The award winning performance art duo of Daniel Krolick and Curtis Campbell mark their second show at the Toronto Fringe Festival with Blake and Clay’s Gay Agenda.
This year's performance is a sequel to the previous comedy show Gay for Pay with Blake and Clay. The show was about the titular characters explaining to straight actors how to act gay in productions. The roles of Blake and Clay are performed by Jonathan Wilson and Krolick.
The new performance is about Blake and Clay creating a set of rules for the whole LGBTQ2+ community.
Gay for Pay had Krolick and Campbell nominated for the Dora Mavor Moore Award of Outstanding new play for the performance. Despite not winning a Dora award, they won the 2022 Second City award for Outstanding Comedy.
Even with the nominations and wins with Gay for Pay, Krolock says that it’s never been their aim: he says that thinking of writing to win awards only “trips you up” and is something he avoids thinking about to avoid “laying awake at night.”
“We didn’t approach writing [Gay Agenda] with any different objective than we did a year ago. Writing Agenda, our objectives were exactly the same. We pick out satirical targets and talk about what makes us really angry. We love what we are disgusted by in our culture and build a show around that,” says Campbell.
Krolick and Campbell say they are using the premise as a way to vent their issues with the community in an honest, fair and entertaining way. In the writing process, Krolick says that he and Campbell made sure they were “always punching sideways and never down” with their jokes so their criticisms were fair and funny.
The criticism used in the show comes from the lived experience of Krolick, Campbell and Wilson. Krolick says that in the writing room, there were three generations of gay voices to play off of.
“For me, I’m just really obsessed with queer community infighting and the way that we sort of eternally fight each other because at least that gets results,” says Krolick. “I have spent decades pretending to like certain things about gay culture that I have absolutely no affinity towards. So I poured all of that disdain into the show.”
“I think even just saying that it’s irksome how eternally divided the queer community is and poking fun at that is kind of a contentious thing to say,” says Campbell.
Krolick and Campbell first worked on a show together in 2020 with the production wrapping up before the pandemic. They kept in touch and worked together on YouTube videos and podcasts, and when 2022 came around a slot at that year's Fringe fest “dropped into [their] laps.”
With the Fringe Festival comes creative freedom for the people who acquire a performance slot: Krolick says that the festival has given them the ability to create a show with no compromises in writing that they want to make. The only thing they have to adhere to is a deadline for the script.
“That’s what Fringe should be used for. It should be used for these ridiculous, insane ideas in a relatively low stakes, low risk environment,” says Campbell.
“Just in terms of what you can put on stage it really begs you to create something sparse and that can get put up and down in a good six minutes. It really makes you have to have really good performances or really good writing,” says Krolick.
Gay Agenda will be performed for four nights at the Tarragon Theatre on July 7, July 9, July 13 and July 14.
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