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Renowned playwright Michael Healey will tell you it isn't healthy to write plays. It's a solitary life enclosed by walls that doesn't bode well for one's temperament.

So he has balanced his writing with a hefty dose of acting.

“I'd be infinitely less pleasant as a person if I were only a writer,” he says. “You can ask around.”

Healey's latest stage role is in Them & Us by Toronto-bred writer and actor Tracy Dawson. The play, which had its world premiere last Thursday at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille, is both a departure and a homecoming for 45-year-old Healey.

Recently, he appeared in Toronto productions of such high political dramas as Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon and David Hare's Stuff Happens. Then came a leap of faith, when he attempted a mix of theatrics and dance alongside Peggy Baker in Radio Play.

Dawson's work, however, presents a different challenge from any of Healey's previous work. The 90-minute show features a series of 16 vignettes with 30 characters played by four actors – the other three being Dawson, Dora Award-winner Sarah Dodd and Shaw Festival regular Gray Powell – with the absurdities and turmoil of relationships acting as the unifying thread.

The play has been described variously as “darkly comic” and “a comic tragedy.” Or, as Healey explains it: “There's my shit, your shit and our shit. And it's the ‘our shit' thing that kind of turns it, in some of the scenes, toward the tragic,” as misplaced aggression, fear and resentment crowd out the laughs.

Healey said he was attracted to the play by its humour and by the amount of implied information the short scenes rely on, an approach that demands great range but offers many possibilities.

Healey himself assumes six characters spread across a broad spectrum from the young and humorous to the middle-aged and distinctly unpleasant.

At the lighter extreme is 26-year-old computer-programmer Jeff, who has broken his girlfriend's heart but has absolutely no idea how he did it and needs straightening out by his friend Carlo. (Meanwhile, across the stage, his crestfallen girlfriend drunkenly discusses his errors with a friend.) A stark contrast is 45-year-old Robert, who has at last agreed to go to counselling with his wife. Though funny at first, the scene gradually grows darker as the subtle brutality of his behaviour throughout the relationship is revealed.

And somewhere in the awkward middle ground is Victor, in his early 40s, being propositioned by the 16-year-old daughter of his business partner, a scenario that threatens to plunge from hilarity to horror in a heartbeat.

“All the scenes you can just totally act the shit out of,” Healey said. “And it's been years since I've been asked to be even a little bit chameleonic, so totally fun.”

Dawson, who completed Them & Us during a recent residency at the Shaw Festival, said she chose Healey based on a lingering memory of an earlier performance. She saw him in Yodellers, a one-act comedy he wrote with Kate Lynch, in which he played a golf reporter who falls in love with a lesbian professional golfer.

“I remembered the look on his face. And I remembered the struggle that his character went through in that piece, in that relationship, and I thought, he would rock in this play,” Dawson said.

Though he has left behind the political worlds of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush for the politics of the personal in Them & Us, his outlook on theatre – and specifically new works such as Dawson's – is closely intertwined with the machinations of government.

Healey suggests that two things are required to successfully develop and mount new works: leadership with taste, which he thinks Passe Muraille has in artistic director Andy McKim, a long-time friend and collaborator; and space, which he defines both as physical room and financial security.

“When things aren't being run on a crisis-to-crisis basis, when you can actually consider how long it might take to develop a play like this one, when the needs of the playwright come first as opposed to the needs of keeping the heating on … then that person who's in charge can exercise his taste and the work that he's interested in gets built,” Healey said.

And though he is thrilled to see Passe Muraille “back from the brink” of collapse, he says financial security is hard to come by for Canadian arts organizations, partly because of the political climate. (Passe Muraille had accumulated half a million dollars in deficits before the city of Toronto bought the theatre for $1.2-million in July, 2007, offering very favourable tenancy conditions.) Healey brims with pride when asserting that artists cost the Conservatives a chance at a majority government in the last federal election through their furor over $44.8-million in cuts to arts spending. And he laments that it is hard to imagine having a national government that thinks the arts are as high a priority as some other countries do, though he hasn't given up all hope.

Nor has he given up writing new works. He has been working on a pair of plays to make their debuts at the Blyth Festival and Tarragon Theatre later this year. Both, along with his 2006 play Generous, are, in part, attempts to artistically work through his much publicized but never discussed decision to donate part of his liver to fellow playwright Tom Walmsley, whom he had hardly met, saving his compatriot's life in 2004.

And as for the homecoming mentioned above, his admiration for Dawson has a touch of nostalgia about it. Exactly 10 years ago, at the age of 35, Healey came to Passe Muraille and mounted his first full-length play, The Drawer Boy, which soon earned him a slew of accolades, including four Dora Awards and the Governor-General's Award for best English drama.

A decade later, he stood Thursday night on that same stage beside Dawson, now 35 herself, as the curtain rose on her first full-length play.

Them & Us plays at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille until Jan. 31 (416-504-7529).