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Culture Stage

Cover story: Damien Atkins stands out

THE GAY HERITAGE PROJECT written and performed by Damien Atkins, Paul Dunn and Andrew Kushnir, directed by Ashlie Corcoran. Presented by the GHP Collective in association with Buddies in Bad Times (12 Alexander). Previews from Sunday (November 17), opens November 21 and runs to December 8, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinees Saturday-Sunday 2:30 pm. Pwyc-$37. 416-975-8555, buddiesinbadtimes.com.


Not many artists agree to open up rehearsals to the prying eyes of a journalist. Yet it’s a few weeks before The Gay Heritage Project goes up and Damien Atkins, Paul Dunn and Andrew Kushnir have let me be a fly on the wall for about an hour while they finesse the work.

There’s a sense of freedom, discovery and raucous fun in the room as the actors – all in mid-career and very good friends – run lines, revise sections and quiz each other about their own history and gay history in general. They’ve got nothing to hide.

Who’s your gay hero? Which Golden Girl are you? What does the term “gay heritage” mean to you?

The tall and thin Atkins – his email address has the word “skinny” in it – steps forward during his turns and answers: “k.d. lang.” “Rose.” “I don’t know.”

Atkins is wearing a red Angels In America T-shirt from Soulpepper’s recent revival in which he played the central role of Prior Walter in a devastating performance that will surely earn him another Dora Award nomination next spring. (He’s already got two statues.)

Occasionally he tosses off an aside in a guttural Aussie accent – he moved from Australia to Edmonton at three. But mostly he’s serious, diplomatic, charming and – a quality he shares with the best actors – incredibly vulnerable. No surprise to audiences who have seen him in shows like Real Live Girl, The Glass Menagerie and The Importance Of Being Earnest.

“I’ve always thought vulnerability was part of the job,” he says a few days later at the Reference Library’s ground-level café. “My favourite actors – Brent Carver, Nancy Palk, Michelle Monteith, Seana McKenna, Kristen Thomson – can all express that. I think acting is learning how to cultivate empathy, being awake in the world and having compassion.”

I’ve asked to meet in a place that has history for him. When Atkins first moved to Toronto from Edmonton, in 1996 – he’d just performed in Canadian Stage’s Into The Woods and thought he’d try the city for a year – he came to this library every day to study scripts and leaf through files on theatre companies like Shaw and Stratford, to pore over old programs, lists of actors and reviews and articles. His goal back then was to work at the Shaw Festival, which he did for a season.

“I was so frightened by the city I could barely walk,” he says. “But I’m practical and believe in hard work. I made sure I had seven monologues ready – two for Shaw, two for Stratford, two Canadian pieces and one other contemporary work.”

You want a sense of his ambition and work ethic? When he decided he was ready to do an Oscar Wilde play, he set up a pitch meeting with Soulpepper’s Albert Schultz in which he cast himself as The Importance Of Being Earnest’s Algernon and suggested who in the company could play the other roles. Eventually he got an audition and won the role. Ditto Angels In America, which he calls “the richest, most beautiful experience of my life. Albert gave me the biggest gift anybody’s ever given me.”

That time he didn’t have to audition.

The Tony Kushner play has special significance for him because it was one of the works – Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and Randy Shilts’s And The Band Played On were the others – that convinced him, at age 17, to come out in Edmonton.

“I read them, and felt it was politically vital for me to come out and be visible,” he says.

Atkins is no stranger to queer work. His first theatrical calling card was his solo show Miss Chatelaine, about a young prairie boy’s gay upbringing juxtaposed with events in k.d. lang’s life. He did the Fringe circuit with it and mounted it several times in Toronto. Later on, he questioned gender roles and stereotypes in the musical solo Real Live Girl.

But he’s never wanted to be pigeonholed. He started off in musicals, then went to Stratford to learn how to do Shakespeare. While there, he wrote the play Good Mother, starring Seana McKenna, to prove he could write more than solo shows.

“I’ve always known I had to chart my own course,” he says over a hot chocolate. “All of my career has been about defining myself and not letting anyone else do it for me. I’m a character actor. And the joy of being a character actor is resisting definition.”

Even so, he’s candid about how TV and film can be limiting.

“If you do a good funny gay character, they want you to do it over and over,” he says. “You can get into sticky situations when the writing’s not good. I auditioned once for a role in which a really smug gay guy gets verbally abused over and over. I had no desire to sit there and be called a bunch of names people called me in high school.”

But he also admits there are creative people in the business who cast him in non-stereotype parts. He’s played his fair share of rapists.

“Apparently people look at my face and think, ‘He doesn’t look like a rapist,’ so therefore I’d be good as one.”

And in the film Take This Waltz, Sarah Polley hired him to play a bitchy aquafit instructor.

“You could infer that the character was gay, but to me it didn’t matter if he was gay or not. He was an asshole. That’s how I played him, anyway.”

He has strong feelings about homophobia in the theatre community, and in The Gay Heritage Project he’s written a scene – which may not make it into the final version – chronicling what he hates about being a gay actor.

“Many people still think that gay actors can’t play straight parts,” he says. “You never hear that straight actors are too straight to play certain roles. If you’re gay, there’s this belief that you have intrinsic behaviours you can’t overcome, even though we are actors and acting is what we do.

“Now,” he continues, “I have less of an issue if you want to say someone’s too effeminate to play a part, or they have a feminine energy. You can work on that for an audition, try to bring out different qualities. If you tell them they’re too gay, there’s nothing they can do. And that’s enraging.”

When I ask why he thinks revivals of plays like The Normal Heart and Angels have been so successful here and in the U.S., he gets philosophical.

“Both those works came out of the heart of darkness, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic,” he says. “I think it takes a long time for a community to turn and face the chasm and start to recover. Now we can look back and think, ‘Okay, where are we now? What has happened? What still needs to be done?'”

During the run of Angels, he was shocked by the people who asked whether it was a period piece and questioned its relevance.

“We don’t question what’s still relevant about The Glass Menagerie,” he says. “It’s a classic and very much of its time, and yet it’s so deftly written that it reveals larger truths. What’s the difference with Angels? I think there’s something homophobic about that question. Yes, the face of AIDS has changed, but it hasn’t gone away. Two million people die every year because they can’t afford AIDS drugs.”

He’s got a busy 2014, starting with Canadian Stage’s production of the edgy musical London Road, continuing with a piece he’s developing with Crow’s about his interest in UFOs, and then the Factory adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel Beatrice & Virgil. And Soulpepper just announced an Angels return in the summer.

While he’s doing very well professionally and personally (he’s been with his Gay Heritage Project co-creator Kushner for more than five years), he’s also learning to think in broader terms.

“Although there is autobiography in The Gay Heritage Project, it really is more about locating the self in a larger body, about seeing more fully our community and trying to honour some of the diverse elements in it,” he writes me later in an email to clarify a point.

“Keeping awake to everything that is wrong in the world might make you an angry person, but I think it also reminds you to care about people other than yourself, it keeps the ego in check and opens the door to a kind of grace.”

Interview Clips

Atkins on the genesis of The Gay Heritage Project:

Download associated audio clip.

On a conversation with Edmonton teacher and friend Marilyn Ryan that made him realize the link between homophobia and misogyny:

Download associated audio clip.

On using vocal masque to develop this piece:

Download associated audio clip.

On a life-changing moment at the Shaw Festival watching Tracey Ferencz:

Download associated audio clip.

glenns@nowtoronto.com | @glennsumi

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