Fonthill native and Dora Award winning actress Claire Armstrong explores the dark depths of marginalization as Sandy in the iconic Canadian play.
Growing up in Fonthill, Claire Armstrong was no stranger to the arts. She began playing piano at age ten, and started receiving voice lessons two years later. The stage was not far behind, and it wasn’t long before she was performing in a number of different productions at a variety of local venues.
“I started doing community theatre after school in the evenings with Garden City Productions in St. Catharines,” recalls Armstrong. “So I did Fiddler on the Roof and all kinds of musicals with them, and in the summer time I also did Shakespeare in the Vineyard. That was really great, and they did really great professional level productions that gave me a lot of excellent experience.”
After high school, Armstrong moved to Toronto to study Theatre at York University. Since her graduation, the classically trained pianist and singer has developed an impressive resume in both theatre and film, performing in numerous productions across the country.
This spring the 29-year-old Armstrong is once again in the spotlight, this time at Toronto’s Factory Theatre in a production of the Iconic Canadian play The Crackwalker.
The play centres on an Indigenous woman and her friends suffering from mental illness, abuse, drugs, alcoholism, and violence. Armstrong plays the role of Sandy, a woman trapped in an abusive, alcohol-fueled relationship who wants to leave but is afraid to abandon her best friend Theresa, a mentally challenged woman with problems of her own.
“Sandy is really tough on the outside, but really vulnerable on the inside,” said Armstrong. “She’s also very loyal to Theresa and she’s trying to figure out a way to understand how life turned out this way.”
Amidst this dysfunction, the characters are perpetually haunted by The Crackwalker, a homeless native man that embodies social and personal failure and despair
“The play examines subject matter that is not often seen on the stage and stories that don’t often get told,” explained Armstrong. “The characters are all people who are marginalized members of society; the people who get forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected, and are essentially abandoned by the system.”
To play such complex roles, Armstrong says that actors must find the part of the character that resonates with them: “There’s always some piece of the character that feels closest to you as a person. And then you sort of build it from there, and try to learn to empathise and really love the character.”
The Crackwalker is part of Factory Theatre’s Naked Season, which aims to strip works down to their essentials: text, actors, audience, and space. The play is on now, and will run until April 10.
