Jonathan Wilson wants us to remember.
Remember a time when the Gay Village was known as the Ghetto. Remember when the act of two men holding hands felt like an act of political defiance. Remember the names of his close friends — his family — who died during the AIDs epidemic.
In his autobiographical show “A Public Display of Affection,” which opened Friday in a Crow’s Theatre-Studio 180 production, Wilson offers a poignant homage to this forgotten past. Through a series of vignettes, he recounts stories from his youth, as a gay teenager trying to find community in a Toronto so different from our city today.
He recalls how, as a “queer bullied ostracized little boy,” he dropped out of his high school in Oshawa after Grade 9 and escaped to the Big Smoke. In arresting detail, he describes the scenes that greeted him. “Yonge Street?” he recounts. “You may as well have said you were headed to the centre of hell to have tea with the devil himself.”
And he describes the people he met along the way: Tommy, his first boyfriend, and Orchid, their roommate, the three of them all living in a dilapidated rental on Jarvis Street.
The way that Wilson retells these stories is gently moving. He’s a bashful presence onstage, imbuing his play with shades of melancholy. His vignettes, meanwhile, pour forth like fragmentary memories. Some laced with wit. Others recited with a clinical, matter-of-fact tone.
Wilson frames his solo play as a speech he’s delivering to a conference as a “queer elder,” imparting his knowledge of Toronto’s LGBTQ history to his peers and the next generation.
This theatrical device helps ensure “A Public Display of Affection” isn’t only a retrospective. It looks into the future, too, offering a glimpse at where Toronto’s queer community has come from and also where it’s heading. But it’s a device that feels more forced and cumbersome than necessary.
Wilson’s show is already so delicately crafted that you can barely make out its seams, as one story flows into another. He employs such vivid imagery throughout — random objects and events, seemingly innocuous at first, return in echoes to devastating effect. These memories can be sharp, sometimes painful, sometimes filled with joy.
Director Mark McGrinder’s production is paced perfectly in the black-box Studio Theatre, with the audience seated on three sides of the stage. André du Toit’s soft lighting conjures a sense of intimacy, while Denyse Karn’s raised set, consisting of digital screens arranged to evoke an urban skyline, is simple yet effective at transporting us to various locations throughout the city.
At its best, “A Public Display of Affection” works on various levels. Though autobiographical (and Wilson stresses in the program that all the stories are true), the show is also bigger than himself.
As for the public display of affection in the show’s title: it can be interpreted, I think, many ways. Wilson mentions several memories from his youth involving defiant public displays of affection, including one that led to an outburst of violence. But the play’s name can also be read metaphorically, too. A play, inherently, is a public display. And this one, ultimately, is one of affection: a love letter to Wilson’s friends and the community that held him.
