Walter Borden brings artistry and activism to Lilies; or, The Revival of a Romantic Drama
06 May 2019

by Drew Rowsome -

"The audience certainly will be seeing something they haven't seen before," says Walter Borden of Lilies; or, The Revival of a Romantic Drama. "I hope and I believe that they will definitely be - what's the word I want? - engaged. It's very difficult to know how an audience will react but they will definitely sit back and go 'Hmmm.'"

Borden is a veteran and lauded actor, having started at Halifax's Neptune Theatre before conquering Stratford, Broadway and beyond. He was last onstage in Harlem Duet and was unforgettable in Bruce La Bruce's film Gerontophilia. His work has earned him many awards including an Order of Canada and a Martin Luther King Jr Achievement Award. But Lilies is a new experience. "We have so much material out there, whether it be Shakespeare or any of the classics, and they're presented sometimes, most of the time magnificently, from the same point of view," says Borden. "But what happens when somebody else, not thought of by the playwright, speaks the playwright's words and puts into the work their experience? How they would come at it?"

Lilies is as unabashedly gay as it is romantic -

In 1912, two schoolboys fall in love performing a play about Saint Sebastian. Their passion is interrupted when one is unjustly sent to prison. Decades later, several inmates agree to stage this story of young love in search of their own redemption.

- but this production by Buddies in Bad Times, Lemontree Productions and Why Not Theatre adds another layer. "The story is there but it's been approached through the lens and sensibility of an Indigenous viewpoint," says Borden. "It's not just a spin. It's what would have happened to this particular group of people if they had encountered the situation that is presented in the play. We all have the same palette of emotions, but what stimulates those emotions can be very, very different. We associate what we are seeing with what we have endured and gone through and getting the same emotional response. That's this production, what happens when these actors say these words based on their experience."

Beyond the conceptual framework, "I'm having the opportunity to work with Indigenous and Metis actors for the first time as a Metis actor myself," says Borden. "That's a very new and exciting thing for me in a very deep kind of way." And it is a powerhouse cast including Mark Cassius, Indrit Kasapi (Hello Again, House Guests), Tsholo Khalema (Box 4901), and Ryan G Hinds (McArthur Park Suite, Bent). "Everybody in it is solidly in the business," says Borden. "Joseph Zita is really exciting to watch. I particularly like working with Waawaate Fobister [The Crackwalker]. The way it's structured, our characters in the play have a relationship but that extends itself into the real world too. He's one of those young actors that you just want to take under your wing."

Borden has taken most of the cast under his wing. "If you've been in the scene for a long time, hopefully you've learned something," he says. "I could do one of two things, I could keep it to myself or I could share it. Since I have always considered myself, even before an actor, a teacher which is how I started out, so it's very natural to want to keep passing it on. I accept that responsibility and that opportunity. They're all wonderful. It's a very familial, very giving, very sharing kind of a group. It's necessary to have that or we couldn't really do what we want to do. "

Borden is very articulate about his acting process. "I look at what the playwright is offering and what the vision of the director is. This is what an actor must do. Then I step back and as we go along step by step, what is it I have to pull out of my accumulated stuff to accommodate what is being asked of me? So slowly, slowly, I put it together into a skin, weaving it together, pulling it up over myself and then zip up and there you are. And when the play is finished, unzip it and put it back into your little satchel, and you're standing there in a neutral corner waiting for whatever comes along next. And you do it again."

But he warns. "Every actor goes through their own methodology. If what I described sounds Laurence Olivier-ish, he acted from the outside in, and that is not me. While I'm doing the fashioning of the skin, it's coming from the internal. I'm a gut actor. I have blended, hopefully, the intellectual with the visceral. But I am far more visceral. That allows me to be spontaneous. The intellectual tells me what I must do at any particular moment. I have to trust myself that that will be there because I'm going to go flying on my own in terms of emotionality. That's immediacy and that's what an audience needs. The one thing that is absolutely true is that I can hit you with an emotion and it will register more than a sentence."

