Tannahill has been described as "the enfant terrible of Canadian Theatre" by Libération[6] and The Walrus,[7] "one of Canada's most extraordinary artists" by CBC Arts,[8] and "widely celebrated as one of Canada's most accomplished young playwrights, filmmakers and all-round multidisciplinary artists" by the Toronto Star.[9] In 2019, CBC Arts named Tannahill as one of sixty-nine LGBTQ Canadians, living or deceased, who has shaped the country's history.[10]
Early life
Tannahill was born and raised in Ottawa, where he attended Canterbury High School. He moved to Toronto at the age of eighteen, and began making short films and staging experimental plays, often with non-traditional collaborators like night-shift workers, frat boys, preteens, and employees of Toronto's famed Honest Ed's discount emporium.[11][12][13][14] In his early twenties, he made several photographic and video works with artist Nina Arsenault.[15][16] After living in Toronto for ten years, Tannahill moved to London in 2016, where he became active in the city's queer nightlife and kink scene.[17][18]
Videofag
In 2012, Tannahill and his then-boyfriend William Ellis founded and ran Videofag, an alternative arts space operated out of a defunct barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market. The space doubled as the couple's home and became an influential hub for counterculture in the city, until its closure in 2016.[19][20]
Novels
Liminal
Tannahill's debut novel, Liminal, published in 2018, is a work of autofiction which follows the author as he reckons with the nature of consciousness and the abject, precipitated by the sight of his mother's sleeping - or possibly dead - body.[21] In her review of the novel, Martha Schabas of The Globe and Mail wrote "Tannahill's lushly intelligent debut... captures something illuminating and undefinable about the present moment; it speaks in the code and cadences of the late 2010s and paints an incisive portrait of the demographic we call millennial", and compared it to the work of authors Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard.[22] In Le Devoir, Anne-Frédérique Hébert-Dolbec called the novel "a prodigious odyssey that tests the limits of reason and materiality."[23]Liminal won the 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires.[24]
The Listeners, published in 2021, follows Claire Devon, a woman whose life and beliefs are irrevocably altered after she starts hearing The Hum. The book made the Canadian national bestsellers list, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize.[25] In their citation, the Giller jury called the novel "a masterful interrogation of the body, as well as the desperate violence that undergirds our lives in the era of social media, conspiracies, isolation and environmental degradation."[26]
Tannahill's book of essays on theatre, Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama, first published in 2015,[37] was called "essential reading for anybody interested in the state of contemporary theatre and performance" by The Globe and Mail.[38] In 2022, Playbill listed the book as one of fourteen essential books for theatre students.[39]
Theatre and performance
Tannahill's plays frequently explore the nature of belief, queer identity, power relations, and the body as a political subject.[40] His work has been performed across North America and Europe, particularly in Germany, where several of his plays are in state theater repertory.[41][42]
Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays
Tannahill's first collection of plays, Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays, was published in 2014 and received Canada's Governor General's Award for English-language drama.[43] The collection features three plays for solo performers: Get Yourself Home Skyler James, the true story of a young female soldier who deserts the American military, the live-streamed monologue rihannaboi95, about the fallout from a queer teenager's viral video, and Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes, which imagines the final hour in the life of Peter Fechter, an adolescent from East Berlin shot while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 1962. An early example of virtual theatre, rihannaboi95 was performed nightly in a bedroom over live-stream video in 2013, and won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for 'Outstanding New Play for Young Audiences.'[44]
Late Company
Tannahill's play Late Company, about two sets of parents seeking closure after a tragedy involving their sons, premiered in 2014 at the SummerWorks Festival in Toronto, where it won the Best Production and Audience Choice awards, and went on to receive multiple productions across Canada, and abroad.[45] In 2017, the Finborough Theatre production of Late Company transferred to the Trafalgar Theatre on London's West End.[46][47][48]
Tannahill's play Declarations premiered in 2018 at Canadian Stage in Toronto, and was later presented at the 2021 Festival TransAmériques in Montreal. The fragmentary and lyrical play, inspired by the terminal illness of the playwright's mother, was described by Karen Fricker of The Toronto Star as "a devastating but joyous statement about life and grief."[51] While the text of the play is fixed, it is accompanied by a gestural score improvised anew by the five performers with every performance. Critic José Teodoro wrote in the Literary Review of Canada, "the way Declarations is structured, the musical feeling of it, the way elements accumulate and unify, then splinter off, plays as something closer to what is called 'systems music' as exemplified by modern composers such as Steve Reich."[52]
Commissioned by Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Theater der Welt, Is My Microphone On? is a performance text for an ensemble of young performers who speak directly to the adult audience about their inheritance of a broken political system, and a climate in crisis. Developed and directed by Erin Brubacher, in collaboration with ensembles of teenagers from Düsseldorf and Toronto, the play premiered at the 2022 Theater der Welt, before productions in Canada, Germany, Sweden, and as part of the 2023 National Theatre Connections festival in London.[56][57] The play was a finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for English-language drama.
Prince Faggot
It was announced by Playbill in 2024 that Tannahill's play Prince Faggot will have its world premiere Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, in a co-production with Soho Rep, in spring 2025.[58]
Tannahill's production of Sheila Heti's play All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, which he directed with frequent collaborator Erin Brubacher, premiered in 2014 at Videofag, more than a decade after Heti first began the script. Heti's struggle to write the play is one of the central plot-lines in her bestselling novel How Should a Person Be?.[60] The production, which featured original songs by Dan Bejar, was remounted at The Kitchen in New York City in 2015.
On April 4, 2019, Tannahill and three collaborators staged a protest action during high tea at The Dorchester Hotel.[64] The action was in response to Brunei's proposed introduction of laws that would make homosexual sex and adultery punishable by stoning to death.[65] The Dorchester Collection is a luxury hotel operator owned by the Brunei Investment Agency. Video documentation of the protest action, and Tannahill's forceful removal from the hotel, went viral soon after it was posted online.[66]
