Damien Atkins
2022 Playwright in Residence
We’re thrilled to announce that Damien Atkins is 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.
About Damien Atkins
Playwright and actor Damien Atkins has performed on most of the major stages across the country. Recent credits include: Caroline, or Change (Obsidian/Musical Stage); The Ladykillers, Getting Married, The Devil’s Disciple, Henry V and Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles and Sherlock Holmes and The Raven’s Curse (Shaw); Angels in America (Arts Club); Hosanna, A Doll’s House, The Heidi Chronicles, Angels in America (Soulpepper), The Gay Heritage Project (Buddies). Other credits include: Someone Else, Unidentified Human Remains..., Shopping and Fucking (Crow’s Theatre), London Road, 7 Stories, Frost/Nixon, The Glass Menagerie, Amadeus, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods (Canadian Stage), Jacob Two-Two, Beauty & The Beast, Seussical (YPT), Sextet, (Tarragon), The Caretaker, The Importance of Being Earnest, (Soulpepper), I Am My Own Wife (Dallas Theater Center), The Way of the World (NAC/Soulpepper), The Retreat from Moscow (Neptune Theatre), and Mozart in Amadeus (Segal Theatre, Montreal). He has spent four seasons at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and five at the Shaw Festival, as both actor and playwright. His plays include Real Live Girl, miss chatelaine, Lucy, Good Mother, The Mill, Part Four: Ash, The Gay Heritage Project (with Andrew Kushnir and Paul Dunn), We Are Not Alone and an adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian. Damien has been a guest instructor at the National Theatre School, and playwright-in-residence at Crow’s Theatre, Canadian Stage and Factory Theatre. He 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. We Are Not Alone has played in Montreal, Halifax, Whitehorse, Toronto and Edmonton. It has been nominated for META, Sterling and Dora Awards, winning the Sterling for Best Production.