He also hits with his remarkably resonant and mellifluous voice. "That was fashioned because of the activism," says Borden who was the communications director for the Black United Front and helped establish Nova Scotia's Kwaacha House in the '60s. "Because I had to do a lot of speaking. The great guide in my mind has always been Paul Robeson. It was natural somehow that I was going to try to emulate his primary tool which was his voice. From my earliest remembering he fascinated me. His sound. What he saw as his duty. His intelligence. Everything. He was the model for me."

Lilies fits snugly into the activist framework "If I'm going to do something, if I'm going to involve myself in work, I want it to reflect in as many ways as possible, what I the actor, Walter, thinks and feels and wants to get across," says Borden. "My work is an extension of who I am. I'm really deeply committed to that. Why do something that's just there to be done? Sometimes I'll do something just because it's fun or whatever, and it's a chance to relax a bit, but there's always a reason behind it."

It is then that he wants to emphasize that using Indigenous and Metis actors is not a "spin" or a marketing hook. He muses that voices of POC and queers are much more prevalent than when he began acting in the '70s. "It's a very significant change," he says. "But the thing that always has to be very carefully monitored is whether that change is part of a fad or something that is real. Because although there are organizations, many of them god bless them, who are dedicated to the truth and the reality behind bringing about these changes, there are others who grab onto something because it is the thing of the moment. What they produce might be very complimentary and well-done, but then they say 'What's the next thing now?' That's because the people who are involved always have their first attention directed towards sustainability and continuation of the organization as opposed to what the organization presents."

Not so with Lilies' home. "When you talk about Buddies, they have never changed, they have kept their eye on what they perceive as their duty and their responsibility," says Borden. "They did not shift and turn and morph into something else other than what they had determined themselves to be. And they've done that for 40 years. And that is the difference between those who are committed to living the life they sing about in their songs or if they're going to change the script to accommodate what they see as their survival. Buddies is something. Such an important history. It really is a wonderful thing to be associated with the theatre at this particular time in this particular way."

Borden also has the distinction of writing and starring in the autobiographical, and one of the first to address the black gay experience, solo performance, Tightrope Time: Ain't Nuthin' More Than Some Itty Bitty Madness Between Twilight And Dawn, which would be right at home at Buddies."To tell you the truth, it really took from 1974 to 2018 to complete it. It is layered. It was evolving as I was evolving."

When I tell Borden that I was dazzled by the text of Tightrope Time and would love the chance to see it performed, he has a surprise. "That's the plan. I have to set a certain amount of time aside for it because it is so rich. The performing of it is huge as an actor, but I love doing it. The only time that Tightrope has been done by someone else was once in Montreal years ago. A production at Black Theatre Workshop with Chimwemwe Miller. It was wonderful. It taught me a lot of things to see someone else to do it. That's when I really understood how dense it was. Actually I'm just in the process of recording it as an audiobook. It's a project."

In the '70s Tightrope Time was a sensation and a scandal for its explicit gay content. I ask Borden what is what like being gay in the theatre in the days before Buddies. "The thing is, I have never been in," he laughs. "Even from my earliest days. I go back again to activist days. When we went into those organizations, no-one asked anything about that. You were there to do a job. They determined very quickly what you were best at and that's the spot you took in the organization. What you're experiencing in your life, at some point it certainly came out, but it was no different from how everybody else in the organization was experiencing wherever they were in their life. It was all out there on the table. Which is not to say that there were those who had to do some learning. But what we were doing was more important that any individual behaviorism or whatever."

"Being in that kind of world, when I stepped into the full artistic world, I just came with exactly the same force, the same me. I always say that my artistic and activist worlds went along parallel until they merged into each other. By the time they merged, I was seen in a very particular way and that was 'this is him.' And nobody questioned it. They wouldn't think of questioning it. For 50 some years, that's the way it's been. When I get into conversations with young gay people who are trying to find their footing and they question, 'What was it like for you to go through this?' I didn't go through anything. Because my nature is not that. I've just defined how I'm going to deal with you or I'm not going to deal with you at all. And that's the way it's always been."