Anna MacKay-Smith is an accomplished actor, director and teacher. Grappling with her own transition, she uses theatre to create community and support others as they consider who they are.

HER HOME IN TORONTO . . . 6:30 p.m.

Chicken Shish Kebab, Rice, Greek Salad, Tzatziki, Babaganoush with Pita, Spanakopita and Baklava.

THE CONVERSATION

Anna MacKay-Smith has played most of the roles she has coveted as surely as she has helped others step out of the roles they were stuck in and into the next phases of their lives. She describes herself as a woman in transition and knows that she is not alone.

Aware of her tendency to stand just outside the communities she has created as a teacher and a director, it was with her “MOMs”, the women who participated in The Musings on Motherhood Project, that she allowed herself to join the group.

The MOMs are members of the Uxbridge community who spent a year writing their stories about motherhood. Anna guided the women through the writing process, compiled their stories and selected at least one from each of the women to be performed on stage. She cast the women to perform each others’ stories, an enormous risk for a group of women who did not consider themselves writers, or performers.

Not only did Anna allow herself participate in the many, many social gatherings the cast held, she led them deeper into their own stories by sharing her own.  It is a view of leadership that is as unconventional in the theatre community, as it is in most parts of society. Even Anna did not realize the impact her story would have.

She spoke about the daughter she had when she was fifteen. Sent away to Toronto to birth the baby, by the time she returned to Ottawa, her daughter had been adopted and Anna had only her stretch marks and a newfound uncertainty about her body to mark the event. It would be decades later, after raising another five children, separating from their father and birthing The MOM Project, that Anna would grapple with her angst about her body on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

She completed the pilgrimage despite the fact that she was not in the least prepared, amazed that the body she had so neglected still carried her through. She has since found the daughter she had as a teenager, saying, “she’s fabulous. She’s just a lovely, lovely person. She’s just perfect.”

Anna adds, “We’ve been so lucky. We had to wait a long time. It’s answered questions for her. And I was able to have closure on something that’s troubled me my whole life. It’s a happy ending.”

Anna is fully aware that there are many types of endings, both on stage and off. The M.O.M. Project was followed by The AhMen Project and The Women In Transition Project (W.I.T.).  The heartbreak she is nursing is not the amicable end of her twenty five year marriage. In fact, she and her former husband separated so amicably that their story was published in Cate Cochran‘s book Reconcilable Differences: Marriages End; Families Don’t. A radio documentary made from the tape of their story was just recently re-aired on CBC Radio.

What pains Anna is the abrupt end of her work with a group of former street women recovering from drug addictions in a Toronto shelter. She had been working with the women to write their stories, noting that she was not just cutting and pasting email files, but painstakingly transcribing the women’s words from the handwritten copies they had entrusted to her. Though Anna had expressed concern about the lack of funding for the project from the outset, the work continued while the shelter staff hoped for grant funding that ultimately did not materialize. Anna offered to continue on spec, but the project was terminated.

She says, “It is still raw. I just felt sick about it. We’d promised them and they’re women who’ve had a lot taken from them. These women are remarkable. Their stories are heartbreaking and funny and full of hope.” They are also stories that are seldom talked about and almost never told by the women who live them.

The stories and the integrity of the women telling them are paramount to Anna. She says, “A lot of these women had been prostitutes and in jail and they were good people. With their addictions, they had gone into a place that was just a nightmare.”

The premature end of the project is difficult for a number of reasons. Anna is committed to building communities among the people she works with, a well thought out and intentional approach that marks her apart. While the prevailing wisdom when she was training as an actor was to tear people down and reshape them as the teacher deemed appropriate, Anna uses her skills to build people up as they see fit.

Anna explains, “My talent is to have people trust me and I do genuinely fall in love with the people I work with. It was also about my talents of loving people and being compassionate and helping and changing people in a way that they want to be changed. ”

Whether as a teacher or director, she loves seeing the look in people’s eyes when they really understand an idea. The creativity to pass on the information in a way that they understand and the willingness to take the time to do it sets Anna apart.

She says, “I realized I could make a difference in people’s lives because I care. I like people and I like to make a difference to them. Then I also have these arts that I can use to make that difference.”

More difficult for Anna than making a difference is making a living. It has been a long time since she subscribed to thinking that her talent be used in the service of a career for her own benefit.  She suggests it is a natural part of maturing to realize that your talents are best used to serve others.  While Anna sees and creates many opportunities to help others through the arts, like many talented artists it is difficult indeed to create a steady income.

Most of Anna’s best loved and longest running endeavours generate much greater impact than income.  Her Motley Theatre Company has done play readings on the last Sunday of every month for over eight years. A committed group of regulars and many fresh faces come to hear the actors Anna has drawn to deliver the readings.

Anna understands community, carefully building it wherever she goes. It is a talent and an effort, as she notes when she explains that she lives and works in Toronto because it was simply too hard to start over elsewhere. She can describe her intentional approach directing a company or teaching a class, but the family links she maintains and the friendships she nurtures suggest she is as consistent in her personal life as she is known to be professionally.

The woman who had mixed feelings about standing alone in the parking lot after one of her greatest triumphs on the Uxbridge stage has transitioned into a woman who can choose with equal skill to stand on her own or as a part of a group.   She is well aware of the image some people have of what she was, but she is even more aware of who she is. It is that awareness and candour that has women and men ready to leap with her.

Anna knows, “It’s the best thing about acting. It’s not real life. You can be who you want to be.”  Few indeed have Anna’s awareness of what this can mean for women who are looking to be true to who they are in real life.  Through theatre, she shows them that their own lives are their best role yet. And they can trust her because she lives her life accordingly.

STILL DIGESTING

Fear of high ropes courses and depreciating comments about her body aside, Anna is a woman who is built to fly. And like so many the brightest among us, she has spent the most significant part of her considerable energies helping others take off.  She has already emailed me to suggest other people she could put me in contact with to continue my writing.

Anna embodies all of what she loves about working with women. She is generous to a fault, as eager to share her hard earned wisdom as she is her triumphs. It is not lost on her that while the mass media continues to churn out images of femininity hallmarked by vulnerable, young women made all the more susceptible by the fleeting nature of their tiny statures and youthful prettiness, Anna and her friends work to create their own roles.

They are witty and wise and gorgeous, equally skilled in the internal machinations that move us on film and the external work that reaches all the way to the back row of a theatre. Nonetheless, they struggle to find casting directors who want them and men who can match them, just as they are coming to realize the full extent of their worth.

They are life size in every way, with a depth that we could all do well to emulate. These women recognize the strength it takes to be vulnerable and the courage it requires to ask even more of yourself than you do of those who would follow you.

Impactful in the many roles she has moved through in her life, Anna is no longer the woman whose husband once offered to buy her champagne for actually managing to say no to a request for her time.  Anna is her own best company now, laughing that when women make themselves that busy there is probably something in the marriage that needs to be looked at. It is trademark Anna humour.

Anna’s youngest daughter leaves the table after dinner, already well versed in these stories. She is also transitioning, living with Anna while she establishes herself as an actor. Anna marvels at how much farther ahead her daughter is than she was at that age and we wonder how the world will change as her daughter moves through it.

In an industry that can be very much about image, accomplished in a craft that makes illusion believable, Anna is the real thing. Her secret is that she cares. And that willingness to be vulnerable is her greatest strength.