Berto_Tony_201307_PhD .pdf - University of Guelph

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(Wallace, Producing 34). Funding issues often meant that gay sub-cultural theatre in this
era was forced to operate outside various standards of professionalism (in terms of paying
union scale, performance space, etc.) and increasingly turned to newly available festival
and cabaret venues.
As AIDS became a prevalent concern in the 1980s, many fringe theatre projects
addressed the disease with plays directly calling for government action. Other plays, such
Colin Thomas’s Flesh and Blood, or Kent Stetson’s Warm Wind in China raised awareness
of the disease by portraying its human consequences. With the introduction of HAART
therapy, plays concerning the HIV/AIDS crisis became less frequently mounted and, by the
end of the nineties, new theatre productions about the disease were rare.
In 1994 Buddies in Bad Times acquired its Alexander Street space. Funded by three
levels of government, it was intentionally designed as a queer space (Halferty 242). Prior to
this, Buddies had been a transient theatre company, existing in a variety of spaces, often
sharing with other theatre companies (Gilbert, Ejaculations 178, 203). Having a permanent,
visible and funded presence in the Canadian theatrical and cultural landscape contributed to
legitimising gay theatre as being less a fringe element, and closer to the Canadian theatrical
mainstream.
Similar trends appeared to happen across global English-language theatre markets.
Andrew Wyllie notes that on British stages “[b]y 1994, a move of male homosexuality to
the mainstream stage was distinctly perceptible” (108). In Canadian productions of Brad
Fraser’s Poor Superman and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, gay-themed works were
for the first time widely presented on the stages of Canada’s regional theatres. Prior to these
productions, the regional theatres had not as successfully mounted works with overtly gay