ted witzel, the new artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times, is pictured inside the theatre building in Toronto on June 17.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
What should a queer theatre be now?
It’s the question each new incoming artistic director of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times, which bills itself as the largest and longest-running one in the world, must ask as times change and new letters get added to the 2SLGBTQIA+ initials.
In revealing his first season on Tuesday, ted witzel, who took the reins at Buddies in October after a three-year stretch where it had no permanent leader, has provided an answer – though he recognizes it is only one of many possible answers.
“The only time I’ve been in a room where everyone agrees on what ‘queerness’ means is when I am alone in that room,” says witzel, who devised the 2024-25 season with Buddies artistic associate Erum Khan around the phrase “queerness is divine mystery” and a new three-word statement of values: Liberation, Audacity, Rigour.
“I recognize that, maybe, with my own particular interest in serving up a kind of transgressive sexiness, you’re going to exclude someone,” says witzel, whose own artistic practice as a director bridges European aesthetics and North American intersectionality.
“The season doesn’t include everyone in the alphabet soup. ... Next season will look different.”
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For witzel, Buddies is a place for the queer lens over queer stories – a distinction clearest in his opening show in September. He will personally direct Roberto Zucco, a play inspired by an Italian serial killer that was the last written by France’s Bernard-Marie Koltès before his death owing to complications from AIDS in 1989.
“Koltès’s plays don’t really focus on queerness as content,” says witzel, who is originally from Kitchener, Ont., and has built a career between Europe and Canada.
“But I think that the point of view, the very postmodern, postcolonial point of view of his work, which is ... very much in opposition to the dominant political structures of Western Europe in the eighties, there’s something very queer about that.”
On the other end of the spectrum next season – seemingly at least – is Oraculum, a world premiere production from Denim and Pythia, two Canada’s Drag Race finalists, that will combine performance art, puppetry and projection.
“I think that they will be a draw for people who have never experienced Buddies before who, you know, just watch Canada’s Drag Race and that’s their sort of window into queerness,” witzel says. “But also those two artists really excite me because, aesthetically and imaginatively, they’re doing something quite avant-garde that they’ve managed to fit inside of the container of reality TV.”
Another tentpole show in witzel and Khan’s first season is There is Violence, There is Righteous Violence, and There is Death or; The Born-Again Crow, a play by the Calgary-based queer Métis theatre artist Caleigh Crow, which opens in March, 2025, in co-production with Native Earth Performing Arts. Jessica Carmichael, who has recently wowed at the Stratford and Shaw festivals, directs this show described in a press release as like “an unearthed X-Files episode the suits were too afraid to air.”
Other 2024-25 outside-the-box programming includes four movement-driven solo pieces in a rolling double-bill with a title that’s too racy to print; I Won’t Envy, a podcast in which author Vivek Shraya talks to fellow artists about professional jealousy; and New Ho Queen, a queer Asian collective, who are billed at the theatre’s “party in residence.”
While Buddies has had an even more tumultuous journey than your average theatre of late – its non-stop drama since 2018 has included cancellations, sudden staff departures, mass board resignations, reckonings and restructurings – it does remain in a solid financial position, in part because of its unusual existence as both nightclub and theatre company.
Attendance for the most recent season’s theatrical offerings was back at 75-per-cent capacity – a return to the 2018-19 level, according to witzel – with about 4,000 more people actually coming through the doors in real numbers because of increased Pride programming.
That witzel, a cisgender, white gay man, ended up in charge after a time that included company statements reckoning with “harms that have been done over the years to racialized and other vulnerable folks within the community” might seem a surprise to some. But, in fact, the director has been heavily involved in what he calls “systems change” at a number of arts institutions, including at the Stratford Festival, where he ran the R&D wing known as “The Lab” for three years and was involved in implementation of anti-racist projects.
Witzel has other skills, too: His most recently earned degree is a masters of arts management from SDA Bocconi in Milan, Italy, where he tried to learn how to make sure big ideas and systems changes don’t “die on the steps of the finance department.”
“The strength of your convictions is nice, but an Excel spreadsheet is a little bit better,” witzel says.