Live theatre is a risky business -- anything can, and often does, go wrong. But living a life in the arts is equally risky, especially when there are two of you working at it. Meg Roe and Alessandro Juliani reveal how they manage.

Theatre looks easy when you're sitting in the audience, but working in the arts is a complicated business. When you combine a director with a composer/sound designer in one house, you pass complication and head right into chaos. Then ask them to work together on a Bard on the Beach show. Bard puts on 200 performances of four different plays in just over four months and builds two stages, dressing rooms, a box office, concession, bar and gift boutique for that short season. Then tears it all down at the end.

Meg Roe and Alessandro Juliani work for the extraordinarily talented Bard company. They call this chaos equivalent to "being in the ball room at IKEA on the Saturday of a holiday weekend" -- lots of things to juggle.

But Roe and Juliani are used to juggling. They juggle their lives as partners, actors and sound designers, and now they've added Roe's first time as a director -- which she calls "absolutely frightening" -- for The Tempest, with Juliani as sound designer and composer. He laughs when he talks about being the sound designer to Meg's director: "I've already missed a couple of deadlines. I'm taking full advantage of our relationship." They've each just returned to Vancouver from short stints in separate cities. Juliani was in Victoria at the Belfry Theatre, acting in The Violet Hour, while Roe did a one-woman show, The Syringa Tree, in Calgary. As well, Juliani is just finishing up his five years as Tactical Officer Lieutenant Felix Gaeta on the long-running sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica.

Both Roe and Juliani are jumping in at the deep end, doing something they haven't done before -- Roe as director, Juliani as composer. He's writing music for the string trio that will play live during The Tempest and says about this personal stretch for him, "I went to opera school at McGill years ago, so I dusted off all the old textbooks for this, all of the old music theory stuff that was in storage somewhere."

"It's chaotic and crazy," Roe says, "but that's where we live right now, in the ball room at IKEA."

Juliani laughs and agrees. "I've been commuting the last month and a half. I agreed to do this play in Victoria a year and a half ago, long before the writers' strike. It's resulted in a few frantic days of flying in [to Vancouver to work on Battlestar Galactica] first thing in the morning, shooting all day and then just hoping that the fog will clear or the hailstorm will cease so that I can take the flight back to catch my 8:00 curtain."

Juliani and Roe met five years ago, as the lead roles in Romeo and Juliet. "It's really easy to fall in love with your Juliet," Juliani says with a grin, "when you're spouting this beautiful poetry to each other every night and the lighting is perfect and the costumes are beautiful, but the challenge is -- and what I'm most proud of is -- we're still together when you see that Romeo picks his nose and Juliet doesn't do the dishes."

Even though Juliani and Roe aren't playing star-crossed lovers now, they're still in love and seem to have figured out what works for them, what helps them stick together through all the complicated juggling of schedules. Both are enthusiastic about Bard on the Beach and the joys of working there.

"Bard is a great little machine, and it's a wonderful place to work," Roe says. "They have such a wonderful history of working with some of the best classical actors in the city. The actors are so comfortable in the language and they're so comfortable picking up those texts."

Juliani chimes in, "There's a wonderful mentorship that happens, too. They're very good at fostering, nurturing local young talent and bringing it along."

Roe and Juliani attend all the plays, sometimes more than once in a season. Juliani talks about their enthusiasm for the Bard company and their work: "Because it's a company that does plays in repertory, if you're here for a week you can see one show and then you can come back and see a completely different play with the same actors. I think Bard has always been about accessibility and not being overly highbrow. Even though it's Shakespeare, even though it's 400 years old -- ancient texts really -- they want to make it as immediate as possible for everyone, and they do that well."

The Tempest is being presented on the Studio Stage, in repertory with the more obscure Titus Andronicus. Roe laughs when asked about the curious juxtaposition, saying, "It couldn't be more in counterpoint with Tempest: blood and guts versus magic and faeries."

When asked about the difference between acting and directing, Roe says, "It feels like a different emotional experience. It has a different kind of responsibility and requires a different piece of your brain, and you have to be the boss." Juliani laughs. "She comes by bossiness very naturally."

Summing up their chaotic life in the theatre business, Roe says, "The interesting thing about the arts is that you're constantly starting again and reinventing yourself." They may not know what's going to happen when the season's over, but as expert jugglers, they know they can handle whatever balls get thrown at them.