No, he didn’t actually jam a Mustela putorius furo — the Latin name for ferret — into his nasal passage, but it makes about as much sense as dressing up Shakespearian characters in floppy ears and bushy tails and making them do the bunny hop in one of the bard’s most gruesome plays — Titus Andronicus.
But that’s the world the 28-year-old UVIC and McRoberts grad lives in during a few months of the year as he focuses his energies and wit on the fringe festival circuit, which this year had him perform a self-revealing, one-man show across the country, and a bard parody he penned which debuts next week in Vancouver.
Raised by British-born parents, Wade was fed a steady diet of off the wall humour — the likes of Spike Milligan and plenty of Monty Python — and used that perspective to colour his creative side.
“I think if you asked me when I was six what I wanted to be it would have been either a singer or a comic book writer,” Wade says between sips of his mocha latté at Diplomat Bakery in Steveston.
Instead, he embarked on a path towards writing and the performing arts.
“Over the course of three years in high school, I wrote a show called High School Noirewhich was a detective-type story set in a high school featuring detective who just rambles on about how life is like metaphors,” Wade says. “Since I’d never seen a noir film, it was based strictly off cartoons that mocked noir films.”
The production never made it to the stage while Wade was at McRoberts, but it was revived a few years later when the piece won at The Vancouver Playwright’s Competition.
“It got an honourable mention and was performed there. And in the same week a friend of mine from high school returned to McRoberts to direct a show and performed it there, as well.
“That sparked in me the need to write more.”
After high school, Wade says he literally flipped a coin to choose between writing or studying theatre at UVIC.
Writing was the choice, although after two years Wade added the theatre side.
“Now I have both degrees,” he says, adding in a wistfully mocking manner the career he’s chosen doesn’t require a certified stamp of academic qualifications.
Between fringe festival tours that’s left him with about half a dozen part-time, flexible schedule jobs, ranging from leading tours at Science World and the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, to tending the bar at Gateway Theatre, and serving as a mock patient who gets poked and prodded by herds of medical students.
“It’s an uncomfortable day when you’ve got 24 people all reaching under your ribs, trying to determine if your liver has grown or shrunk,” he says with a laugh.
But, when he’s on stage, it provides an opportunity to share certain aspects of his life in a cathartic manner. That comes across in his one-man show called The Most Honest Man in the World,where Wade discusses his enduring quest for candour while constructing a working lie detector on stage.
It’s a process — an unscripted, 70-minute show with cue cards to keep him on track — which often leaves him feeling vulnerable, although not in an unpleasant way.
“I’m a bit of an odd duck in that being on stage is a safe place,” he says. “For some reason, being alone and talking to a bunch of people I’ve never met before is a place where I feel more safe emotionally.
“That sorta tells me I had that storyteller gene in me, because I’d much rather be feeling those things on stage, rather than home alone in my room.”
As for where ferrets up your nose — a song from a 1960’s British radio program called I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, which launched John Cleese, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor — and bunny hopping Shakespearian figures fit in, Wade says it comes from his Monty Python side of his brain, which produced Titus: The Light and Delightful Musical Comedy of Titus Andronicus,which is part of the Vancouver Fringe Festival lineup Sept. 10 to 20.
The idea came to him during a production of Titus Andronicusfor the Victoria Shakespeare Society.
“As I was performing in the show, it struck me how absurd a lot of the story is,” Wade says. “It’s very compelling, dramatic and tense. You feel for these characters. But at the same time, it has plot lines where someone decided the best way to convince people not to go to war, is to dress up in silly costume and pretend they are the demon of revenge.”
In the version Wade wrote, Shakespeare struggles to fix the show and make it more audience-friendly by transforming it into a musical comedy.
The festival’s website describes it as “a dark struggle for power and revenge — but why slit a throat when you can sing and dance, right?
