Soulpepper’s Gregory Prest on bullying, on stage and off

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Gregory Prest didn’t fall in love right away with Punk Rock, playwright Simon Stephens’s acclaimed play about a class of British teenagers preparing for mock exams.

Indeed, the well-known Soulpepper company member – who is directing the show’s Toronto premiere for the up-and-coming indie ensemble Howland Company – says the power is only really revealed by doing it, not reading it.

“In the story of the play, there is a character that really takes power and really abuses their power as they discover it,” says Prest, during an interview in the lobby of Crow’s Theatre, where Punk Rock plays this month.

On the page, all you really register is one character bullying another. On stage, however, the audience doesn’t just see and hear that bullying, but also watches five other characters who are not doing anything while it occurs.

Prest found much of the real drama in Stephens’s play in what’s going on with these bystanders – their different shades of silence. Those who want to do something but don’t know what, and those who actively ignore what’s going on. “I see myself there, I see myself there …” he says, pointing around the lobby. “How do you stand up? It’s amazingly relevant.”

A publicist’s pitch to discuss that relevance with Prest is what enticed me to sit down with the acclaimed actor and occasional director. He was, after all, right in the eye of the storm at Soulpepper in January – in rehearsals for Amadeus with Albert Schultz, when the artistic director and his theatre company were served with lawsuits by four former company members alleging sexual harassment by Schultz, but also incidents of bullying, mocking and belittling. (Schultz has vowed to “vigorously defend” himself against the allegations, which have not been proven in court.)

We haven’t heard much about what was going on in the building at that time – but while Prest doesn’t shy away from questions about Schultz and the lawsuits, he is honest that he and his fellow Soulpepper artists are still “processing” the situation. “It’s a really sad time.”

And the relevance of the question of bullying and bystanderism is one that, for the 39-year-old director, goes back long before he started working in theatre, let alone at Soulpepper.

Growing up gay in the small shipbuilding town of Pictou, N.S., Prest was bullied – quite badly – in high school. “It was a very confusing thing, because I was student council president and yet, at the same time, I was getting spat on every day and people were calling my house [to say they’d] burn it down,” he recalls.

Prest says his parents handled the situation well – but that the advice he got was to ignore it. “Maybe it’s just the east coast thing: ignore,” he says. “It’s a coping mechanism that we see in this play. The kids are ignoring what’s happening until it’s too built up.”

After high school, Prest got a degree at Acadia University, studied acting at the National Theatre School in Montreal and then moved to Toronto. While most audiences know him as an actor now, his first major success in the city was directing the memorable premiere of his roommate Anita Majumdar’s play Fish Eyes in 2004 (which was remounted as recently as this fall).

Worried he’d be pigeonholed, however, Prest consciously put aside directing for a decade to focus on his acting after that.

The performer quickly rose to renown when he joined the Soulpepper Academy in 2009 – and he has since been involved in more than 30 productions with the theatre company. His most memorable turns include the self-loathing Louis in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and an abolitionist Union soldier with a surprising background in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home From the Wars.

An exceedingly funny actor, Prest also showed off the full range of his talent starring in Of Human Bondage, the company’s much-acclaimed – most recently in New York – adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel.

With Dora nominations and critical acclaim under his belt as an actor, Prest recently began directing again: “I like being able to be responsible for creating a world – not just the world of the play, but the world of rehearsal, of how we treat each other,” he says.

Prest first tackled The Heidi Chronicles for Soulpepper in 2016, and then shortly thereafter helmed a notably lucid production of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna that restored the drag-queen drama’s lustre for many critics who felt it had become dated. “Albert [Schultz] believed in me, in that way, as a director,” says Prest, quietly. “He was really encouraging me and fostering me.”

Prest was one of the ensemble members who were rehearsing Amadeus when Schultz was asked to step down by the theatre company’s board of directors. A few days later, he and the other actors and designers came to a consensus to not go on with the show, and, through the theatre company, released a statement. It said that there had been an “unhealthy workplace culture” at Soulpepper and sided with the women suing the company: “We believe Diana Bentley, Kristin Booth, Patricia Fagan, and Hannah Miller, and stand with them.”

“It was important to support them,” he says now.

“This is going to sound so stupid, but it’s really complicated in an adult way,” Prest says. “The thing I’ve taken away from this experience … is that there are 100 versions of the same story and what’s true for someone isn’t necessarily true for someone else, and that’s okay.”

Following Punk Rock, Prest will return to Soulpepper to take on his biggest role there to date, starring in La Bête, American playwright David Hirson’s idiosyncratic verse comedy about a troupe of actors in 17th-century France.

Opening in May, the play was only recently put on the schedule as a replacement for a comedy that Schultz was set to direct. All of which is a bit wild for Prest because the part he plays – the verbose street entertainer Valère, most recently played by Mark Rylance on Broadway – is a famously challenging one that includes a 30-minute monologue.

“Puke in my mouth and all over the floor,” Prest says, trying to illustrate the extent of his nerves. “I’ve been drilling every day, just drilling text.”

Next, in August, Prest will star opposite his real-life partner Paolo Santalucia (a founder of the Howland Company) in Bed and Breakfast, Mark Crawford’s comedy about a gay couple from Toronto who set up a B&B in small-town Ontario.

While there’s a lot of chatter about who might carry on Soulpepper’s success as an institution while fixing its “unhealthy workplace culture” behind the scenes, the fact is that audience members mostly care about who is on stage there – and Prest will be front and centre in the coming months.

“There are people who stop me in streets, people I don’t know, audience members, and say, ‘I’m so sorry this is happening,’” he says. “I’ve been given so much by that company – all I want is for that place, for the good things of that place, to still exist for other people to experience because it changed my life.”

Punk Rock runs at Crow’s Theatre to April 14. La Bête opens May 16 at Soulpepper.