Dennis Garnhum, director and author of Toward Beauty. Photo supplied

“The noise in my head has been quieted by the gentle sounds of the ocean….” — Toward Beauty by Dennis Garnhum

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This is the story of a theatre artist who found something he thought he’d lost forever: his creative spark.

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It’s a story propelled by contradiction: heartbreak and joy, weight and buoyancy, shuttered prospects and sweeping vistas. And the happy ending (and the magical route there) is one that director Dennis Garnhum will share Tuesday night at the downtown library when he talks about his memoir Toward Beauty: Reigniting A Creative Life On The Camino of Santiago. Ah, and he’ll share another sort of happy dénouement for a dramatic story in July when his production of the riotous comedy The Play That Goes Wrong starts a summer run at the Citadel.

In that play, which mines comedy gold from the disaster potential of live theatre, the earnest theatre-loving amateur thesps of the Cornley Drama Society are valiantly attempting to stage a 1920s-style murder mystery. What could go wrong?

Irony irony. Everything did go wrong in live theatre in March, 2020 when COVID struck it down. As the exuberant Garnhum describes, pre-rehearsal last week, he and theatre were on a roll at the time. After 11 years as the artistic director of Theatre Calgary, he was seven seasons into his highly successful tenure at the helm of the Grand Theatre, in London, Ont. “We’d just announced the greatest season ever, we were going to take my Cabaret across five cities. And we were about to have the hottest show!” After a series of standing ovations by preview crowds, Garnhum’s production of Room, the North American premiere of the stage adaptation of the Emma Donaghue hit novel and film, was about to open on March 13, with Broadway prospects too.

On that fateful day, at the Grand’s traditional morning-of-opening-night hot breakfast, Garnhum had to announce to the assembled crew, cast, board that “we’re going to close for two months, and the next show is cancelled….” He told them “don’t worry, we’ll be back in two months. And it was two years.”

“Some people made it through and got stronger, and some people fell apart. I fell apart…. My purpose was lost; my creativity was gone. I didn’t know who or what I was any more,” he says candidly of the personal chaos that ensued. “I’m a theatre person. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done. I wasn’t ‘Oh, I’ll pivot; I’ve always wanted to work in film’. No. I don’t do that…. I couldn’t find my way out, the way other people do. It just wasn’t in my spirit.”

It was in “a last-ditch effort” to pull himself out of the slough of despond, after 17 months of “zombie-ing” as he puts it, that Garnhum took a more dramatic step, well 832 km worth of steps, on a rugged walking route along the Atlantic. “Some people go sit on a beach; I decided to walk across Spain by myself (laughter). So I put on a backpack and walked eight to 12 hours a day for 32 days.” He left the “why?” or “what” questions behind him. “I just knew I needed to take a break.” And during that sabbatical, “I discovered the ‘punch-line’: for the rest of my life I want to be consciously walking toward beauty,” the enlivening thought that give his first book its title, and impetus as both a memoir and a travelogue.

Garnhum didn’t arrive at a six-hour pre-Camino layover in Madrid airport thinking he was going to write a book about the experience to come. “I do love travel books, adventure books, transformation stories. And I guess I had an idea that I might write a book one day…. But I’d never written a book before.”

The immediate inspiration, he says, was “the thought that tomorrow when I start walking my life will change. I will only see my life in retrospect. So I’d better write down today what I feel.” And that’s what he did, every night on the Camino, after he took his boots off. “I came back with 40,000 words. And an editor and another year of work later, it became 80,000. All the detail was written daily.”

You wonder if, since Garnhum is of the theatre, the experience might have become a play. “Never a play!” he declares decisively. “I’m running away (from theatre), I’m going to Spain, and I’m going to come back and announce I’m never going to work in theatre again…. Whatever else, but not this any more!”

The book wasn’t a pre-meditated calculation. But “my adventures were so thrilling, things happened that were so magical and surprising….” He arrived with a pressing need for solitude — “I get to go away and maybe not talk to anybody, all day long, for five weeks, and if I see anybody I’m not going to talk to them!” In the event, he met people from around the world, and ended up in unexpected, freewheeling conversations in which theatre was never mentioned. It just didn’t come up, as he describes.

“I’m 56 now, and I spent three days walking with a couple of 25-year-old Parisians, French kids with sexy accents,” he laughs. “On the three day, Nico said ‘so you work in a theatre or something’. And I laughed, ‘something like that’” And that was it. As you discover in his book, “we talked about life and love, challenges, struggles,” not to mention boots, and food, and wine, and where to stay, and the breath-taking views of the ocean. “The first question is why you’re on the Camino…. And everyone else’s reasons for being on the Camino were more interesting than mine.”

“Everyone looks the same; we all look like hikers; we’re all wearing the same costume.”

The Camino de Santiago has Catholic resonances, to be sure, since the route leads to the shrine of the Apostle James in northern Spain. And Garnhum, who grew up Catholic until parting ways with the church and its homophobic cruelties at age 30, isn’t unaware of them. “I can’t pretend being Catholic wasn’t a big part of my life…. I literally brought letters of hate,” Garnhum says of his baggage. “But I came out of it more peaceful,” he says. And “pilgrims” can be as secular in their pilgrim’s progress as they choose. “God never came up once.”

“You can walk the Camino for a holiday,” he says. “But I don’t know that anyone can walk it and not feel a true magic power…. There’s something about the people, the gathering, the walking outside with the most gorgeous views. And you stop in a village and have the best Spanish food and wine. And then you wake up and do it again the next day. And all you want to do is start walking….”

“And the happiest part of it, a lesson for life, is you don’t know where you’re going. You turn a corner and … surprise! Every step’s a surprise.” He’s remembering walking through a forest alone, then up cobblestone stairs, and then o my god, a little town square that’s a movie set. What just happened?”

And speaking of surprises, there are the comedies that he’s been doing in his new life as a freelance director since he left the Grand. The last times Garnhum was in Edmonton to direct, a couple of decades ago, he did beautiful Citadel productions of To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. Now, he’s having fun figuring out how to make sets fall over and sabotage a mystery in The Play That Goes Wrong. “If you’d said to me, in 20 years you’ll come back to direct this crazy, wild, weird, wacky play I’d have said ‘no chance; I do heart-breaking!'” he laughs.

“I’m finding I love (comedies) more than I ever thought possible, the joy of being in an audience watching people laugh…. It’s funny and  I want it to be beautiful!” He pauses. “In theatre, I’ve always been unofficially heading toward beauty. Now I’m coming out, officially doing that!”

Garnhum will be talking about his Camino experience (and his book) at the Stanley Milner Library downtown, Tuesday at 7 p.m., as part of an ongoing book tour hosted by the Edmonton chapter of the non-profit Canadian Company of Pilgrims. The Play That Goes Wrong runs on the Citadel mainstage July 6 to August 4. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.