They had a hit Fringe play about coaching straight actors to play gay. They’re back to send up the queer community

What a difference a year makes.

Exactly 12 months ago, Daniel Krolik, Curtis Campbell and Jonathan Wilson were nervously readying their satiric show “Gay for Pay with Blake & Clay” for the Toronto Fringe Festival.

Within a couple of hours of its opening, word quickly spread and it became one of the hottest, buzziest shows of the first post-pandemic-lockdown Fringe. The Star’s Karen Fricker called the play “pitch-perfect satire.” I dubbed it, pun intended, “straight-up brilliant.”

The show sold out its run and won the coveted Patron’s Pick extra performance. Within a couple of months, it was picked up by Crow’s Theatre — who had a sudden open slot in their programming — for an extension. Then, just last month, co-writers Campbell (who also directs) and Krolik (who stars in the show with Wilson) were nominated for one of the most prestigious theatre awards in the country: the Dora Award for best new play.

It’s every independent theatre artist’s dream.

“On Sunday, I had just made peace with the fact that I was done with theatre and it was time to move on,” said Campbell in a recent interview with his two actors. “And then on Monday we got the Dora nomination and I thought ‘Ah, f—. It’s pulling me back.’”

That kind of love-hate attitude toward the entertainment industry was one of the inspirations for “Gay for Pay.” In it, underemployed gay actors Blake (Krolik) and Clay (Wilson) present a seminar to a group of straight actors on how to “play gay” so they can get great roles that go on to win big awards.

Think Tom Hanks in “Philadelphia” and Mahershala Ali in “Green Book.”

Now the team is debuting its followup Fringe show called “Blake & Clay’s Gay Agenda,” a work aimed much closer to home. It sends up contradictions in the queer community itself.

Blake and Clay, besides revealing a bit more about themselves, quip about hot-button issues like slut shaming, heteronormative assumptions, body dysmorphia and why Glenn Close hasn’t yet won an Oscar.

To be clear, there were references to queer infighting in the earlier play. Two of the show’s satiric targets, after all, were upstanding gay couple Pete and Chasten Buttigieg.

“I remember some audience members said we shouldn’t go after Buttigieg, since he was such a role model,” said Wilson about the squeaky clean American politician. “But our feeling was that everything and everyone was up for grabs. If he’s a queer person, he understands that has to be part of the conversation.”

“And what does ‘going after him’ really mean?” asked Campbell, whose first novel, “Dragging Mason County,” is being released this fall. “We were having fun with him.”

“Let’s keep things in perspective,” added Krolik. “Pete Buttigieg is trying to change the world for the better. We’re just a bunch of bitches putting on a show.”

What’s so refreshing about the trio’s work — besides its humour — is how Campbell, Krolik and Wilson represent three generations of out gay theatre artists collaborating. That feels unprecedented. In the past, marginalized artists have traditionally created work with and among their immediate peers.

Wilson is the most seasoned of the three.

“I’m like the auntie,” he said, self-mockingly. One of Second City Toronto’s first openly gay performers, he earned a Dora Award for his role as Timon in the long-running Toronto production of “The Lion King.” A cast member of the Kids in the Hall’s cult hit film “Brain Candy,” he’s also starred in Studio 180’s staging of “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s iconic queer AIDS drama.

Krolik, who remembers reading Wilson’s acclaimed Fringe play “My Own Private Oshawa,” performed with him at a reading of David Rakoff’s “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” during the Pan Am Games in 2015, and the two kept in touch. Krolik considers him a mentor.

For his part, Campbell, the baby of the bunch, says “The Normal Heart” was one of the first shows he saw in Toronto after arriving at York University from his small rural Ontario town.

He and Krolik met while mounting Brian Francis’s multi-generational gay play “Box 4901,” and the two hit it off. When the pandemic hit a few months later, they began uploading chatty conversations about pop culture onto YouTube. When the pandemic persisted, they came up with “Gay for Pay.”

Krolik said the bizarre circumstances of the pandemic meant there was less pressure put on them to try to write a conventional play.

“Normally I would feel I had to write something artistic directors and agents would like,” he said. “But because the theatre community had shut down for two years, I wasn’t getting bombarded by Instagram messages of other actors doing this and that. So we got to really focus on making each other laugh.”

During the writing, Krolik came up with a line about Toronto serial killer Bruce McArthur that he thought might bomb in front of a live audience; he was expecting to cut it during the Fringe run. Instead, it turned into one of those “Whoa!” moments when the audience suddenly realized it was in for a darkly funny ride.

When Wilson first read the script, he recalls thinking it was “filthy, disgusting and hilarious. And it made me scared. So of course I had to say yes.”

This Fringe, Wilson’s also appearing in Sky Gilbert’s play “Inside,” about a gay man obsessed with a porn star (real-life adult entertainer Ryan Russell). He said it feels liberating to work in a queer environment.

“I can show up completely as myself,” he said. “I know that sounds sentimental, but it really is profound. On film and TV sets, you hear things and you have to say, ‘Well, hi there, I’m gay actually, please don’t make assumptions about me.’ Here, when I come into a room, I can bring every part of myself to the process.”

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