REVIEW: A Public Display of Affection simultaneously holds your hand and breaks your heart
iPhoto caption: Photo by Dahlia Katz.
What is a theatrical memoir, if not a public display of affection for the past?
Well, it can be a display of many things: History and memory, rage and grief, joy and regret. Perseverance and closure.
In Studio 180 Theatre’s A Public Display of Affection, performed in the Crow’s Theatre Studio and directed by Mark McGrinder, decorated actor and playwright Jonathan Wilson presents a personal history of Toronto’s beautifully seedy queer scene of the late 1970s and the subsequent anguish of the AIDS epidemic. He juxtaposes this arduous but exciting time with the city’s current acceptance of diverse sexualities and gender identities that leads to queer integration, but also queer commodification.
Like a disco ball shimmering to a Donna Summer hit, Wilson illuminates and refracts detailed memories about absent friends whose names, struggles, and lives have otherwise vanished, while walking through modern streets where a little gay hand-holding in Starbucks goes completely unnoticed. His palpable relief at the increasing banality of queerness battles with fear that assimilation marks just another form of disappearance.
Both history lesson and refusal to be just a history lesson, social satire and emotional gut punch, A Public Display of Affection simultaneously holds your hand and breaks your heart.
Wilson addresses the audience of the “Queer Elder Speaker Series” he’s headlining, as enlisted by a multihyphenate group of young activists. Rolling the word “elder” around in his mouth like a medicinal lozenge, he acidly muses that few terms more awkwardly connote both respect and obsolescence. His task is to take us back to 1979 as a rare survivor of the era, a living embodiment of gay history providing historical context while being careful not to depress the audience too much.
“Tonight, I am the artifact,” he says.
Denyse Karn’s backdrop of projected rainbow stripes, brightly and cheerfully undulating like a flag on a cityscape of screens, reinforces that at this event Wilson is supposed to be “a celebration of queer joy” and little else. The cityscape represents Wilson’s unease with the way life has moved on without much of his generation, a group of monolithic towers replacing the run-down Victorian flophouses and clubs of his youth.
Karn’s ever-changing projections effectively take us on a tour of “the Village” present and “the Ghetto” past, back when the action was on Yonge Street, with photos and videos of club flyers, back alleys, and fear-mongering newspaper headlines. McGrinder syncs one projection’s vibrant pulses of light with Wilson’s words to highlight a memory about clandestine anonymous phone calls on a secret payphone line that connected lonely queer people across Canada, a fleeting burst of humanity in the dark.
Wilson’s message about the importance of connection between outsiders shines in stories of two people who buttressed his first months in Toronto after he left home at 15. There’s the tough but caring Orchid “from the Rez,” whose gender identity and presentation defy modern definition, and sweetly naïve small-town teen Tommy who just wants to dance, shaking his feathered hair. Wilson’s memories are a raging sea of warmth, nostalgia, and pain, punctuated with moments of fond humour even in the depths of despair, such as when a bedridden Tommy misunderstands a magazine headline about the new “gay cancer.”
If this spurs visions of Nick Green’s Casey and Diana, rest assured that Wilson has a jab for the queer kids who would rather wax poetic about the brave, stylish princess than the people she visited. He balances this with harsh words for himself and the deliberate detachment from his friends that ensured his survival.
A scene from his teenage years in which he must literally choose sides in front of a Yonge Street tavern on Halloween is both achingly real and symbolic, a clash of fierce drag queens and hateful spectators where bravery is met with broken bottles.
The sharpness of broken glass carries into Wilson’s pointed commentary on the present, with changes in mores and social justice language making him the aforementioned artifact before his time. Cycling between the eager 2SLGBTQIA+ committee’s Zoom backgrounds, he lists their overwhelming and conflicting demands for his talk to separate emotions that cannot be separated.
But the satire is most effective when it’s part of Wilson’s journey; a moment where McGrinder has Wilson almost leave the stage to collect himself before reemerging as a spokesperson for the luxury rainbow condominium that is the event’s sponsor, is biting but also feels like an interruption of the story we’re here to witness.
In a scene visually reminiscent of the end of The Graduate, Wilson and his longtime but newly legalized common-law partner hold hands in the back of a TTC streetcar carrying them toward what’s next. The simple, unconscious act is a focal point in a maelstrom of social upheaval and rainbow capitalism — it’s why we endure. It’s well worth reaching toward Wilson’s poignant public exploration of the complexities of his affection for then and now as he metaphorically offers his hand one more time.
A Public Display of Affection runs at Crow’s Theatre until April 20. Tickets are available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Ilana Lucas
Ilana Lucas is a professor of English in Centennial College’s School of Advancement. She is the President of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. She holds a BA in English and Theatre from Princeton University, an MFA in Dramaturgy and Script Development from Columbia University, and serves as Princeton’s Alumni Schools Committee Chair for Western Ontario. She has written for Brit+Co, Mooney on Theatre, and BroadwayWorld Toronto. Her most recent play, Let’s Talk, won the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival’s 24-Hour Playwriting Contest. She has a deep and abiding love of musical theatre, and considers her year working for the estate of Tony winners Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green one of her most treasured memories.
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Jonathan’s performance evoked so many emotions! His courage in recounting the very raw and personal memories led the audience through joy and heartbreak; feeling admiration for his perseverance, disgust for those inflicting so much pain, deep sorrow for those loved ones tragically lost and a level of shame for observers oblivious to the challenges he and his chosen family encountered. How wonderful that the impact of his guidance and mentorship will improve, educate and save so many young lives moving forward. Hats off Jonathan- you were tremendous!