Playwright, actor and author Haley McGee ahead of the opening of her show Age is a Feeling, at Soulpepper Theatre, in Toronto, on May 24.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Haley McGee is fascinated by sliding-door moments – decision points that can alter the direction of one’s life. Her latest play, Age is a Feeling, brings that fascination to the stage.
The choose-your-own-adventure show, McGee’s fifth solo work, is about the “beautiful melancholy of a life,” she says. It tells the story of a woman from the age of 25 until her death, and there’s a catch: The direction of the woman’s life is dictated by the audience. The play’s set features 12 flowers that represent 12 points on a clock; each flower’s stem features a different word. During the show, audience members will pick some words while rejecting others, deciding which stories will be told throughout the play. There are 180 possible versions of the show.
Age is a Feeling follows McGee’s The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale, for which she won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play in 2023. Her Olivier Award-nominated new play made its debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022 before making its way to the Soho Theatre in London. It will make its Canadian debut on May 29, at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre as part of the Luminato Festival.
McGee, who grew up in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., spoke backstage at Young Centre for the Performing Arts about death, making choices and what it’s like to be bringing her show home to Toronto.
Could you tell me a little bit about the play?
The show is a solo show. It tells the story of a woman’s life from her 25th birthday through her death. And so the idea really of this structure is to reflect one of the themes in the show, which is the unknowability of human life: this sense of some memories receding, or the inability, when you know someone, to really get your arms around everything that’s happened in their life.
You mentioned that the show starts at the age of 25. Why did you choose that age as a starting point?
There’s all this research now about brain development, where they’re learning that your child brain isn’t actually done developing until you’re about 25. So, your ability to plan long-term, to truly understand cause and effect, to understand consequences, isn’t actually developed [until then]. And so a lot of our irritation with people in their teenage years or early 20s, part of it is just that their brain doesn’t really understand that they are not immortal. Something about becoming aware of your mortality happens at 25.
I read that there are 180 possible versions of the show, do you think that you’re somebody who often thinks about how things might have turned out differently if you had taken a different path?
You know, I’m not. I do sometimes think, because I moved to the U.K. when I was 30, which was eight years ago … what would my life be like if I had stayed [in Canada]? I think on a broader level, the older you get, the more parallel lives you live. All the sliding-door moments, they add up over the course of a life.
Do you think it’ll be different performing the show here in Toronto than it was in the United Kingdom?
Yes, it’s always different here. It’s a home-team advantage, which I love. And I think in the U.K., it’s taken me a long time to tune into it, but people hear my voice and they think I’m American, and they don’t like Americans. And so there is always a sense of them sussing me out, and me being separate from them, and they have to kind of warm up. They have to get used to my accent and tune into it. And I noticed when I come back to Canada to perform, it’s just from the get-go, the audience is totally with me. I also think I have a Canadian sense of humour.
British humour is something different altogether.
The show did well, but I noticed a difference in the quality of laughs in Canada.
Do you think there’s anything different about the theatre scenes in Toronto versus the U.K.?
I think in the U.K. there is a theatre industry that is part of an international tourism industry. People come from all over the world to see arts and culture stuff in London. And I think in Canada primarily it’s other Canadians coming in. And so it kind of serves a slightly different function.
Is there anything you think Toronto should be doing to attract more international visitors to the theatre?
Just keep going. Because the show started in the U.K., there’s a whole bunch of British people on my team, and they’re here, and they’re obsessed with Toronto. They’re all so excited. They’re so amazed by the facilities. So, it certainly has nothing to do with talent or with skill level. I think it’s really just the city’s really young, the arts scene is really young. And hopefully, governments really understand that when you invest in the arts, you’re investing in a city, and they just need to keep doing that because it will pay off.
Age is a Feeling runs until June 16.
This interview has been edited and condensed.