Stage/Theatre

What: Topdog/Underdog
Where: Canadian Stage
When: Opens Weds., Sept. 22 until Sun. Oct. 15
Why you should go: Red hot actor-director Tawiah M’carthy turns his attention Suzan-Lori Parks’s much-acclaimed American play Topdog/Underdog.

THIS SPRING, the theatre artist worked on two shows at Canadian Stage: he directed Fairview, a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the white gaze, and he acted in Maanomaa, My Brother, a play he co-wrote. Meanwhile, at Soulpepper Theatre, he performed in the South African play Sizwe Banzi is Dead.

Next, M’carthy is set to direct a Canadian Stage production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s much-acclaimed American play Topdog/Underdog.

He’s been a fan of Parks’s work for a long time. “She’s quite spectacular,” says M’carthy in a mid-rehearsal Zoom interview. “As a Black artist in North America, I’ve gained quite a bit from her writing.”

Her plays unpack the contradictions that define American life. “America is great when you talk about technological advancements, but they also have a history that’s dark. So, they have a light and a darkness,” he says. “The purity with which she exposes that in her writing is what I fell in love with.”

Its societal critiques aside, Topdog/Underdog is mainly about brotherhood. “[The show] is about two brothers navigating their love and their relationship with one another, under the pressures of the world,” he says. “It’s something most people can relate to. How we navigate our relationships with our loved ones — it’s a reality of our lives.”

M’carthy’s last two directing projects — before Fairview, he helmed a production of Death and the King’s Horseman at the Stratford Festival — were much larger in scale. At Stratford, he worked with a cast of 25. But Topdog/Underdog is a two-hander. Perhaps surprisingly, M’carthy finds this smaller scale more challenging, because “the level of trust and intimacy” he has to develop with his cast is much greater. “It’s harder because it demands more of you. But it pays off.”

When I asked M’carthy about his recent hot streak of theatre work, he said the last year hasn’t felt as different as you might expect — after all, he’s been working hard to get here for over a decade. “The reason why I ended up where I’m at is because of the work I’ve been doing that people didn’t see publicly,” he says. “The fact that you didn’t see me on stage … doesn’t mean that I wasn’t working.”

So, his advice for young artists is to keep making stuff, no matter what anyone says. “If other people are not offering you the opportunities, try as much as possible to make the opportunities for yourself,” he says. “If this is what you want to do, just keep creating. Just keep creating, just keep writing. Whenever you get the opportunity to practise, just be in practice.”