Stunning performances bring ATP’s Casey and Diana to theatrical life in unforgettable production

Emily Howard and Nathan Cuckow in Alberta Theatre Projects' Casey and Diana at Martha Cohen Theatre through Mar. 15.

Sometimes the most compelling thing a character can do onstage is to try and navigate between the legend that lives inside their head and the real, live legend who shows up in the flesh.

That’s part of the dilemma facing Thomas (Nathan Cuckow), a queer man dying of AIDS in the Casey House hospice in Toronto at the height of a terrifying epidemic that killed millions in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Thomas is bed-ridden and bed sore -- sometimes he spends two straight weeks lying there, hallucinating, fantasizing, remembering, and forgetting what remains of his life.

He’s estranged from his once-beloved sister Pauline (Helen Knight), who he believes abandoned him when he got AIDS -- a not-uncommon reaction that added an extra heaping dose of emotional anguish to people who had already been dealt a premature death sentence.

He rolls through a rotating list of roommates at the hospice, because they keep dying, he explains to the latest new guy, a slender, young bewildered Andre (Josh Travnik), who looks to be all of 18 years old.

He loves Vera (Norma Lewis), his caregiver, who is really the only person who ever touches him, even though she wears latex gloves when she does because everyone is afraid they’re going to catch it too.

In 1991, AIDS patients were the world’s true untouchables, and Casey House was where they went to die -- many of them far too young, far too smart and talented to be making their final stop, but that’s where the world was in 1991.

Thomas is cranky and dramatic and can be wildly funny when he’s not being wildly cruel to whomever he feels has hurt him.

Then one day, Vera announces a special visitor will be dropping by Casey House to say hello to residents: none other than Princess Diana (Emily Howard).

Thomas cannot believe that Princess Diana is coming to say hello to him. He already carries on conversations with her in his head. She’s there at the top of the play, in her pink jacket and smart skirt, listening to his stream-of-consciousness as he muses about pop culture and pet peeves he holds about those near and dear.

Vera insists, saying Diana will be at Casey House in seven days, so they should all think about what they want to say to her.

“Don’t you know,” Thomas says, “This is like a homosexual Make-A-Wish!”

Casey and Diana is playwright Nick Green’s theatrical rendering of the time in 1991 that Diana did visit Casey House in Toronto and touched men who were dying from AIDS.

While the lead-up to Diana’s visit is the timeline for the play, the plot is just as much about the community of individuals who inhabit the world of Casey House every day -- caregiver (Vera), volunteer Marjorie (April Banigan) and patients like Thomas and Andre.

Marjorie isn’t even employed there, but she becomes emotionally connected with Andre and more or less gives herself over to trying to make him feel better, to give him the love that was missing from his life as a child.

Marjorie is a bit annoying. She doesn’t follow the protocols. She rescues some of Andre’s stuff from his rented room to make him feel better, prompting a lecture from Vera about not creating false expectations -- and Banigan does a great job of finding the emotional through line of a character who has blurry boundaries.

Vera fusses over Thomas but she’s a professional about it -- and when it goes off the rails from time to time between Andre and Thomas, she is calm and resolute and focused on getting the train back on the tracks -- and Lewis is never less than completely believable as the ultra-reliable Vera.

Meanwhile, Lady Diana is a constant presence, popping up as part of Thomas’s imagination preparation in anticipation of her visit.

Howard does an amazing job inhabiting Diana, just by virtue of adjusting her posture, her face and her voice -- and the wig and wardrobe are spot on.

Travnik, as the too-young Andre, has a kid’s voice and not much in the way of emotional armour to contend with the horrendous curveball that life has thrown him, is wonderful.

Just before Diana’s visit, Pauline re-emerges in Thomas’s life, or what’s left of it, as she tries to make amends for shunning him after he received his diagnosis.

Pauline lives in a basement suite in Scarborough, a pretty rough Toronto suburb, and she doesn’t carry herself like someone who has been treated well by life.

She seems alone and defeated and dragged down by her emotional separation from Thomas and is desperate to try and make things OK again.

Finally, they meet in a church for a sit down that’s little more than two actors talking to each other on a church pew -- and it’s everything that theatre can be when it fires on all cylinders as Knight and Cuckow memorably do in all their scenes together.

Director Lana Michelle Hughes finds all of the money moments in Casey and Diana and nails them, in one exquisitely-directed scene after another.

Edmonton’s Cuckow, as Thomas, delivers a spectacular performance. He’s got wonderful material to work with -- I was told the script was originally dramaturged by longtime ATP artistic director Bob White -- and Cuckow doesn’t waste a word of it, in a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking production of Casey and Diana that will make everyone who sees it remember why they fell in love with theatre in the first place.

Casey and Diana at the Martha Cohen Theatre through March 15.