Tough Guy

With a vulnerable, nuanced script, accompanied by visceral lighting and sound design, Tough Guy is brought to life by a brilliant cast that straddles the line between love and grief so present in the queer community. From losing a loved one in a senseless hate crime, to forgoing a family that cannot accept you, this tender play shows us that each tragedy is a worthy battle to find joy and community in a world that too often chooses hate and isolation.

One of the central tensions in theatre, particularly theatre that grapples with difficult subject matter, is finding the right balance between realism and effective storytelling. Tough Guy, a new play by Hayley Moorhouse following a queer friend group coping with the aftermath of a nightclub shooting, is a sincere examination of queer grief, joy, and resilience, but sometimes struggles to land with full force.

At its core, Tough Guy explores how people grieve both as individuals and as a community, and the way these processes are sometimes in conflict. When filmmaker Emerson returns to her hometown after a year away wanting to make a film about a tragic event she wasn’t present for, it throws her friend group into disarray as they debate a host of necessary questions: What does it mean to make art about queer pain? Who has the right to tell those stories? Where is the line between art and exploitation? Autumn Strom is a delight in the role, striking the perfect note of earnest self-involvement with slightly cringy monologues that were painfully reminiscent of my own early 20s as a queer person.

One of Tough Guy’s strengths is that while the precipitating event is obviously the central trauma impacting the characters, each also deals with their own struggles in a way that makes the characters feel true to life. Queer people often juggle multiple sources of heartbreak: parental rejection, political prejudice, not to mention the thousand small disappointments every young person experiences, from friends growing apart to career uncertainties. While this is realistic, there is at times so much going on with the characters on top of the central trauma that the story risks losing focus.

Tough Guy also sometimes makes the opposite mistake, choosing practicality over realism in distracting ways. Quinn, an amateur boxer attempts to work through their grief via their sport. However, actor Jasmine Hopfe never strikes the on-set punching bag with more than a token amount of force. While it’s understandable to take safety precautions, there’s something profoundly jarring about watching a character metaphorically fight through trauma while the actor literally pulls their punches.

Despite these challenges, Tough Guy succeeds where it matters most. As Sutton, Marguerite Lawler provides some much-needed levity, simultaneously demonstrating how humour helps us cope with unimaginable pain while also occasionally causing friction with those who grieve differently. While the script could benefit from revisions and some staging choices could use refinement, Tough Guy deserves to be seen. It’s important, powerful theatre that finds the intersection of queer grief, joy and resilience.