Ford's Focus: Ned Cox - The Road to Duplicity

The Duplicity Girls gang: Ned Cox (centre) flanked left to right by Johanna Nutter and Paula Costain with Tanner Harvey in back

By Barbara Ford

Who is this Ned Cox with a play in the upcoming Wildside Festival? Where does he come from and why is he here? Cox’s journey to Montreal has taken a long, not to mention, circuitous route.

He and his sister were both adopted and raised in Short Hills, New Jersey, about 30 minutes outside NYC. Cox eventually found his birth mother, who now lives in Florida and is coincidentally involved in theatre, and remains in touch with her. She met Ned’s father, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, at a cast party in Boston when they were working as actors in different plays. Sparks flew and little Ned was conceived but it didn’t work out between them, so Ned was given up for adoption and the two went their separate ways. Henry Beckman continued to pursue his acting career by going out LA and for a while during the 60’s and 70’s, got a lot of TV work with a recurring role on Peyton Place and appearances on shows like The Munsters, McHale’s Navy, The Monkees and even had a line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In 1984 he passed through Montreal in A Majority of Two at Centaur. When Cox met Maurice Podbrey, he managed to glean a tiny bit more about the estranged relative he never met. “Maurice didn’t remember much but he did say that my dad was very professional.”

Review: Duplicity Girls

by Gaëtan L. Charlebois


Fifteen minutes into Ned Cox's Duplicity Girls, I realized that this was not a play as much as it was a piece of music for two voices...a kind of chamber opera, if you will. And it was not for nothing that Benjamin Britten's adaptation of Henry James' Turn of the Screw popped into my head. For Girls, as with the James, is about a household where something is not quite right.


But back to the music for a moment...Johanna Nutter and Paula Costain play two sisters who display their hatred for each other in different ways—one openly and darkly (the alto) the other brightly and with no shortage of cheerful passive aggressivity (the soprano). They talk at cross purposes, they repeat each others words (turning the tone to make the phrase mean exactly the opposite of what the other said), they have bitter little duets, quiet arias and little fugues—each note getting under each other's skin. If you are an impatient theatre-goer, this will try your patience. But if you like the ebb and flow of dialogue crisply written, expertly directed (Tanner Harvey) and sublimely performed than you will stick with this difficult work.