This play is about Christmas Eve at a strip club. It's also about loneliness

Julie Phan admits that when she picked up a Christmas Eve shift at a Montreal strip club back in 2022 that she "low key did it for the plot."

The playwright and actor, or self-described "stripper and theatre gremlin," started dancing earlier that year after quitting what she describes as a "shitty $20 an hour theatre admin job." Stripping, she says, felt like a more efficient way to supplement the money she made as an actor and writer, a way to make a living "without tearing all my hair out of my scalp." Besides, years of fitness pole dancing had given her the necessary stage skills.

Still, she didn't know what to expect from the Christmas Eve crowd, other than "lonely people who didn't have anyone else to spend time with on that night."

And that included her. 

"There was nowhere else I really wanted to be," she says. "I didn't come from a background where Christmas was like a big deal culturally or religiously."

That Christmas Eve shift wound up being the inspiration for her new play, Never Walk Alone. And at its core, she says, it's less a play about a strip club and more a play about loneliness and the search for connection.

"The feeling of being alone and the feeling of not really being understood by the people I love, that's something that I've always felt," she says. "Before ever becoming like a sex worker or a stripper — just this feeling of being not really seen for who I am."

Like a lot of people in sex work, Phan didn't tell her family about how she made a living for a number of years — they only found out last year — but prior to that, she'd already spent some time concealing her involvement in theatre.

She developed a love of theatre early on, and was selected to be part of the Tarragon Theatre's Young Playwright's Unit while still in high school, but her parents didn't encourage her interest. In fact, they actively discouraged it.

"At the time, I was doing a lot of the extracurriculars that my dad wanted me to do," she says. "Kind of the Asian child trifecta of Asian language school, like, off-brand Kumon tutoring and piano lessons. He really thought that adding this extra thing would have been… a distraction… I told my drama teacher, and she called my dad to tell him that he had to let me do it because it was basically a professional opportunity, and he allowed it because he listens to authority."

After high school, she went to McGill with the intention of becoming a doctor, but in her first year, she was given the opportunity to put on a play she'd written back in Toronto. But she couldn't just bail on school to go direct the play. What ensued was a level of sneaking around, back and forth between Toronto and Montreal that seems almost unfathomable.

"I was trying to do the show in my first year while going to school — school being in Montreal and the show being in Toronto — and needing to come back to Toronto to do that show without my parents knowing because I wasn't supposed to leave school," she says. "It went off not without a hitch, but it went off, and it went well, but I think I nearly died under the pressure of it all."

Shortly after that, she came clean to her parents about wanting to pursue a career in theatre, quit McGill, and enrolled in the National Theatre School.

"I had discovered that [theatre] was just such a fundamental part of who I am," she says. "It just makes up who I am, actually. I literally thought I was going to die without it."

Phan says that not all the stories told in Never Walk Alone actually happened on that Christmas Eve shift, although some of them did. Rather, she's using the Christmas Eve shift as a device to hold together stories she's collected over the course of her time in stripping.

"Situating it in Christmas was giving it more of an anchor, more of a context for everything that happens… for that kind of pressure to build," she says. 

Phan hopes that, in the wake of Anora's big Oscar win, audiences are ready to hear more stories about sex workers, ones that are "more complex than, like, the dead sex worker or the background characters on The Sopranos." She particularly hopes that they're ready to hear sex worker stories like Never Walk Alone, ones written by sex workers themselves.

"I think it's important to support narratives where sex workers are humanized and portrayed as their own people with their own motivations and complexities and, you know, all the beautiful things, but also all the messy things as well," she says. 

She adds that, hopefully, the more sex workers are humanized in fiction, the easier it will be for them to exist in real life.

"I'm hoping that the more we have nuanced portrayals of sex workers, the more… it [will] be easier to recognize how a lot of the laws, or a lot of the ways we treat people are f**ked up," she says.

Never Walk Alone runs from May 21-May 31 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (12 Alexander St.) in Toronto.