Visually impaired playwright, actor brings touring solo play to Steinbach stage

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This article was published 23/02/2023 (449 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As far as multitasking goes, it doesn’t get much harder than painting a group portrait while acting in front of a live audience, but that’s exactly what Bruce Horak will do in Steinbach next week.

The playwright and actor brings his one-person show, Assassinating Thomson, to the SRSS Theatre on Tuesday, Feb. 28.

Horak is making 24 rural stops in five weeks for the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s regional tour, which has returned from a pandemic hiatus.

To say the play is ambitious would be an understatement.

“I tell my story of how I became a visually impaired visual artist, and I paint a portrait of the whole audience, and I also solve the mystery of who killed Tom Thomson,” Horak said in a phone interview.

The painting will be auctioned, and the proceeds donated to Canadian Guide Dogs for the Blind.

Horak, 48, found fame during the pandemic with a role in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, donning heavy makeup to play Lt. Hemmer, a blind, albino alien with telepathic powers). But the stage remains his favourite place to act.

“The response in theatre is immediate,” he said. “The adrenaline that you get from that live connection with an audience, you just can’t beat it. And people are super happy to be back in the theatre.”

As a child, Horak lost 90 percent of his vision to retinal cancer, but that didn’t stop him from pursuing his dual passions of painting and acting.

His father, an amateur cartoonist, inspired Horak to make comic books and take art classes in high school. A school performance by a travelling theatre troupe prompted him to give up visual art and become an actor.

Horak studied theatre at Mount Royal University then began writing and performing children’s theatre in his hometown of Calgary. Thirteen years on the Fringe Festival circuit followed, including a 2006 stop in Steinbach with the Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

He returned to painting in 2011 when a friend asked Horak to express how he sees.

“We sat together and I tried to interpret the way that I see in acrylic paint,” he said.

Horak now paints portraits for clients in person and online.

“It’s the best face time there is,” he said.

Horak said he feels a kinship with Thomson, who died on a canoe trip in Ontario in 1917. The 39-year-old’s painter’s death was ruled an accidental drowning, but other theories, including murder, have proliferated ever since.

Horak said he likes Thomson’s work ethic and love of landscape.

“He didn’t take up painting seriously until he was in his early 30s, which was how old I was,” Horak said. “He managed to mix all of his great loves together, and that’s certainly something that I’ve tried to do.”

Horak said he hopes his performance inspires people to pick up a paintbrush.

“That’s the sheer joy of doing the show, is seeing people opening up to the notion that they could do it too.”

Tickets are available from the Steinbach Arts Council. Adults are $28 and students are for $12.