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Play. That’s how I describe performing,” says actor and comedian Cynthia Dunsford, who traces her performance career back to childhood. “When I was a kid, we’d play house and we’d play school —those were our two worlds.”
Cynthia’s worlds are more numerous now. She is currently playing three roles in Norm Foster’s Here on the Flightpath at Victoria Playhouse: “a prostitute, a wanna-be singer musical chick, and a woman who broke up with her husband and is rediscovering her sexuality.” These women interact with a guy in the apartment next door (played by Erskine Smith), and help him develop, says Cynthia, “from being a confused man with no direction in his life, to a troubled man with no direction in his life.”
The play has racy moments and innuendoes, but, says Cynthia, audiences love it—“especially the old people. Doing the play, the first five rows are old people—of course, they’re there because they’re deaf.
“When I was with the Drill Queens… we were always afraid to offend ‘the old people,’” laughs Cynthia. “The test would be when my parents saw it. But if they were laughing their holes off, why should other ‘old people’ be different?”
Cynthia herself isn’t old but may be an old soul. She is well-known for channelling senior citizen “Parkdale Doris” on CBC Radio’s Island Morning. “[Doris is] my mother, my aunt, my neighbour, me—and every woman over 65 I’ve ever respected.”
Cynthia says, “When I read the paper or listen to the news…I’m already thinking what Doris is going to be thinking about things. She has her own perspective and opinions. Sometimes I don’t even agree.” The main difference? “Her perspective has a past I just don’t have.”
Cynthia has a clue or two about Doris’s past. “It’s not written down in a book or anything, but I have a backstory. I know what kind of house she has, what kind of husband. She has two grown kids —a son and daughter. They both live away but come home in the summer. She didn’t work outside the home, but her husband did, and now he’s retired…. She walks—she’s a walker. And she plays cards. And takes in what’s going on in her community.” If she has any scandals in her past, Doris is keeping them to herself.
Doris’s future—and Cynthia’s—are both indeterminate. “I just do what I do— I don’t have any idea where I’ll be who I’ll be working with. I just keep saying yes to people,” as long as the material is good.
In a departure from comedy, she recently said “yes” to playing an abused wife opposite Wade Lynch in a film on family violence. “Talk about pretending!” she says. “It was really draining. And in film, you do a scene over and over.” It has opened her up to the possibility of acting in non-comedic roles. “As upsetting as it was, it was also exhilarating and exciting,” she says. It led her to enroll in Megan Follows’s “Acting for the Camera” class at the PEI Conservatory, an amazing experience for her.
To develop her writing, Cynthia has also said “yes” to becoming part of the blogosphere—the global community of writers who post their thoughts to the Internet in Weblogs. “Oh my god,” Cynthia says, “I spend a lot of time writing,” as she thinks about her days’ activities. “But it’s great to have a thought and put it out there. The real reward—and I don’t care what any blogger tells you—is knowing somebody read it.”
Whatever she writes, whatever she performs, Cynthia Dunsford remembers what playing felt like as a kid: “When you’re a kid you’re not afraid who’s watching. You’re not thinking about how much fat you have on your gut,” she says. “I’ll go back to that feeling when I hit a roadblock when I’m acting. You’re back under the stairs, playing house, sitting on ice cream containers.”