For Pride Week in Peterborough, New Stages Theatre is kicking off its 2025-26 season with a one-man show that is dynamic in story and subject and all things humour and heart, nostalgic and timely, and heartbreaking and hopeful.
For one night, playwright and Dora award-winning performer Jonathan Wilson will be presenting a staged reading of his popular and critically acclaimed show A Public Display of Affection, a semi-autobiographical show that explores his queer youth in Toronto.
Presented in partnership with Ptbo-Nogo Pride, Wilson will perform a staged reading at 7 p.m. on Saturday, September 20 at the Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in downtown Peterborough.
Recently nominated for Outstanding New Production by the Toronto Theatre Awards, A Public Display of Affection saw its world premiere at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto this past April after being developed through Studio 180’s In Development program, but its origins began prior to the pandemic when Wilson was given a request that made him reflect on his responsibility to living queer history.
“A couple of years ago, I was asked to speak at a queer elder event to share history of Toronto in terms of things that are undocumented,” says Wilson, who turns 62 in October.
“This was the jumping off point of that and grappling with that word (elder) and what it meant, and what you share as someone who’s put in a historian position. Stories of my friends came to mind. It was a chance to take people on a tour of my younger teen life in Toronto and bring back some of my story.”
VIDEO: “A Public Display of Affection” with Jonathan Wilson and Mark McGrinder
Wilson is a celebrated Canadian actor, playwright, and Second City Toronto alumni who won a Dora award for playing Timon in the Canadian premiere of The Lion King. He made his playwriting debut with 1996’s My Own Private Oshawa, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and two Dora awards and was adapted into a Gemini-nominated film.
Where that debut piece explored his past as a closeted gay teen in the outskirts of the city, A Public Display of Affection is a “companion piece” about landing in Toronto as a queer, 15-year-old high school drop-out.
“It’s looking back more honestly, revealing more and talking more about what really happened versus the softer, cuter version of what happened — still with humour and still with insight,” says Wilson.
A Public Display of Affection will take audiences back to Wilson’s arrival in Toronto in 1979 and beyond, exploring the time when the city’s Gay Village at Church and Wellesley was known as the Ghetto. The show offers poignant stories and reflections on Toronto’s nude beaches, bath houses, the AIDS epidemic, and the ever-present threat of homophobic violence.
“The queer gay community then was very much underground,” Wilson recalls. “There were clubs that we would sneak into, there was a social life on the streets, and friends looked after you. There was also a certain amount of danger, and an element of being marginalized and pushed aside. It’s really about chosen family.”
Though Wilson says he perhaps didn’t initially welcome the “queer elder” label that was later given to him, he has since come to understand the responsibility it entails and which he continues to explore through A Public Display of Affection.
“I am here and I am bearing witness to a certain time,” he says. “I went from running away from that to embracing it and saying ‘If you want me to speak and give a history lesson and tell you what it was like, then let’s really go there.’ But it’s also having fun with that idea and, of course, being an elder is all relative.”
Since he first began putting pen to paper to write the show, Wilson explains that the world around him has changed and impacted the context and, ultimately, the messaging of the story he wanted to tell.
“It started as a celebration that we have gay marriage, equal rights, equal opportunity, the rainbow, and Pride festivals,” he says.
“Then politically, the swing to the right again and the easy targeting of the queer community, and marginalization and coding of trans and queer people again had an effect and made me realize how timely it actually was to remind people that we’ve been there before, and this is a tactic to divide us and to have the larger population turn against us. So, in a way, it’s a rallying cry.”
“The elder moniker became something that I embraced, realizing that it could be a way to unify people and to be an example and to be the person that I probably needed when I was a kid,” he adds.
Wilson is hopeful that the “urban stories” of queer people “seeking anonymity” in larger cities, as depicted in A Public Display of Affection, will remain a thing of the past.
“Back in my youth, it was a real given that you had to leave your town to go to the city,” he explains.
“That’s where you had to go to reinvent yourself and you probably weren’t able to be part of your larger family. I hope that’s not true anymore — that people in smaller communities don’t have to flee, don’t have to feel like they can’t be part of the fabric of their family, or be an important thread in the family.”
Though the reading has a restricted 18+ audience due to strong language, including homophobic slurs and discussion of mature and violent themes, A Public Display of Affection is also filled with humour and jokes — something Wilson says was important because, to him, humour is “part of queer culture.”
“Comedy is a survival skill,” he says. “You have to have humour, even in the darkest of times. I know that from my friends and from my community and even now it can bond us. I find with theatre, movies, book, and any kind of culture, if you cut humour, it doesn’t feel like true life. Humour is so much a part of our survival toolkit.”
Through the combination of history, humour, and moving reflection, Wilson says A Public Display of Affection is not only a public display of affection for Toronto and the queer community, but a story of unity across communities and generations.
“We are all part of the same community — we’re all connected — and, as much as our history is sometimes hidden, it’s always there,” Wilson says. “Please share your stories. Always share your stories, the good and the bad. That’s what helps keeps our community alive.”
Limited tickets for the September 20 staged reading of A Public Display Of Affection are available for $30, with a $20 “welcome rate” for those who need it and a $40 “pay it forward rate” for those who can afford it, to help cover the costs of the welcome rate.
Tickets can be purchased at the Market Hall box office at 140 Charlotte Street, by calling 705-749-1146, or online at tickets.markethall.org/?category=20.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be media sponsor of New Stages Theatre Company’s 2025-26 season.
