Mystery man

>> Playwright Anthony Kokx is as private as he is prolific

by AMY BARRATT

Anthony Kokx is easily the most prolific English playwright working in Montreal. Last season he saw three of his plays produced by Gravy Bath Productions, a young company with whom he is closely affiliated. He expects to repeat that feat this season. In fact, when I spoke to him in late November, he claimed to have written six new plays since mid-October.
Kokx is also famously reclusive (“fame” in the context of the Montreal theatre scene, being relative). This is, as far as we know, the first interview with the playwright in any Montreal media.
On meeting Kokx, one is immediately struck by the striking resemblance he bears to Tony Palermo, an actor who has appeared in several of Kokx’ plays, including as a mouthpiece for the playwright in last spring’s Critic. But once you speak with these two young men—both just 22 years old—it becomes clear that their personalities couldn’t be more divergent.
Palermo is friendly, outgoing, garrulous. Kokx prefers to hole up in his office and compose angry missives to the world. He will, however, be venturing out to direct a couple of things in the coming months. He’ll be working with students at his alma mater, John Abbott College, on Montrealer Vittorio Rossi’s short play, Little Blood Brother. Then, Gravy Bath will produce a double bill at Hudson’s Village Theatre: a remount of A Phoenix Too Frequent, directed by Matthew Tiffin, and Tom Stoppard’s 15-minute Hamlet, directed by Kokx.
Even though they won’t be doing anything downtown until the spring—a conscious decision, resulting from a fear of over-exposure—the company is always active.
“I’m tired of seeing companies doing one show a year,” gripes Kokx, “and getting big-ass grants to produce workshops or readings. I don’t charge people to come see a workshop. Gravy Bath’s budgets are like, $2,000–3,000 and we’re still paying our actors.”
Incredibly, Kokx claims never to have seen a play until two years ago. Now, largely because Gravy Bath gets comps, he goes to almost everything.
“Centaur and the Saidye are responsible for the quality of all the rest of the theatre in Montreal,” the playwright says. “If people pay $30 for a play at Centaur, and companies like Gravy Bath are charging $15, they’re going to assume that our show is half as good. So if Centaur and Saidye are producing stuff that’s just okay, it lowers our standards before we start.”
Kokx and Gravy Bath have two projects planned for April 2002. First is Circus Sickened, a collaboration between Kokx and Tiffin. Aimed at a young audience, Kokx says it is not a cabaret, but a “real sad, grotesque circus,” featuring “yelling, smoking and peeing on people.” The second project is slightly more highbrow, a double bill of Kokx’ stage adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, titled The Waste, and poet Endre Farkas’s Voices, to be performed at the Monument-National. And in June, either in the Fringe or out of it, there will be Kokx’s Cabalogy, a one-man piece the plot of which is currently under wraps. :