Amy Lee still remembers the first words she ever said on stage. “I was seven for my first play and that was Are You My Mother. I played the cat, and I only had one line, which was ‘meow.’”
Amy Lee
But that’s all it took.
Lee, who will be starring in the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People’s production of The Invisible Girl, has been hooked on theatre since she was around four years old.
“My brother was in acting… his class performed, I think it was something from Charlie Brown, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do,” she said.
Since her first performance, Lee, who is turning 27, has been in at least one play a year, every year. As a child, she never quite understood why she loved to be on stage.
“It was more of an instinctual thing. I don’t know that I knew what it was I loved about it, but I knew I loved it,” she said. “As I got older and went to theatre school, I analyzed more why I liked to do it with my adult brain. I love to tell stories, and I love for people to come to the theatre and laugh or cry or think in a way they’ve never thought before.”
In Lee’s Manitoba high school, it wasn’t common for students to go into the arts.
“Not a lot of people, in my grade, at least, went into the arts. I took my sciences up until Grade 12 to keep my options open in case I decided I wanted to go to med school,” Lee said.
But theatre eventually won out.
“I knew that theatre was what I loved to do and that I’d done it forever, but I thought, ‘Can I really do this? Can I really make this my living? It’s always been my passion, but can it be my job as well?’” she said.
“And then I decided that’s what I wanted to do, that I wanted to make that happen.”
This is what brought Lee to York University, where she pursued a bachelor’s degree in theatre and psychology.
While in school, Lee and her friend Heather Marie Annis were approached by Byron Laviolette, a fellow student, to perform in a short skit about clowns in Playground, the university’s student-run fringe festival. The play, a 10-minute sketch called Reflections about Morro and Jasp, two clowns, eventually turned into the creation of Up Your Nose And In Your Toes Productions in 2005, which produces various Morro and Jasp plays.
“We hired a man named Pete Jarvis to do workshops with us in the style of Pachinko clown, so we did that for Reflections. Then we just continued to study with Pete and continued to create shows.”
The production company’s shows have been featured in the Toronto Fringe Festival, including Morro and Jasp do puberty and Morro and Jasp go GREEN, which follow the adventures of two sister clowns played by Annis (Morro) and Lee, who plays Jasp.
“I was excited to try something new,” Lee said about clowning. “I find my clown work really influences everything else I do now… a lot of [clowning] is being really present, really truthful and just acknowledging what’s happening in the moment with the audience.”
Apart from her clowning, Lee also continues to perform in plays like the Invisible Girl, which opens on Oct. 17.
The play follows 10-year-old Ali, played by Lee, who used to be part of a popular clique in her Grade 5 class. When she makes a social mistake, her friends start to ignore her, which forces the character to learn the importance of real friendship.
For Lee, who prepared for the role by reading teen magazines and listening to Justin Bieber music, it wasn’t hard to connect to her character.
“The character I play, Ali, she’s on a journey. It takes her the whole play to figure out what true friendship is and what respect is. She makes mistakes and she learns from those mistakes, so it’s her story that she’s sharing. It’s really on a kid’s level, but it’s also on a human level,” Lee said.
Invisible Girl will be running from Oct. 17 to 23. Tickets are $10 to $20. Call 416-862-2222 or visit lktyp.ca
