The great heart opener
Mitchell Butel is returning to the stage in an era-defining play about a global health crisis — the AIDS epidemic.
Mitchell Butel is about to play the role of Ned Weeks, a writer and activist who jolts his community into fighting the fatal illness taking the lives of countless men, among them his friends and lovers. The Normal Heart is a semi-autobiographical play by writer and activist Larry Kramer about the AIDS epidemic in New York during the 1980s. When it had its off-Broadway premiere in 1985, The New York Times called it “the most outspoken play around” and labelled Ned as “a loud, tireless firebrand who favours confrontational strategies in dramatising the AIDS threat”.
Butel is speaking to Review in Sydney on a wet August day on one of his many pilgrimages back to his native city since he moved to Adelaide to take up the role of artistic director at State Theatre Company of South Australia, which will open its production of The Normal Heart, directed by Dean Bryant, on Tuesday.
The 51-year-old actor and director admits that, when he was in his 20s, he would have baulked at the idea of playing an openly gay character such as Ned.
“I’m a character actor and wanting to play a range of things,” he says. “I was closeted, because, you know, there was a famous Sydney casting agent who had what was called the ‘pink list’ and if you were on that you wouldn’t be seen for certain roles. In those days it was best to keep it on the down-low.
“It took me a very long time as an actor in this industry to come out of the closet,” he adds.
The production is part of Butel’s overall vision to shift STCSA’s programming away from the “straight, white voices” of the past and towards greater cultural diversity, including the voices of First Nations people, queer writers and performers, and artists with disability. “We want the pendulum to swing a different way for a while,” he says.
After its Broadway premiere in 2011, The Normal Heart went on to win three Tony Awards and inspired an HBO film directed by Ryan Murphy and starring Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts.
Butel hopes his production will raise some timely questions about how medical crises are dealt with. The company announced its season of The Normal Heart in 2021, the second year of the Covid pandemic. Butel was astonished at “the kind of differences in response from government and media to coronavirus (compared with) the AIDS epidemic when it started happening in the Western world”. Referring to the latter, he says “there was just such incredible silence and lack of response from the government”.
“Is there a difference between gay issues and straight issues?” he poses. “I thought it was really kind of important to look at.”
Butel is one of the country’s best-loved actors and directors and has four Helpmann Awards under his belt. He wonbest actor in a musical for his performances in The Venetian Twins, Avenue Q, and The Mikado, as well as best supporting actor for Mr Burns.
After spending the past decade of his 30-year career balancing directing and acting, he took on the mantle of artistic director at STCSA from Geordie Brookman in 2019. Then, just as he was sinking his teeth into the job, the pandemic struck.
He was forced to take the company off stage and cancel five productions due to Covid restrictions. Like other artistic directors, he started to look at new ways to connect with audiences. In 2020, the company broadcast one of the world’s largest digital theatre offerings, a nine-hour series called Decameron 2.0, which brought together more than 100 collaborators from across South Australia to tell “100 tales of who we are and who want to be”.
Later that year the company welcomed live audiences back to the theatre with its gender-swapping post-MeToo staging of an 80-year-old classic, Gaslight, which became one of STCSA’s highest-selling shows. In March this year, Butel brought the critically acclaimed musical Girl from the North Country to Adelaide, following seasons in the West End, Toronto, Broadway and Sydney, and it went on to become the company’s best-selling show in its 50-year history.
“It’s been a really wonderful thing to combine my great loves, but also platforming new and other emerging and veteran artists in such a great community,” says Butel. “We have a buffet of great canonical works plus new works and seeing those through has been the biggest highlight so far.”
Butel and his two siblings were raised in Maroubra in Sydney’s eastern suburbs by his mother, a bookkeeper, and his milkman turned contract cleaner father. After leaving high school he worked as a paralegal at a law firm while studying to become a lawyer but six months into the degree he decided to quit.
Without any formal training other than dipping his toes into student theatre, Butel started performing with the Australian Theatre for Young People and the PACT Centre for Emerging Artists. The joy he found on stage was “transformative” and he eventually got his big break in a production of Grease in 1992, directed by David Atkins.
“I’m very glad I didn’t become a lawyer and chose this life instead,” he adds playfully.
Butel’s work has taken him to New York, London, Hong Kong and New Zealand as well as around Australia. He’s a funny comic actor in musical theatre but he also does straight drama. Companies he has appeared with include Belvoir (Angels in America), Melbourne Theatre Company (Piaf), Sydney Theatre Company (The Republic of Myopia) and Opera Australia (The Mikado).
Asked what his aesthetic is he says, “My big thing is to never do boring theatre.
“I can’t stand boring, pretentious theatre. I want the audience to be shocked, whether it’s through provocation or delight.”
Butel says his love of theatre grew from a place of familiarity and finally finding voices similar to his own.
“The theatre saved my life. My personal experiences were reflected on stage, which wasn’t the case in mainstream Australian media at the time … (Theatre is) about making the world a better place through art and for me it’s always been a really entertaining thing but also a very noble thing as well,” he says.
“The theatre’s essential purpose is to take something that’s chaotic or disordered and in the course of two hours with a room of 500 people solve the problem.”
It’s a philosophy he is living in Adelaide, supporting the city’s small yet tight-knit creative community.
“There is a very dedicated artistic community there, so it’s a kind of a crucible of a place to make really interesting and challenging work because they’re really up for it.”
The Normal Heart will mark Butel’s first performance on stage for the company since becoming its leader and he has quickly discovered that the reality of being an actor and artistic director at the same time means staying up late after rehearsals to answer emails.
“I’m in almost every scene of The Normal Heart,” he says. “Hopefully I remember how to do it. I hope I learn my lines.”
State Theatre Company South Australia’s The Normal Heart, showing at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, until October 15.
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