Local rock musicians have dabbled in the Toronto theatre scene with mixed results over the years. It’s a natural fit. Rock is all about emotion, playing with swagger and acting a role. And when it comes to swagger, there are few musicians who can match the might of Hawksley Workman.

Workman comes to the Tarragon Theatre June 3 to 29 to play the most rock ’n’ roll of gods — Bacchus (a.k.a. Dionysus), the half-mortal god of wine and revelry — in his music-infused play The God That Comes.

This is the god who comes to the people to make hedonism and excess a sacred right. In an indulgent case of life imitating art, Workman says The God That Comes “was written very much in a jam,” as he, along with director and co-creator Christian Barry of Halifax’s 2b theatre, sat around talking, drinking wine, improvising and writing songs every day.

Claiming drums as his first instrument, the Juno Award–winning Workman is known for switching between various instruments on recordings and in live shows. “I’m just a creative animal,” says Workman, who describes himself as being impatient.

After having released 14 records and touring the world, he says he was ready to try something new.

Barry had persisted for 10 years in suggesting they collaborate until Workman was ready to make the creative leap from music to theatre. Workman calls the two vastly different experiences. “A song might take 20 minutes to write [and] a day or two to record,” he explains. “After those 40-odd hours, the song is on a record and it’s everybody else’s song.”

The slower tempo of theatre creation, developing the play for over a year, was a new experience for him. “I’d never lived with any piece of work for that long before it had been called officially complete.”

He warned Barry early in the process that he wasn’t one to stick to a script. “I’ve spent my entire performance career trying to capitalize on anything that is serendipitous, anything that can make the show unique to the night that I’m performing it,” he says.

As the show played in various cities, Barry kept an eye on the performance. “As a performer, I like to sprawl; sometimes Christian likes to contain my sprawl,” says Workman.

The story of this song-filled “cabaret/rock ’n’ roll hybrid,” as described by Workman, is about the “ambiguous, strange, girlie” god Bacchus coming to the kingdom of a killjoy king and enabling “women, slaves and outlaws” to leave the oppressive city at night to engage in libidinous debauchery and to “drink and fight and dance around fires.”

As Workman repeatedly walked through the play, he found his intimacy with the music growing. “The more I let the play evolve on a performance level, the more it became a meditation,” he says. Now, Workman says, this slower approach to creativity is finding its way into other work he’s doing. He says it’s “a wonderful tool to throw in the toolbox.”

Having done the show in cities across Canada and a few places abroad, Workman has internalized it, like “a fancy Swiss Army knife that sits in my pocket, and I get to take it out and play with it.”

There’s no one moral to the story, Workman says.

“I think the idea in the show is that it’s natural and healthy that people want to gather, you know, in dark places at night and have a few glasses of wine too many and feel the power of rock music and to connect with something a little dirty or a little more gooey.”

Especially in this era of austerity and “fear-generated ideas,” we need to remember that “humans need to burst from time to time.”