notably as George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and the movie My Fair Lady. Opening night is July 14 at Arts Court’s Theatre, to start the Summer Fling series.

Arts Court Executive Director Linda Balduzzi chose Educating Rita for its crisp Willy Russell dialogue and a universal message of human intercourse she hopes will attract people in a virtually empty summer theatre season. Koensgen loves the idea because “it’s a challenge for the actors. It’s a play about something (of consequence).”

Actually it’s not about something, but about everything: creation, love, death, class, hope and gender. Mostly it’s about how change never happens the way you expect it, and how you’ll never be the same again. John Koensgen’s life has followed that script, and he wants his epitaph to be “He Survived Everything But This.”

His father died when he was six, the family moved to Ottawa and even by university, studying biology, something was still missing. The will was there, but not the template. Theatre was close to irrelevant until Koensgen turned 25. He was working at CKCU,  programming music, comedy and drama when friends in a group called Penquin Theatre got a Local Initiatives Program grant for a play.

Instead of one production, they decided to use the money to fund a whole season, which meant using amateurs for virtually all the work. Koensgen agreed to do a small part in the first production and then was asked to be the lead in a second, more psychedelic that cerebral, but intriguing nevertheless.

“I had to go to the library and read books about theatre. I had no idea what acting was even about,” he says. Yet the play sold out, and the next three years of Koensgen’s life became an industry cliché: rejection, success, near-catastrophic rejection, acceptance into the National Arts Centre’s Theatre Company plus a mash of corporate work that paid the bills.

By 1980 it was time to try out the big scene in Toronto. That lasted three years, until John and new wife Laurie realized “I was working all the time in Ottawa, even if part of it was industrial video. We came back because I knew I could work on the stage and not have to do all that other bullshit stuff.”

Along the way he picked up an expertise in fight-scene choreography and absorbed the theatre so well that he became a gifted director and an employable film actor. Since his first professional part in a 1977 production of Waiting for Godot, Koensgen has acted in 100 plays. He never expected this; it saved his life; and he wonders all the time how he got to this place.

Koensgen also teaches theatre at the University of Ottawa and four colleges. McVie remembers him as a mentor during an extracurricular drama course she took during high school. The other person she credits for motivation during that course is Kate Hurman, the director of Educating Rita. Small world.

Balduzzi’s Summer Fling is much more than a seasonal stop-gap for theatre people. It’s an effort to bring the private sector into an area of the arts that many feel is being marginalized by city funders. It’s also an experiment, growing from one production last summer to five this year, running from July 14 until August 28 and including a musical (Satin Dolls), bilingual historical satire (Inseparable), comedy (Swimming in the Shallows), improvisation (My Summer Crush Improv), Agatha Christie (Murder on the Nile), Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet), drama (Tuesdays with Morrie) and outdoor Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet).