In real life, fighting and making love are intimate acts: outside of whoever you're doing them with, no one else exists.

In the theatre, representing either violence or sexuality comes with a set of paradoxes.

During stage combat, your first duty is to your own safety and that of your fellow performers. Your second duty is to make it look like you're trying to hurt them.

Staging love/attraction/sexuality, meanwhile, turns one's most private moments into a PDA.

Actors love to live as fully as possible through their time on stage. In And Bella Sang With Us, I get to deduce, chase, argue, mime, sing, drink, kiss, make jokes, make a fool of myself and others, and perform heroic deeds. I'm a lover, a fighter, a friend, and (as The Wire would have it) "good police".

I knew I'd ease into the fighting slowly, able to bring the aggression only once I'm sure I know the choreography and that no one's going to lose an eye. (I'm lucky in that Sarah May Redmond and I just worked together on He Said It. In fight scenes as in love scenes, trust always helps.)

On the other hand, I was startled to hear from director Sarah Rodgers and her assistant Ian that whenever Simon Webb and I are playing ex-lovers O'Rourke and Harris, our volume drops to a nearly inaudible whisper. As Ian put it: "If this were a film and we had microphones, it would be very steamy!" Simon and I are both stage animals and, once into performance, I doubt we've ever gotten a volume note in our lives. However, this is rehearsal, and this is different. The overt sexual content of this play is pretty mild – it's essentially a buddy cop story set in 1912, after all – but Harris and O'Rourke have a pretty torrid history, even if only the tip of it is currently bobbing above the surface.

I do feel that, particularly when we play lovers with actors who are strangers, there needs to be a period (even one run-through, if the schedule is tight) where it is just for us. We need to create intimacy... because erotic and sexual material, in the context of the theatre, is not generally about exhibitionism. It's not actually a PDA. It's a very private moment... shared.

Not to worry, though, Rodge: now that Simon and I have got the hang of it, we'll bump it up a decibel or forty. Next I need to focus on improving my hand-to-hand... while wearing a long skirt. Good times.

And Bella Sang With Us plays at the Cultch Sept. 9-17. Tickets and more information here.

My comments about intimacy and privacy are obviously not universally applicable: when it comes to the Kardashian family, for example, all bets are off. However, most reality TV stars haven't seen fit to turn their talents to the stage. Yet.

This was the craziest little gig. One week of work on He Said It (written in 1915), part of a double bill of Gertrude Stein plays, along with White Wines. Typical of influential women artists, Stein is someone we often hear about, but seldom hear from. Stein scholar Adam Frank of UBC started with a question: do her plays work? So Adam produced a series of recordings (I did He Said It with Lucia Frangione and composer/musician Dave Chokroun), which he found encouraging enough to gamble on putting a couple of pieces onstage.

Here's what it felt like to spend a week inside the brain of Gertrude Stein: fascinating, frustrating, liberating, flibbertigibbet, a cow. In Adam Frank's arrangement of the text, Sarah May and I loosely took on the roles of Gertrude and her life partner Alice B. Toklas, with Dave as a sort of Narrator/Looming Male Presence. Jimmy Tait – a beloved mainstay of Vancouver theatre, whom I had heard much about but never met – encouraged us to make bold and definite choices about what was going on in the moment, without worrying too much about the whole. So there were little status games and competitions; flirtations and rejections; fears about the outside world, and desperate searches for comfort in the domestic. And there was jazz.

"I was very pleased with embroidery very very pleased with embroidery."

I enjoyed my collaborators immensely. I also learned a great deal from the other company, and from the audience.

White Wines was set to music by Dorothy Chang and tackled by four singers as a blend of choral spoken word and avant-garde opera. Watching them for the first time on opening day, Sarah May and I were reminded of how much of Stein is sonority and swing, and how far you can go by digging into the poetry with precision and verve. The women of White Wines told us that they learned from watching our piece because it sounded like actual conversation – or fragments of many conversations – and we brought a real emotional, psychological dimension to it. I thought Adam could retitle his evening in the style of a dish at a fancy restaurant: "Stein, Two Ways."

The audience for this staged reading – who were these people? The house was packed, and not with a theatre crowd – was vastly different on each of the evenings. Our opening night spectators were giddy and ready to laugh at anything, so the show played as a sophisticated little divertissement. The next night was full of serious people: luckily for us, they felt attentive rather than cold. On instinct, instead of trying to beat the laughs out of them, we just kept plugging into each other: the whole tone of the show became more introspective, vulnerable, and sad (Jimmy and Adam said they much preferred that version). I'm not sure how much of the shift was our doing (second night, settling in) and how much of it was theirs: but the post-show cocktail reception was just as enthusiastic both nights, and these were not theatre people who try to buck you up after opening. As Jimmy said in rehearsal: perform strong clear actions, and people will project onto it whatever they need to. And it's all good.