It’s not every day you get home from a long day at school, flop on the couch, flip on the TV, and see your prof.
But that happens all the time for Theatre and English Professor Jerry Wasserman’s students. They’re just as likely to catch him in an episode of The X-Files, or Battlestar Galactica — or on the silver screen — as they are to see him in class.
Ever since he moved to Vancouver from his hometown New York City in 1972, Wasserman has been living out what he calls his “parallel career.”
By day, he’s a prize-winning professor and a respected academic. The rest of the time, he’s hard at play in “Hollywood North,” Vancouver’s booming film industry, where he’s got more than 200 acting credits to his name. “It’s been great having this dual life,” Wasserman says, beaming his megawatt smile. “I’m the luckiest person I know.”
Sure, his work as an actor has seen him consort with celebrities like Will Smith and Ethan Hawke, but he’s adamant that teaching is no bit part in his career.“I love teaching,” he says. “At best, it’s this kind of ridiculously ideal job where you get to talk about interesting things to interested and interesting people. And someone pays you for it? I mean, what could be better than that?”
The classroom, to his mind, is a kind of stage in its own right — especially when it comes to Monday morning survey courses, where students fight to keep their eyelids open. “I figure it’s my job that a) the students stay awake, and b) they stay engaged,” Wasserman says. “And that’s an actor’s skill.”
Acting skills he has in spades, but he says the class-as-theatre analogy has its limits. “There’s a fine line between upstaging your material and utilizing those skills to maximize students’ engagement with the subject at hand.”
It seems to be working — UBC honoured Wasserman with a Killam Teaching Prize in 1998 and the Dorothy Somerset Award in Performance and Development in Visual and Performing Arts in 2005.
Trained as a 20th Century English and dramatic literature specialist at Cornell University, Wasserman became deeply involved in that university’s theatre scene. When he came to Vancouver to teach canonical British writers like Beckett, Woolf, and Conrad in the Department of English, he soon started acting and lecturing on Canadian theatre. “The field of Canadian drama studies was wide open, it was literally brand-new,” says Wasserman, who recalls that at the time he was literally able to read every play ever published in Canada. “I came in right on the ground-floor of a new discipline.”
He became a leading expert in the field, publishing among other things the book Modern Canadian Plays (Talonbooks: 1985), an anthology that has since become the major textbook in the field.
Extremely thankful to work at a university that has supported his double life, Wasserman equally credits lady luck for allowing him to be in the right place at the right time.
“I wake up in the morning sometimes and I have to pinch myself, you know, because I’m living the dream.”
