Open-Ended Run, An

An Open-Ended Run
by Layne Coleman
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Brandon Fick
$22.95 ISBN 9781779400260

Layne Coleman’s An Open-Ended Run is a deep dive into one man’s love, grief, ecstasy, failings, and triumphs. The entire range of human emotion is on display in this short memoir. Dramatic and morally complex, the book traces Coleman’s life from his fundamentalist upbringing in rural Saskatchewan to becoming a noted actor, playwright, and theatre director in Toronto. It is an intensely felt love story between Coleman and French Canadian arts critic and novelist, Carole Corbeil, whose premature death from cancer in 2000 upended his life. In wake of that loss, Coleman had to navigate being a widower and single father, and by far, the relationship with his daughter Charlotte is the most touching part of the memoir. Yet he does not skimp out on less savoury memories of sexual encounters, questionable decisions, drug and alcohol addiction, physical health challenges, even his own sense of vanity. Reading an aging actor’s memoir may not sound like most people’s idea of fun, but I assure you, if you give An Open-Ended Run a shot, you will be shocked and moved in equal measure.

Truly, this is one of the most candid memoirs I have ever read. With little reticence, a result of years of hard self-examination, Coleman describes periods of promiscuity and clandestine drinking; most memorably, visiting lap dancers in Toronto’s seedier sectors while his wife Carole was dying of cancer. At times, the book can seem like a series of confessions typical of a bohemian thespian from a certain era – a chapter set in the early 1970s stages an encounter between Coleman and a “blonde Nordic beauty” as though it is an erotic film – but it is much more. Coleman’s writing does not judge his past selves, nor does it try to justify. There is a deepening of character as time progresses. The tone of each chapter always matches Coleman’s current age and milieu. After Carole’s death, Coleman has a much younger girlfriend who teaches him “to look deeper into why people act the way they do.” He is forced to ask himself difficult questions about shame and pleasure, even his infatuation with pleated skirts, “a real Bible school fantasy.” His “deeply religious” mother and stern father who had his back literally broken by his farm – “part of [Coleman’s] inheritance” – may have driven him into the world of theatre, but they never really left him. Saskatchewan never really left him. As he reflects on his transformative yet imperfect relationship with Carole, he says: “Carole had seen the lost farm in my heart. That was what made her take a chance with me. The agony of the lost farm paralleled her family’s pain. I carried my dad’s hurt; for her, it was her parents’ broken marriage and a kind of divorce that children never recover from.”

This book is not necessarily an examination of Canadian theatre in the late twentieth century, but through one man’s personal recollections, you do see the vanity and insecurity inherent to being an artist. At the beginning of his acting career, Coleman lamented not being an American, “comfortable carrying a gun and flashing a smile,” fearing people “would learn that I was from the middle of nowhere, some desolate corner of some desolate province… destined to be a clown, cast forever on the lowest rung of the artists’ food chain.” But in the very next sentence he says: “Still, I aspired to be a tragedian.” And ultimately he does, fulfilling his hunger for a cultural life by moving to the “Big Smoke,” Toronto, and playing the role of a lifetime, Hamlet, in a production of the play at Theatre Passe Muraille. This long chapter is one of the highlights of the book, as it not only chronicles the thrill and the agony of taking on such a storied role, but it recounts the beginning of Coleman and Corbeil’s relationship, while she was still with Clarke Rogers, the director of Hamlet. Life imitates art here, and Coleman captures those long ago emotions viscerally, just as he captures later events – Charlotte getting sick with malaria on a trip to Ghana, opening night on a provocative play written by Charlotte, his own triple bypass – with the right balance of aplomb and vulnerability. In the end, after all he has been through, it is Charlotte, who the book is dedicated to, that emerges as Coleman’s anchor and guiding light.

An Open-Ended Run’s easily devoured narrative is not slight. There are vivid scenes and emotions I will remember for a long time, scenes and emotions worthy of great novels and great tragedies. Which makes sense, because every real life contains the elements of great and tragic art. What An Open-Ended Run shows through the life of Layne Coleman is that we aren’t bound by past narratives or limiting roles. We can write our own endings.

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