Walter Borden in The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time, from the National Arts Centre and Neptune Theatre.Stoo Metz - stoo.ca/Supplied
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- Title: The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time
- Written and performed by: Walter Borden
- Director: Peter Hinton-Davis
- Company: National Arts Centre and Neptune Theatre
- Venue: Tarragon Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Oct. 15
There’s a great passage near the end of The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time, legendary Canadian actor-playwright Walter Borden’s solo show, opening the new Tarragon Theatre season. Borden, in the role of the mythical Sphinx, describes the human journey in terms of self-expression.
“In the springtime of your 20s,” says the Sphinx, you’ll be pretentious enough “to think your life an epic for a book.” But by the time you reach your 80s, you’ll realize a lifetime’s experience can be summarized with a smile.
Borden turned 81 this past summer.
That octogenarian smile he speaks of seems to hover above even the darkest sections of his poetic tour de force. It’s the pleasure of an elderly actor still delighting in his craft. If no longer as supple of limb and sinuous of voice as he was in his 40s, when he premiered the original iteration of this work, he continues to perform its multicharacter high-wire act with an acrobat’s ease.
Borden has been writing and reworking this material since the 1970s and first presented it in 1986, under the title Tightrope Time: Ain’t Nuttin’ More Than Some Itty Bitty Madness Between Twilight & Dawn. In the past few years, he’s reshaped it into the current version with the help of director Peter Hinton-Davis. It made its debut last season at the Nova Scotia-born Borden’s old stomping grounds, Halifax’s Neptune Theatre, as a co-production with the National Arts Centre. (It was meant to open at the NAC in Ottawa in February, 2022, but a certain truckers’ protest made that impossible.)
The play is described as semi-autobiographical and some of it clearly draws on Borden’s own life, including his boyhood in New Glasgow and – more obliquely – his involvement in the 1960s civil rights movement. At other times he embodies people he has encountered in the past, from a fire-and-brimstone preacher to a feather boa-bedecked drag queen. Throughout, he deals with the experiences of being queer and Black.
In his present-day guise, he’s an old parking-lot attendant, who leaves his booth to give us a piece of his mind. He rails at the Black supermodel on television, who claims to have never encountered racism, not seeing that she’s still, in his words, on “the auction block.” And the hip-hop musician with his macho misogyny, disrespecting the women who have always been the backbone of “the family” – Borden’s term for the Black diaspora.
Soon he’s remembering his mother and conjuring up childhood memories by turns idyllic, tragic and mystical. As he grows up, that Baptist preacher tries to instill a fear of God in him, but then he hears the call to arms of the militant activist, in the persona of a Minister of Defense who wields comically Churchillian rhetoric. But this is the 1960s, and there’s also the lotus-eating allure of the hippie drug culture, prompting from Borden a cascade of witty psychedelic imagery.
Other characters encountered in his journey include a sharp-tongued sex worker who turns out to be a poor single mother, gone into the trade after being denied welfare. Then there’s the desperate male hustler, turning tricks in return for food and shelter on the freezing winter streets of Montreal.
Borden ventures into some squalid and, in one episode involving pedophilia, deeply disturbing places. But ultimately there’s comfort and wisdom. The most beautiful scene has him tenderly portraying his mother, crocheting at the kitchen table and gently offering advice to her son. It also inspires one of his most playful poetic descriptions, involving a plate of bacon and eggs and a curious housefly.
If you’re not familiar with Borden’s writing, that poetry takes some getting used to. He employs a rococo style that falls somewhere between Beat and rap, where metaphor tumbles over metaphor and you can sometimes find yourself lost in a thicket of words. At its best, it’s vividly evocative, but at other times it’s as enigmatic as that Sphinx.
Despite all those words, there’s also something lacking, as we begin to lose the context for Borden’s stories. At one point he uses a patchwork quilt as a life metaphor, saying the stitching is the most important part, making a pattern of all those disparate patches. The play itself could use some of that stitching.
Borden’s performance, however, is consistently engaging and it gets the artful framing we’d expect from virtuoso director Hinton-Davis and his principal designer, Andy Moro. The stage is a circle that suggests a clock face, while the attendant’s booth in its centre becomes a time machine that takes us back to that remembered family kitchen.
Video projections are used, both as backdrops and to put Borden into concert-style close-ups. Adrienne Danrich O’Neill’s sound design occasionally incorporates Borden’s recorded voice, notably in his persona as the Sphinx. That climactic scene is the most striking, with the image of the Egyptian statue slowly transforming into the actor’s own rugged profile.
Given Borden’s long, rich life, we might’ve wished for a more straightforward autobiographical narrative. One that discusses, say, his civil rights work in Nova Scotia or his early career as one of the few professional Black actors in Canada. That’s not the show he’s chosen to give us, however. We’ll just have to accept his Last Epistle for what it is and, like Borden, smile.
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.)