With millions of Canadians stuck at home, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s nationally televised warning about “speaking moistly” was so likely to send a wave of memes crashing across social media, even Trudeau himself seemed to realize he was going to need a life jacket.

It was the perfect storm, really.

With millions of Canadians stuck at home, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s nationally televised warning about “speaking moistly” was so likely to send a wave of memes crashing across social media, even Trudeau himself seemed to realize he was going to need a life jacket.

Auto-tune remixes and faux Canadian Heritage Moments followed as expected but, if anyone can truly relate to what Trudeau was talking about, it’s the stage actors from the Stratford Festival whose Ps and Ks are known to produce a hefty amount of spittle in the heat of the moment.

A few of them even came together this week to offer their own public service announcement about the dangers of moist speaking, putting their own spit – sorry, spin – on Trudeau’s message and joining in on a viral meme that’s offered Canadians one of the pandemic’s more light-hearted moments.

A video posted to Vimeo Monday (vimeo.com) captures the likes of Andrea Rankin, Jani Lauzon and Andre Sills, among others, delivering some important public-health information as moistly as possible. The video’s editor, ted witzel, an artistic associate for the Stratford Festival’s Laboratory, who is also supposed to co-direct Wolf Hall this summer, said the project was a silly idea he wanted to throw together in between watching old episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the current Netflix phenomenon, Tiger King.

“It’s so nice to see people who are normally incredibly intelligent and powerful on stage going and goobering on themselves,” witzel said with a laugh, adding there’s a goofy side to the Festival’s actors that audiences often don’t get to see. “So much of theatre is just messing around until you land on something great.”

The inside joke is that theatre acting can often be “a moist line of work,” as witzel put it. 

“That’s where the whole impulse for it came from,” he said. “If you’re up in the front row of the Festival Theatre and the scene is well lit with a good side light, you can see a couple good spit takes. That’s what it means to do it right.”

Unfortunately, like almost everything else, theatre is on hold. The Stratford Festival has officially cancelled performances through May. Some of witzel’s colleagues have stayed in Stratford, he said, while others have returned home to various places across the country. He’s currently in Toronto coping with the sudden lack of theatre, much like many other Canadians who have suddenly found themselves without work.

“We (theatre workers) spend so much time in social spaces and collective spaces we actually crave solitude, but this is more solitude than we asked for,” witzel said. “We’ve all cleaned our houses. We’re all out of flour.”

The video – From Stratford, Moistly – came together over the long weekend, witzel said, a cultural contribution he wasn’t expecting to make, but one he hopes brings a smile to people’s faces during an otherwise difficult period.

“It was in a spirit of generosity and humour,” he said, emphasizing that there are no political undertones to be found. “It was something that we could point to that I think Canada collectively witnessed.”

By Chris Montanini for www.stratfordbeaconherald.com.

Photo: Qasim Khan.