Friendship at play, literally, on Theatre Aquarius stage

Barry Flatman and Jeffrey Braunstein quite at home in ‘Jonas and Barry in the Home,’ for special reason

In acting, as in life, when you play a role that is far outside your “type” and quite beyond the draw of your lived experience, it is called a “stretch,” because that’s what you have to do to bring it off convincingly.

You might think that, for Jeff Braunstein and Barry Flatman, being cast to play Jonas (Barry) and Barry (Jeff ) would involve minimal elasticity.

After all, the play, “Jonas and Barry in the Home,” by Hamilton’s own Norm Foster, on now at Theatre Aquarius, is about a friendship between two men and Barry and Jeffrey are not only friends in real life, they’re best friends.

But in the play, when we meet Jonas and Barry for the first time, they are doing the same — meeting each other for the very first time.

For Barry and Jeff, that is a stretch indeed, a 43-year stretch, 43 years being the distance they’ve put between the fine aged wine that their friendship has become now and the rough theatrical grape stomping in which it began.

Those beginnings? Well, we have to imagine ourselves back into the Jurassic mists of the year 1970, a time even before Pet Rocks.

As Jeff puts it, “The covered wagons were still coming through.”

Barry and Jeff had signed up for the questionable honour of working together at Toronto Workshop Productions, on something called “The Pied Piper,” a play ripped, as they say, from the headlines of the period around the FLQ crisis in Quebec.

I say “questionable” because still, as Barry and Jeff talk about it now, the harrowing edginess and stressful excitement of the experience gets communicated in their telling and you hear a kind of wince in their voices.

“It was five days a week, endless hours each day, for four weeks,” says Barry, “and he (George Luscombe, the director) was cutting five people a day from the group. It was like basketball tryouts.”

Luscombe had started with a pool of 450 auditioning actors, winnowed that down to 32 who got put through the teeth of the process and when it came down to the buzzer, so to speak, there were only seven left standing, Jeff and Barry among them.

It was, they says now, amazing. George Luscombe, a tough but brilliant taskmaster, “was a legendary director of the times,” says Jeff, “and we came out of it best friends.”

Grape stomping, indeed. Sometimes the most difficult obstetrics produce the best births.

For a time, Barry and Jeff even lived together. And when Jeff married Maya, Barry was one of only two or three people at their very small wedding. You can actually feel the friendship in their words as they talk.

Barry shares season’s tickets to the Maple Leafs with Jeff’s son Paul. “I keep them (the season’s tickets) in the hope that I will one day see the Leafs win the Stanley Cup, live.” And Satan’s wearing an overcoat cuz hell has frozen over. Just kidding.

They get together at least two or three times a year in a friend group they’re part of called “Men Cooking For Men.” Stephen Brunt, the famous Hamilton writer, is part of it.

As close as they’ve been all these years — 43 and counting — Theatre Aquarius’s “Jonas and Barry in the Home” is the first time the two have appeared on stage together since that fateful workshopping and production in 1970.

When they learned they would be doing it together, they were over the moon ... s of Jupiter.

For Barry, who moved to Hamilton in 2010s, there was an added joy. “It’s my hometown debut! It only took me ’til I’m 73.”

And how is it going? “We’ve had standing ovations every night,” says Barry. “It (the play) is funny as hell and a good deal of crying too, but that’s because of my acting,” says a charmingly self-deprecating Jeffrey.

It is a terrific vehicle for them. Jonas, played by Barry, is a gregarious, loquacious stage actor who moves into the seniors home where Barry, played by Jeff, has already been settled in, shuffling around in his slippers, narrow in his habits and his outlook and keeping to himself.

The whole thing has come about, they say, thanks to Theatre Aquarius director Mary Francis Moore, who has worked before with Jeff and his wife, Maya, and sought them out deliberately for the roles, largely because of the lore of their much-storied friendship.

“We’re flying,” says Barry, of the joy of the production and working with what he calls a great crew and company and cast mate, not only in Jeff but, they both add, in their costar Anna Chatterton, who plays Barry’s daughter.

“But we have to stay always on the front foot,” says Barry. “The energy and concentration. But you have to jump in with no fear. It’s a thing of big faith.” Like believing in the Leafs.

And like friendship itself. Energy, no fear, focus, front foot.

No matter how seasoned it is, friendship always deserves to be approached as something brand new. And it’s always a stretch or how else do we get our arms around each other?

On at Theatre Aquarius until Saturday, Oct. 14.

For more, visit theatreaquarius.ca.