In the biggest stage role of his career, actor Stephen Joffe plays the dysfunctional boyfriend of an intellectually disabled woman, in a remount of The Crackwalker.
The play is a dark portrait of a group of marginalized people living in 1970s Kingston, Ont., where its author, Judith Thompson, was once a social worker.
Joffe, 24, a 2012 graduate of the National Theatre School, said the role of Alan, Theresa’s boyfriend, is older than he’s used to playing. “With my face and body, I generally get cast younger than I am.”
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Joffe described his character as a guy who’s lived at the bottom of the pecking order. “He may have been born with a touch of fetal alcohol syndrome. Definitely a very difficult childhood. Not a good family and a lot of abuse,” Joffe said. “As the play develops, he starts to struggle very aggressively with mental illness. Really, what he’s trying to do is to achieve some sort of peace and happiness in his life. Unfortunately, we’re in a system that continues to push the low even further down.”
Preparing for the role, Joffe was curious about the response to The Crackwalker when it premiered in Toronto in 1980. He found critics and others referred to the play’s characters – including Alan and Theresa’s friends Sandy and Joe, as well as The Crackwalker, a homeless First Nations man – as bottom feeders or bottom dwellers.
“It’s just simply not true,” Joffe said. “These are human beings who are products of their environment.”
The play is no less relevant today, he reflected. “These people still exist, and we still have this aggressive tendency to ignore them or dehumanize them and to separate them from ourselves,” he said. “We have a duty not to look away, no matter how much it may be scary to see what we created, a mirror of ourselves. We have a responsibility to watch.”
Along with acting on stage and in films – Joffe starred in the 2013 short, The Path, a social satire on consumerism – he’s tried his hand at playwriting. Two plays he submitted to recent competitions proved to be winners. He came first in the 2013 Panfish New Play Contest, for Offers of Home, in which he explores homelessness, and he won the 2013 Theatre in the Ruff New Play Contest with The Cocoa Stand, a parable about capitalism.
Joffe also plays mandolin and sings in the award-winning band, the Birds of Bellwoods. An energetic folk ensemble whose harmonies soar, the group won a 2015 Toronto Independent Music Award in the best folk or roots category.
Sky, a tragic song filled with regrets about lost friendship, on the Birds’ EP, The Fifth, was a finalist in the 2015 John Lennon Songwriting Competition. The group shares songwriting duties. Joffe often begins the process by coming up with a basic melody and a lyric, inspired by an experience that is greater than he is able to let go of.
“It’s like an emotional fire hydrant,” he said. The Birds of Bellwoods will release a single in the next month or two and a full-length album is in the works. Joffe sees himself as a performer more than as an actor or a musician. He aims to engage an audience in two-way communication, whether he’s on stage or with the Birds of Bellwoods at a club.
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“I get up and open my heart with the hopes that other people will open theirs as well,” he said. “And that we can communicate and that we can recognize each other.”
The Crackwalker, directed by Thompson, runs at Factory Theatre until April 10. For tickets, click here. For more information about Joffe’s band, click here.