Long-time friends and collaborators Max Ackerman and D. Halpern first met in high school. Now, nearly a decade after Halpern wrote An Orchid and Other Such Lilies and Lies, the pair have reunited to bring this deeply personal, darkly funny, and tender work to life. Presented by Dandelion Theatre, the production premieres at Toronto’s Red Sandcastle Theatre starring two titans of the Canadian stage: Walter Borden and Scott Wentworth.
This world premiere is a surreal, darkly comic journey through mortality, memory, and the art of letting go. With evocative design by Sahana Dharmaraj, Kevan Cress, and Ashley Naomi Skye, Orchid invites audiences to laugh, reflect, and witness the luminous beauty of two intertwined lives—and one extraordinary farewell.
In this conversation with Sesaya Arts, Ackerman (the show’s director) and Halpern (the author) reflect on the friendship at the heart of Orchid, and explore masculinity, aging, the strange tenderness that comes with revisiting grief through art, and the creative journey that brought Orchid to bloom.
Sesaya Arts: You’ve known each other since high school and now you’re premiering this deeply personal piece together. How did your friendship shape the way you approached An Orchid and Other Such Lilies and Lies?
MA: I think our present relationship has shaped it more than anything.
DH: Having such a storied history with Max has allowed me to trust him with this piece. I wrote this play almost 10 years ago now, and I keep thinking back to the version of myself then, learning first hand about what it meant to prepare for loss. In the years since, the initial grief that informed Orchid has been made more complicated by compounding griefs experienced since. It is nice to know that the ghosts in the play are well taken care of by someone who has a context and reverence for them.
MA: I’d also add that being able to know the kid and know the adult is such a special experience, especially given the subject matter of the play. Knowing someone through changes and stages of their life is a really special thing because you don’t just see them in a linear sense but all of a sudden they become this whole universe of personalities and experiences. As artists, it’s such an exciting way to engage with a piece. I get to see the way D. has grown and the piece has grown over the course of a decade, which is really special.
DH: Yeah, it’s been a bit surreal seeing these characters as old men, compared to the earlier iteration during the 2019 Toronto and Atlantic Fringe Festivals, where me and the director just stepped into the roles ourselves. I’ve never claimed to be that much of an actor, and I think that, even though they have always been 83, it’s nice to see the characters all grown up in a more embodied way.
MA: I can barely tell the difference.
DH: Well excuse me for having a thinning hairline and arthritis at 20!
Sesaya Arts: The play explores friendship, aging, masculinity, and the desire to control one’s end. What first drew you to tell this story through two lifelong friends in the desert?
DH: I really don’t want to frontload my teenage grief when I talk about this play, because it’s funny. I think the play’s funny at least.
MA: It is funny.
DH: I started writing the play while preparing for the loss of a dear friend of mine. I had a number of thorny conversations with her and with other friends about what we might want our own experiences of death to look like. The overarching narrative of Orchid came out of one of these conversations, but I think the exploration of masculinity was almost ancillary. For me, my experience of grief and of gender are very much tied up in one another, and I think this play helped me reflect on what it actually means to be a man prior to my acceptance of my own non-binary identity. I really didn’t intend to write a play about masculinity, but maybe this was a necessary last gasp of something.
MA: I would just add that experiencing masculinity through the lens of boyhood and going back to those core childhood memories is a really profound experience. We’ve talked about movies like Stand By Me and La Haine–
DH: Oh, I love La Haine.
MA: Me too! Both of those movies really examine kind of…where things change for boys — where that sparks leaves their eyes, and where they become hardened to the world and lose that childlike innocence and wonder. I think this play really seeks to recapture that spark and to show men that it never really leaves, or at least it doesn’t have to. We sometimes hide it or push it down…often as a form of self preservation or because of an expectation that we need to present a certain way. But that just isn’t the case. The idea that some behaviours are more “feminine” or more “masculine” can be so damaging. I especially want men in the audience to watch this play and see that their joy, their pain, their fear, their love is something to be celebrated. I hope this play will inspire a more sensitive, softer view of masculinity that we rarely see in media.
DH: Something I appreciate about you is your willingness to include ellipses in a text-based interview. It communicates a humility that I think translates really well.
MA: I want people to understand the rhythm of my thought!
Sesaya Arts: The cast features Walter Borden and Scott Wentworth — two icons of Canadian theatre. What has it been like to see your words and direction come alive through their performances?
MA: I actually met Walter the same year this play was written, in 2016. He’s had so much faith in me as a person and as an artist. I don’t know if I’d be here today without him, and there’s a really interesting journey that he and I have been on together to get to this point. I mean, these guys are astounding actors. If you’re a fan of Canadian theatre, you’ve seen their work. I think what most people don’t fully realize is quite how much process there is behind such monumental performances, and watching these guys work through their individual processes in real time is really a special and unique experience. Especially being a relatively early career director, to be able to learn from these two men — and to be able to create alongside them — is really one of the biggest privileges of my career to date.
