Hooked on Hooked

There have been many stories told in strong female voices – Jane Eyre and Emma being two classic examples – but Carolyn Smart, in her poetry collection, Hooked, takes on not just one, but seven historical women and inhabits them brilliantly.

“I enjoyed the process so much of getting outside of my own head,” said Smart. “I had written a lot about my own life. I think I got bored and tired of my own story after I wrote a memoir of my childhood. I thought I was done with that. And it was fun to be able to explore other peoples’ lives for awhile.

“I chose seven women who fascinated me.”

The evolution of Hooked was organic despite Smart’s intention to write poetry with performance potential.

“I was asked to be part of a performance poetry series and I looked at my stuff and I thought, ‘I can’t possibly do this.’ So I thought I might have to write something especially for the event," she said. "And exactly at that time the British murderer, Myra Hindley, died.”

As the “most hated woman in British history,” Smart was terrified by a woman who, with the help of her husband, killed children on the British moors in the early 1960s, but she was also intrigued and inspired by a story so distant from her own.

“I wanted to find out who she was,” explained Smart. “I wanted to get inside her head and move around in there.

“So I decided to write poems from the point of view of these characters, and I started with Myra Hindley, not realizing it was going to take me into a series.”

Smart was so successful at accessing the psyche of each woman that she “had writer’s block for nearly two years” after completing the collection.

“Over time, I have let these people go, amazingly enough,” she said.

Although it seems that she has only passed them on.

“I gave Nicky the manuscript when I had completed it, and I suddenly realized it was working for me as individual performances. But I saw the potential for Nicky to do the entire thing.”

From Zelda Fitzgerald to Unity Mitford and ending with the Canadian of the collection, Elizabeth Smart, Guadagni shows that she is able to change perspectives as quickly as a chameleon changes colour.

“It was as if someone had entered my imagination and put it in front of me as a mirror,” Smart said of the first time she saw Guadagni perform her poems.

It certainly seems that Guadagni has been able to interpret Smart’s characters and depict them as if she had the key to unlock the core of their being, tapping into their struggles, internal conflicts and quirky – and sometimes dangerous – obsessions.

Just as Hooked developed into a cohesive whole, Guadagni is slowly accessing the dark corners of each character’s mind.

“I still feel the text unwrapping for me constantly,” Guadagni said. “There is still an explosion going on in my brain.”

Like Guadagni leaps from artist to murderer to fascist, the Hooked in House project takes her from house to house, enabling her to show her versatility and adaptability as an actor.

“It has actually been put together now in more than 24 homes, including dinner and drinks and snacks," said Smart. "And it moves around. Sometimes she does Zelda Fitzgerald in the bathtub. She did one last night in the bathroom that was so large 24 people could fit into the room.”

Smart may have resurrected these women and then put them back to rest so they could no longer occupy her mind, but Guadagni’s continuous exploration of the subtle intricacies of the characters continues to captivate audiences.

As audience members asked question after question following the performance, it became clear they were hooked on Hooked.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Carolyn Smart's fifth collection of poems, Hooked - Seven Poems, was published in 2009 by Brick Books. An excerpt from her memoir At the End of the Day (Penumbra Press, 2001) won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. She is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and since 1989 she has taught Creative Writing and Contemporary Canadian Poetry at Queen's University.

ABOUT THE ACTOR:

Originally from Montreal, Nicky Guadagni is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and her first job out of theatre school was as Miranda in The Tempest to Paul Scofield’s Prospero in the West End of London.

She’s been nominated for five Gemini awards for her acting on television and won two for Major Crime and Blue Murder. Nicky was a member of the repertory company of actors that starred in the detective TV series Nero Wolfe – performing over a dozen roles. For the CBC she has performed in many radio dramas and read Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers for Between the Covers. She narrated the TV series Birth Stories as well as several documentaries and was one of the stars of the feature film Cube. She wrote and performed in In the Wings based on Carole Corbeil’s book at Theatre Passe Muraille.

She has taught and directed at George Brown College, NTS, and UCDrama at U OF T.