She tore tickets as an usher to pay for theatre school. Now, she’s next door performing in this award-winning show

Goldy Notay has come full circle, but the journey hasn’t always been easy.
Born in Punjab and raised in Stratford and Kitchener, Ont., Notay and her family faced racism as immigrants, and her interest in theatre defied familial expectations.
She put herself through George Brown Theatre School on student loans and a part-time job ushering at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres. After graduating, Notay struggled to kick-start an acting career in Toronto and eventually moved to London, England, where there were more opportunities for South Asian actors.
She built up a strong record of film, TV and stage credits, and has been on a career roll recently, with a part at the Royal National Theatre, an invitation to perform at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a year spent touring the U.K. and Ireland in “Life of Pi,” the Olivier and Tony Award-winning stage version of Yann Martel’s novel.
Now Notay is back in Toronto, performing again in “Life of Pi” at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, just a block away from where she once worked as an usher. And she will also return next April to appear in Why Not Theatre’s acclaimed staging of “Mahabharata” at the Bluma Appel Theatre.
It’s a “pinch me moment” to perform in the city where she learned her craft, Notay said in an interview. The fact that both “Pi” and “Mahabharata” tell South Asian stories makes the return all the more satisfying.
“If someone had told me a decade ago that these two productions … would be touring the world, I would’ve thought it a myth,” she said. “But here we are in this resplendent reality.”
Getting to this point has called on the tenacity that Lori MacLean, the Elgin and Winter Garden’s front-of-house manager, remembers in the college student she employed several decades ago.
“She had such high expectations of herself,” MacLean said of Notay. “She was very driven and poised to get up on a stage, but it wasn’t to push everyone else out of the way … she was full of determination. She was always very brave.”
At the same time, Notay was easy to talk to: MacLean called her the “door goddess” because she was so good at engaging with audience members while tearing their tickets.
“Life of Pi” tells the story of an Indian boy who survives 227 days lost at sea in a lifeboat, building resilience by calling on memories of his family and interacting with animals stranded with him, including a Bengal tiger and an orangutan.
The production, directed by Max Webster, has been widely acclaimed for its spectacular staging, including life-sized puppets representing the animals. Notay plays Gita, Pi’s mother, and handles the orangutan puppet.
“Pi has to channel everything that he has ever learned in order to survive,” said Notay. “All the dangers, the calculations, the mathematics of things, the spirituality, everything that has made him human.”
The play is “about survival, adversity and grief, and about calling on all those people who helped you get thorough the tricky, sticky things in life,” she said.
These themes resonate with Notay. “When I think about my own survival in terms of being an actress, I survived because of all the forces that gave me the tools that I needed.”
Those forces include her family: the father and brothers who drove her from Kitchener to Toronto when she started theatre school, and the mother who always packed food for her daughter even if she couldn’t quite fathom her life choices. They include her husband, Giuseppe, an Italian restaurateur she met, in a real-life rom-com plot twist, while performing in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” in Bermuda.
And they include the then-head of drama at George Brown, Peter Wylde, who offered Notay powerful advice at a time when she was bleaching her skin and denying her ethnicity in the face of racist slurs from classmates. As she recalled, he told her that “the more life experience you have and the more that you come into your own, and recognize your … Indianness and the stories that your parents have, it will all be useful for you in your career.”
When I asked Notay where her roots lie, it took her a while to answer. She eventually offered an analogy involving her mother, who now lives in Brampton, and her late father.
“My mum recently gave me some dried flowers and said they were from plants that my dad had cultivated,” said Notay. “She said, ‘When you go back to London, get a pot, get some soil and plant these. They need lots of sun and water.’”
Notay was dubious that dried flowers could grow, “but they actually sprouted, and Giuseppe and I now have these beautiful orange marigolds. Every time I look at them, I think about the line in ‘The Life of Pi’: ‘Orange is the colour of survival.’ And they survived.”
The message, for Notay, is that plants and flowers will grow “as long as the conditions are right … and maybe that’s me. I carry my roots with me. My roots are my parents and I can replant myself wherever I go.”
There will be a fair bit of replanting in the months to come: following the Toronto run of “Pi,” Notay will travel with the show to Abu Dhabi and Mumbai, and will then leave that production to join the company of “Mahabharata” for performances in Toronto and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
These opportunities are proof to Notay that the landscape has shifted beyond the limited possibilities available when she finished theatre school.
“These two plays and the performers who are inhabiting them are evidence of dreams coming true,” said Notay. “In terms of our ancestors, they must be having an absolute hootenanny.”
“Life of Pi” begins performances Tuesday and runs until Oct. 6 at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St. Visit mirvish.com or call 1-800-461-3333 for tickets and information. “Mahabharata” will run from April 8 to 20 at the Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E. Visit canadianstage.com or call 416-368-4110 for tickets and more information.