You’re bringing a critically acclaimed Toronto production to the Fringe. What shifts when a show rooted in 1970s and ’80s Toronto queer history suddenly meets an Edinburgh audience with a completely different cultural memory?
I’ve learned that although the street names change, the emotions and the struggles are the same. Edinburgh audiences probably haven’t heard of Yonge Street or the St. Charles Tavern in Toronto, but they understand first love, shame, chosen family, and trying to build a life when the world keeps suggesting you shouldn’t exist.
The piece begins as a formal “queer elder” talk and then unravels into something far more intimate and dangerous. Was that structural rupture always part of the concept, or did it emerge as you explored how testimony differs from nostalgia?
It wasn’t planned at all. It happened organically when I discovered I was a terrible historian. The play began as a series of readings for students studying queer history, and I felt an unspoken pressure to be a “good” example. Thankfully, the darker, funnier, and more truthful stories of my friends kept interrupting. The moment I stopped trying to be an authority and started becoming a witness, the play finally knew what it wanted to be.
The press release describes the show as a journey through love, loss, lust, and survival. Which of those threads proved hardest to balance without tipping the piece into sentimentality?
Survival. It’s very easy to turn surviving into a sort of sainthood, but of course we weren’t saints. We were messy, funny, horny, selfish, generous, frightened kids trying to get through another day. But we weren’t simply surviving. We were falling in love, dancing until sunrise, making terrible fashion choices, flirting outrageously, and creating families from scratch.
You chart moments where even holding hands felt like rebellion. How do you stage that kind of quiet defiance in a way that lands with audiences who’ve grown up in a more visible, though still imperfect, queer landscape?
By resisting the urge to make it look heroic. Holding someone’s hand shouldn’t be brave. The tragedy is that it was. It should be gloriously ordinary. I hope younger audiences don’t leave thinking, How courageous they were. I hope they leave wondering why something so beautifully mundane was ever considered dangerous. So much queer history is presented as a warning. I want this show to be an invitation to imagine a long life and an earned elderhood.
Critics have called the show “a forgotten slice of Toronto LGBTQ history brought to life.” What part of that history do you feel is most at risk of being rewritten or erased today?
The ordinary lives. The street kids I loved. My chosen family. The young people on the margins who can still disappear, even within a so‑called respectable queer history. We remember the marches, the police persecution, and the court victories, as we should. But we forget the shared rooms, the back‑alley bars, the friendships, the first kisses, the tacky wallpaper, and the people who never became famous enough to be remembered.
You blend razor‑sharp humour with devastating honesty. Given your background in Second City, improvisation, and comedy, how did you decide where humour helps the story, and where it would undermine it?
Laughter opens us up to hear truth — but importantly, the laughter isn’t there only to soften the truth. It is part of the truth. Queer people have always laughed at funerals, flirted in impossible circumstances, and found joy where no one expected it. That’s an important part of our history too.
Your past work includes My Own Private Oshawa, The Normal Heart, and The Lion King. How does A Public Display of Affection sit alongside those roles in terms of emotional weight and personal investment?
There’s nowhere to hide. When you’re playing Ned Weeks in The Normal Heart or Timon in The Lion King, someone else has written the words. This time, every laugh, every silence, and every difficult memory belongs to me. It’s easily the most exposing thing I’ve ever performed. Even my earlier solo work reflected the version of myself I was capable of sharing in my thirties. This show is what that story looks like after another thirty years of living.
Bringing the play to Scotland feels less like exporting a Canadian piece than finally bringing my own family story home. My parents left Scotland for Canada in the early 1960s, so growing up, Scotland was always referred to as “home.” I’ve written some of that tension into this new version of the show, and it has taken me somewhere even more personal than I expected. Because of course… there’s no place like home.
The show insists on remembering at a moment when queer histories risk disappearing beneath progress and assimilation. What’s the one memory you felt absolutely had to remain unfiltered?
The feeling that disappearing was always a possibility. Not in some abstract political sense. Literally. Friends vanished. Spaces vanished. Entire generations vanished. The danger isn’t forgetting the dates. The danger is forgetting what it actually felt like to be alive.
Gilded Balloon’s The Snug is an intimate space. How does that closeness shape the performance, especially when the material moves between humour, danger, and testimony?
You can’t fake intimacy in a space like The Snug. There’s nowhere to perform at people. I’m simply with them. Some nights it feels less like theatre and more like a conversation that’s wandered somewhere unexpectedly honest. Those are usually the best nights.
If you could speak directly to younger queer people encountering this history for the first time, what’s the one uncomfortable truth you hope the show gives them permission to hold onto?
You don’t owe anyone perfection. Every generation inherits unfinished work. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll disagree with the generation before you. One day you’ll probably horrify the generation after you. Welcome to the club. But don’t confuse having more rights with no longer needing each other. Community isn’t something history gave us. It’s something every generation has to build again.
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