Stage Door News

Toronto: Necessary Angel announces Damien Atkins as its new Playwright-in-Residence

Monday, March 14, 2022

We are thrilled to announce Damien Atkins as our newest Playwright in Residence. Damien is an accomplished actor and playwright, who has performed on most of the major stages across the country. He has received a Jessie Award and the Toronto Theatre Critics’ Award for Best Actor for Angels in America. He has also received ten Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations for acting and writing, winning four. Damien will be supported by Necessary Angel through 2023, as he explores and writes.

Time is precious. I am liking not knowing who I am anymore, making it up as I go along. I am liking writing in free fall. I am interested in wildness, and absurdity, and magic. I want to spend more time outside. I want to eat strange things. I want to be wrong. I want to go down dark alleys. I want to write my way into new ways of being. I’m saying yes to lots of things I thought I would never do (and discovering that sometimes I was right, and most times I was wrong). I am grateful to have a home I can live in (my apartment) and now, a home I can write in (Necessary Angel). I like the other residents of Necessary Angel, I like how kind they are. I want to be a good resident, I want to be a good citizen. I want to pitch in, with my hands, with my writing, with some good well-timed idiotic jokes. I want to surprise myself. And the hope is (hope! who believes in hope anymore! what an idiot!) that through the application of rigour, kindness, faith, reverence and irreverence, generosity and risk, we make some decent (!) art.”

– Damien Atkins

Our Playwright Residency is generously sponsored in part by the K.M Hunter Charitable Foundation, and Margaret Norrie McCain, C.C. Learn more about Damien and our Residency program, here.

Photo: Damien Atkins.