Published July 1 , 2009
By Martin Barry• TLN
PHOTO: Antoine Yared
Chomedey resident George Bekiaris’s theatrical debut wasn’t ordinary by most standards. A graduate in chemical engineering from McGill University, his nine-to-five daytime job also isn’t the usual gig ― waiting tables ― that aspiring actors often fall back on.
A veteran cast member of several theatrical productions staged by a Montreal company known as the Dancing Monkey Theatre, George’s latest role has him playing one of the lead characters in I am I, by playwright Mike Czuba, which opens on July 8 at the Players’ Theatre on McTavish Street downtown.

Kept his day job
“About two years ago I started taking some classes after work and I really haven’t stopped since then,” he said in an interview with the Laval News. “This is my fourth play in the last year or so. Chemical engineering is my job and my bread and butter, but acting is really a passion that I recently found.” Bekiaris started out taking acting classes with theatre teacher Liz Valdez at the Actors Studio of Montreal.
Immediately prior to his current role, he appeared in the Dancing Monkey production of My Child, in which he also played one of the leads. The plot, involving a divorced father who goes to extreme lengths to retain custody of his child, could be described as socially realistic. “This play is unlike anything I’ve ever read before by Mike Czuba,” said Bekiaris.

Praises Czuba
“Mike Czuba did some really great plays in the city last year. This exists on so many different levels. It’s about a man’s struggle with his own self. A lot of us have different facets to our personalities and this play shows different facets of the same man. He’s played by two different actors actually, representing the inner in him between the rational and the desire, all in relation to a woman. There’s part who wants passion, and the other who is rational and more concerned about where he’s going to be in 15 years or 20 years.
“The two parts of him struggle with the third character, the woman in this play, and what they really want out of life basically.” Using deceptively simple language, Czuba, who founded Dancing Monkey Theatre, explores the quagmire where inner voices run rampant, exposing every fear, base instinct and childish need with sharp and ruthless wit. “Right now, today, how do we connect with each other, and more importantly, with ourselves?” he explained.

A ‘sneaky’ work, says Czuba
“We create a persona for each of the roles we play in our daily routine, labels that we inadvertently get caught up in and that confuse us. We know we are more than our masks and want to connect with our deeper selves, and in turn have more meaningful connections with those around us, yet we don’t seem to be able to do that. We can’t reconcile the contradictory pieces of ourselves that don’t fit in.
“We struggle with those grey areas of our psyches, are ashamed of them and try to bury those bits, not realizing that we’re hiding that which makes us unique and also unites us, the very qualities that would enable us to connect.” Czuba playfully refers to his work as “sneaky,” the everyday dialogue disclosing subtle layers of deeper truths and insights, slowly drawing the audience in, peeling away the separation between them and the actors until they merge, becoming “truly connected.”

Audience, actors bonding
As the characters externalize all the thoughts and impulses that monopolize the space between our ears, the twisted, irrational, perverse, even moronic things that everyone is thinking in any given millisecond and that God forbid, anyone should actually hear, the audience memberfs bond with each other and with the actors in a common experience.
“There isn’t a person in the audience who won’t relate on at least one level,” says Czuba. “The play is totally accessible. We demolish the fourth wall as it becomes obvious that I, as an audience member, am the actor and the actor is me. The play reveals us to ourselves. Who’s not up for that?” The Players’ Theatre is located at 3480 McTavish, 3rd Floor. The box office can be reached at (514) 369-6954, or by e-mail at theatredancingmonkey@gmail.com.