Walter Borden's one-man play returns to Halifax stage 48 years after its creation

Like the actor and playwright's life, Walter Borden's one-man play The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time has been a work in progress — constantly evolving with his experiences.

The play has returned to Halifax to open Neptune Theatre's 60th season. It runs until Sept. 25.

Borden said he started writing the play 48 years ago.

Although the play is essentially an autobiographical account of the life of a gay Black man, Borden plays 10 different characters.

Characters he has interacted with over the years helped shape him, Borden told CBC Radio's Information Morning Halifax host Portia Clark. 

This is a condensed version of their conversation that has been edited for clarity and length.

This play has been a long time in the making. Tell us how the play unfolds with this one person becoming 10 different characters.

It's just the way that the play developed over the years. I started writing it on August the 4th, 1974, up on Windsor Street. And so it's taken, like, 48 years to bring it back home. It's had many iterations, and I've played it from Holland to Vancouver, many places in between. But each one of those iterations was just to include life that had developed from the previous time that I had done it. It was never something that could be finished until I had lived what I was going to write about. So that's why it took so long.

You are the narrator, a Black man talking, and then you introduce these characters who have been part of your own life's evolution or life's journey, it sounds like.

Absolutely. Always people with whom I had interacted over the years and how their particular message influenced me, shaped me. And so actually I simply use something that I learned from my mother when I was growing up. Every Friday evening, she and her closest friend would get together in our living room and they would go over what had happened in their life during the week. I would be sitting in the dining room watching them in the living room, and I was mesmerized with how my mother could tell a story, and while she was telling it, she would become the people that she was talking about.

I have never been able to perfect it to the degree that she naturally did, but she turned out to be my very first drama teacher.

You say it's not going to be an easy ride for the audience. How so?

I don't do anything in the play gratuitously. That's not the point. What you hear them say — the characters — is how they were. It's part of who they were, and therefore it doesn't come across hopefully as in your face. You're just viewing these people through the eyes of a Black man talking, and I guess there's a sort of safety net in that because if you were to meet some of these people face to face, they would be a bit too much for you.

He is relating these people so there is a safety net between you and the actual person with whom he is interacting at that moment.

There aren't a lot of plays that centre on the life experiences of a gay Black man in Canada. How do you feel about being the one to do it, and to have had some of these experiences?

The thing is that the emphasis for me has never been on the gay Black man. It's a man who happened to be Black and gay. And therefore, I never wanted people to be preoccupied with that title while they're listening to him talking and saying things. In other words, not to lessen it all, the Black gay man part is incidental to the story.

But your life experience has obviously been very much influenced by that and the characters have reacted to your identity.

The characters didn't necessarily react to my identity.

The messages that they have to give apply to everybody who finds themselves in situations like this gay Black man, who emotionally could be going through specific things that would be more easily identifiable to some than to others. But behind what he's going through, what he is feeling, is what anybody can feel depending upon what is happening to them.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.