Jonathan Wilson launches his personal new solo show, A Public Display of Affection with Studio 180 in association with Crow’s Theatre.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
- Title: A Public Display of Affection
- Written and performed by: Jonathan Wilson
- Director: Mark McGrinder
- Company: Studio 180 in association with Crow’s Theatre
- Venue: Crow’s Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Until April 20, 2025
Wilson’s new production is a somewhat guided excursion through the Toronto of his youth, introducing us to the people he loved and lost on his way to becoming the custodian of 2SLGBTQ+ history he is today.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Jonathan Wilson is a queer elder.
No, he can’t quite believe it either. Each time Wilson utters that phrase in his solo show, he shudders a little, then cracks a joke about aging. “Elder?” he protests. “Really?”
Yes, really. Though he’s only in his early 60s, he’s considered one of the lucky ones, a survivor of the AIDS epidemic that wiped out swathes of Toronto’s queer community in the 1980s and beyond.
And, as an elder, he’s tasked with being a vessel for pregentrification memories of Toronto’s Gay Village. In his late teens and early 20s, those streets were lined with gloriously seedy bars, clubs and rooming houses, each filled with interesting people and stories.
Now, those avenues are prime corporate real estate, throughways lined with shoebox condos (available from the low $900s!) and rainbow-painted crosswalks.
In A Public Display of Affection, Wilson takes us on a somewhat muddled guided excursion through the Toronto of his youth, introducing us to the people he loved and lost on his way to becoming the custodian of 2SLGBTQ+ history he is today.
The basic premise of the show isn’t always clear – its framing device oscillates between an informal walking tour and a more rigid speaking engagement about the importance of queer archival – but Wilson, an actor and writer with decades of theatre-making under his belt, is a relatively engaging performer with a slew of mandates about caring for one’s community.
Billed as a companion piece to Wilson’s My Own Private Oshawa, A Public Display of Affection picks up where that monologue left off – an hour or so west, in Toronto’s downtown core. Wilson recalls being a runaway in the big city, a teen eager to enjoy his newfound circumstances. When Wilson moved to the Big Smoke, his understanding of the world and its grammar flipped on its head; pronouns can be complicated, young Wilson learned in those formative years, and aren’t an absolute determined by anatomy.
And so it goes in the play: Young Wilson makes friends, grows up, enrols in theatre school. Between parties and bar fights, he watches his friends mature and then suddenly die. He shrinks as the city gets taller and more expensive above his head. While he avoids contracting “gay cancer,” he becomes deeply haunted by it.
And when Wilson becomes the victim of a hate crime, he wears the scars like a medal. At least he survived to tell the tale, he says – a human artifact of the history otherwise left to whisper channels.
A Public Display of Affection is billed as a companion piece to Wilson’s My Own Private Oshawa, picking up where that monologue left off.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
A Public Display of Affection‘s ending is, on the whole, stronger than its first half, which struggles to stick to a train of thought. Some of that murk comes from Wilson’s writing, but it’s more an issue of Mark McGrinder’s meandering direction, which underutilizes projections by Denyse Karn to illustrate which of Wilson’s various selves we’re listening to: the jaded, nostalgic Wilson of 2025 or the curious, vulnerable Wilson of the late 1970s and early eighties.
That rupture in clarity gives way a touch when Wilson starts drawing lines between the homophobia of his youth and the anti-trans rhetoric of today. By the time A Public Display of Affection approaches the hour mark, the script feels achingly timely. Future productions should consider trimming the play’s introduction, which at present centres Wilson’s hemming and hawing about aging at the expense of the work’s stronger material.
Indeed, A Public Display of Affection‘s last half hour is much more poignant, heartfelt and intense, as Wilson shares the details of his 25-year-long common-law partnership, which during the pandemic required heaps of paperwork relating to end-of-life care and emergency decision-making. When Wilson recalls holding his partner’s hand, and seeing younger men kiss on the streets and subway, he marvels at the normalcy of expressing love publicly; he remembers seeing others be ridiculed, chased and hit for far less.
While A Public Display of Affection could use a tighter, more thoughtful visual vocabulary, Wilson’s message is clear: We forget history, queer and otherwise, at our peril. That’s an idea worth exploring further – though perhaps with a different director at its helm.
The script feels achingly timely by the hour mark, while the final half hour sees Wilson give a much more poignant, heartfelt and intense performance.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)