DH: Honestly, I was initially really dubious about revisiting this play. I, along with my writing, have changed so much in the intervening years. But it really was the first time I heard Walter and Scott read this play back in August that I felt this profound reassurance. The teenage version of myself who wrote this play was a lot more honest about how grief felt, compared to the cooler, sexier version of me now.
MA: You were pretty cool then, too.
DH: It was my angst and oversized Nightmare Before Christmas hoodie. Now, the grief just feels so much muddier. It’s hard to separate one loss from another, ‘cause it all kind of compounds, sometimes. Having Walter and Scott tend to the mourning of — let’s be honest, a child — feels like such a kindness. They are making something tangible, something that I have disconnected myself from, because it’s scary, because it’s lonely. It makes me feel like someone is taking care of this kid, who I think I am still often way too hard on, even knowing and living all the shit they’ve been through. Yeah, it just feels like a kindness.
MA: I think kindness is definitely our operative word when it comes to Walter and Scott. They are such generous actors, both with each other and with our whole team. They bring so much joy and excitement to the rehearsal room. And so many questions! They are endlessly curious about the story we are trying to tell, and it just brings out all this beautiful texture. I will say I often feel quite the imposter syndrome coming into rehearsal with these two, because ‘what do I have to offer them that they don’t already know with their decades of experience?’ But they are constantly asking questions, constantly reminding us that we really are a collective. It takes a really special kind of actor to both have the wealth of experience that they have and to stay so humble and so present in the process. And it translates so seamlessly into their performances. Audiences are in for a real treat.
Sesaya Arts: Dandelion Theatre has built a reputation for bold, inventive work. What feels distinct or special about Orchid within your company’s creative journey?
MA: You know what, Orchid has actually been with us since the beginning of Dandelion Theatre. It was one of the first readings we did as part of our inaugural In Bloom Festival, and then we brought it back a few years ago as a vessel for an early career director to work with professional actors on a great script. But this is the first time I’ve had a chance to get my hands on it as a director, and it’s really been an exciting challenge. We’re working with some incredible designers to really push the limits of what we are able to achieve technologically, really weaving theatre magic into every facet of this production. I want to shout out Kevan Cress, Sahana Dharmaraj, and Ashley Naomi, our incredible design team, who have built a vivid and textured world for our actors to play in. We are all about making our audience’s experience as all-encompassing as possible, and they have been so instrumental in that. We’re going from our big classical worlds of Faustus and Timon, into now the extraordinarily intimate. We want audiences to feel like they are living through a home video. So to explore where the cinematic meets the theatrical, and how to keep the live nature of our work at the centre of that has been a really exciting new challenge for us.
DH: And speaking briefly to my own playwriting practice, this has been the first of what I hope to be many happy returns to old work of mine. I feel like (and maybe this is some capitalist impulse) I get swept up in whatever the next project it is that I am writing, and don’t often give space to the earlier work that helped define me as the artist I am now. After the 2019 iteration of the project, I feel like I quickly moved on to The Immaculate Perfection of F**king and Bleeding in the Gender Neutral Bathroom of an Upper-Middle Class High School.
MA: God, you love a long title.
DH: And from there, really jumping into Milk and Spittle and other projects that I have been working on for varying lengths of time and with varying title lengths.
Sesaya Arts: November is full of new productions across Toronto. In your view, what makes An Orchid and Other Such Lilies and Lies stand out—and why do you think it speaks especially to audiences right now?
MA: Ours is the best.
DH: I think it stands out because none of these other plays have a team as bodacious as ours.
MA: That is definitely true. But I think on a serious note, we are really in pursuit of something magical that audiences don’t need to do any work to feel connected to. There’s such an impulse in Toronto theatre nowadays for plays to have an opinion on something, or (even worse) to teach you something. If a play is good, the lesson will present itself: it shouldn’t need to be pushed. It’s very pedantic, which I can’t stand. This is a universal play. It doesn’t care who you are. There’s no agenda. We’re not looking to teach you anything. I hope that, like many of the best plays, if we are successful, you will learn something about yourself, about the people you love, just by virtue of being in the room and listening to these guys live out their beautiful final moments together. Scott said at the beginning of our rehearsal process that this play is “full of life. Real life.” And that’s exactly it. Come to laugh, come to cry. Have a revelation. Have fun.
DH: Yeah, I agree with Max that there’s no specific agenda, but I do have hopes. I want this play to be an opportunity for the audience to just sit with certain things that they miss, because, unfortunately, we are not often afforded the opportunity to sit with these absences in our lives. I hope that audiences experience it like the kindness that has been given to me through it. Days are getting colder and darker, and I just hope that this play keeps you warm.
An Orchid and Other Such Lilies and Lies runs from November 15 to 23, 2025, at Red Sandcastle Theatre (922 Queen St E, Toronto), directed by Max Ackerman and written by D. Halpern. Tickets are available at ticketscene.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
