by AMY BARRATT

Alison Darcy has been acting since the age of eight, so at 31 you could say she's paid her dues and deserves to know where her next meal is coming from. Thankfully, Montreal's two permanent English theatres will both be helping fill her larder in the coming season.

It was recently announced that Darcy will direct a new Montreal play at the Centaur. Real Estate by Allana Harkin is a late addition to the theatre's season, replacing Michel Tremblay's The Driving Force, originally scheduled for the November slot. (Centaur still hopes to mount that show at a later date under the direction of longtime Tremblay collaborator André

Brassard.)

"Just a couple of weeks ago," Darcy says, "[Artistic Director Gordon McCall] called me from Australia. I didn't know what was coming. He explained the change to the season and talked about the new play. I thought maybe he was going to ask me to work on it as dramaturge, or maybe to act... When he said, ‘How would you like to direct it?' I think I just laughed. I said, ‘You're kidding, right?'"

It's not that Darcy hasn't directed before, or received good reviews for her work - she has - but that she is more accustomed to directing in do-it-yourself situations. "The wildest thing about this is going to be having a team behind me. I'll really just have to direct, instead of an hour before the show going around with a roll of duct tape taping the set together and praying that it holds."

Despite Darcy's modesty, this isn't such a great leap for her. She did, after all, act as assistant director to Maurice Podbrey on the Centaur's 2003 production of Copenhagen.

In February of 2006, Darcy gets her shot at one of the iconic parts for actresses in the Western world: Nora in Ibsen's A Doll House. Peter Hinton, newly appointed artistic director of the National Arts Centre, will direct his own adaptation of the play at the Segal Theatre at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts.

When I ask Darcy if she is obsessed with this gig, she says "I am," but instead of talking about her own starring role, she blurts out, "Clare Coulter's in it! I mean I can't believe it!" It seems she has been a devotee of this Stratford actress's work ever since the early '90s when Coulter crossed Canada performing Wallace Shawn's The Fever.

In the spring of 2006, Darcy will be back at Centaur, this time on stage reprising her leading role in Bye Bye Baby. Elyse Gasco's adaptation for the stage of her own short stories was a triumph for Imago Theatre last season.

But all of this is still in the future. When I talked to Darcy recently, she was excited to start work on Speak Easy, with SaBooge, the Montreal-based, internationalist company that created such imaginative works as Hatched and Fathom. The latter, which debuted a year ago at Montreal's New Classical Theatre Festival (NCTF), was recently featured in New York City's Ice Factory Festival.

Darcy says she instantly got along with the core members of SaBooge when she met them through connections in the theatre community. "I felt we had similar ideas about exploring aspects of theatre and style, looking at philosophy and thinking patterns, and just blowing it all open."

Their collective creation Speak Easy will premiere September 1 at this year's NCTF. If the show ends up having a future in other parts of the world, that would jibe very well with Darcy's current goal of "getting international."

About the upcoming year, Darcy is feeling, "Incredibly lucky. The coolest thing about it is how many great people I get to work with."

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