Soulpepper Founding Member William Webster talks about returning to the role of George Aaronow and reuniting with the full original cast from last year's production of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Michael Murphy: Has anything changed in how you're approaching the play the second time around?

William Webster: We have to start from the beginning again. As actors, we have all changed in the last year; some people now have children that they did not have before, some people have more or less money than they had before - life, health, all of that stuff. So what I am excited about is beginning anew even though we have a shorter rehearsal period having already performed it before.

The other thing that excites me about tackling the play again is simply the textual music of the script. It is a blisteringly difficult script to learn, it has shape and size in the sense of a string quartet, but it has interrupted dialogue that is meticulously written by Mamet. It seems to be about ordinary language in desperate situations, but in order to learn it you have to learn it like a piece of music.

Like Pinter, he puts in pauses or long pauses and he puts in ellipses in the text. And you really have to learn those and learn what the differences are. On the one hand you have to learn it as it is on the page, but the acting thing is to dismiss that so it seems to be created in the moment.

MM: Has anything about the audience reactions changed the way you see the play or the way you will approach it again?

WW: There was a huge range of reactions. I think that Mamet has brilliantly created the vulgarities that we actually don't hear in real life. To me what was shocking was how mature our audience was about that, they understood that by-and-large. It is part of the music of a particular group of salesman of a particular time, without any censorship. There are no women to moderate the male "jock" sensibility.

Generally speaking our audience was with it, and those invectives, those vulgarities are there to reconnect you with the visceral quality of the play, the shock of the play. So the play, which might be considered a satire - in the most Swiftian kind of way - on the American system, is a metaphor for the worst excesses of capitalism: myself at all costs and screw the rest.

A number of business people came to see the show and really responded in a way that has almost never happens. It was really thrilling how many new people who had never been to Soulpepper really responded, and when we had question-and-answer periods they were packed.

MM: There is this idea that the play is actually an allegory for acting; that there is a parallel between the artifice of sales and the artifice of acting. Would you say so?

WW: Actors are not innocent. What we try to do is find that aspect of ourselves that relates - that will give us an optic on the characters. You're always putting on that persona, whether it's to sell a piece of land in Florida or to go onstage as Hamlet. Why I find acting so fascinating is because I'm allowed to go into quite dark or scary or heroic territories, none of which are really me, but which are parts and components of me. In that sense it is a very private work, but if you happen to be playing a part to which you are particularly sympathetic and non-judgmental, you can share that story with the audience.

As an actor, you just have to go for the jugular or whatever the essence of your character is in this heightened circumstance - this circumstance of selling, or success, of betrayal, and of criminal activity. The challenge always in a great play is how you really find the shock of what the first audience might have possibly felt. It's true whether you're doing Shakespeare or Shaw. It's very difficult to replicate that shock because we are so used to it, unfortunately, with what we see on television and on the Internet and on film. It's just hard to shock.

MM: What excites you about performing Mamet's work?

WW: I love doing this play viscerally, forget all the social and political ramifications, I love doing this play because it's juicy, and it goes so fast. Mamet has written an epic play about the spiritually dispossessed, just guys on the desert island of the soul. The play is very hot, and there are all different sensibilities in that, being set in Chicago. It's gritty.