Ted Witzel, the Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, is providing insight into their role and the vision of this groundbreaking organization. Established as the world’s largest and longest-running queer theatre company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre serves as a pivotal and vibrant part of Toronto’s theatre scene. The theatre operates from core values of audacity, liberation, and rigour, striving to leave its audience members feeling emboldened, liberated, and more critically engaged with the world around them. It creates a space for queer artists to push boundaries and audiences to engage with groundbreaking, disobedient, and transformative art and entertainment.
Describe your non-profit work in a few sentences.
Buddies in Bad Times is the world’s largest and longest-running queer theatre company. We carve out a sexy, disobedient edge in Toronto’s otherwise well-mannered theatre scene, as a place where established and emerging artists alike can take the risks they’ve always wanted to take, for the gamest (and yeah, gayest) audience in the city. We also operate as a nightlife venue, with drag shows, dance parties, cabarets, and all kinds of expressions of underground queer culture.
What problem does it aim to solve?
To be honest, I’m not sure that theatre can solve anything, and in many ways that’s the beauty of it. I like to think that at Buddies, we’re in the business of transformation—the most powerful encounters I’ve had with art shake me, infect me, and slowly transform me as they reverberate through my mind, heart, and body.
It’s a question that this institution has lived with for most of its history: why do we NEED a queer theatre, now? We’re a place for interrogating taboos and deconstructing social norms—we’re also a place where we centre the pleasure in and of our art. We recently redefined the company’s values, and in a way, I’d say they are also our value proposition. We are operating from a core of audacity, liberation, and rigour, and I hope that’s also what people come away from an experience with us with more audacious, after a brush with liberation, and a more rigorous way of engaging with the world. Heiner Müller has this quote I love: “The only thing a work of art can do is create a longing for a different way of being. And that longing is revolutionary.”
When did you start/join it?
I’ve been around the organization for about a decade as an artist, but I was hired into my current role last summer and started in October 2023.
What made you want to get involved?
Buddies has an intoxicating draw—a radical queer sense of possibility. As an artist years ago it represented a space for pushing boundaries, doing the risky and experimental work that you couldn’t do at any other theatre, for an audience that was hungry to see it and be transformed by it. It’s the transformative potency of this place that first pulled me in, and that convinced me to return in a leadership role.
What was the situation like when you started?
The institution has been through a lot in the last four years. Because it’s such a future-forward institution, with a focus on working at the just-becoming-known edges of queerness and artistic practice, it can also be a canary in the coal mine for the Toronto performance world. The many forces of world-shifting transformation that rumbled in 2020 (a pandemic, a reckoning with white supremacy, and an economic crisis) were felt I’d say more deeply here than elsewhere, and the organization was thrown into a multi-year tumult as a result. There hadn’t been an artistic director in three years, and the organization had a great deal of healing and rebuilding to do.
How has it changed since?
Not surprisingly, there was a lot of turnover, but that created a really unique opportunity for Kristina Lemieux (Director of Operations) and I to really rebuild the organization intentionally, and without the kind of pain that comes from a hard-choice restructure. We talk about it like a full “operating system update”—we’ve been working our way through the whole backend of the organization to bring in digital tools and systems and build a staffing structure to best serve the ways we believe the organization can grow.
Additionally, I’ve worked closely with Erum Khan (Artistic Associate) to rearticulate Buddies’ values and core purpose. We’ve been publishing a series of pieces through Buddies’ channels to communicate that work to our publics—both artists and audiences—so they know what we’re about, and what we’re trying to build.
The first months were tough, because we needed to keep the place running while also enacting widespread systems change, but we’ve just announced our first season, and we’re gearing up to welcome audiences back this fall, to a completely transformed way of encountering art.
What more needs to be done?
Oof let’s not talk too much about the to-do list: everything Kristina and I do leads us to another system improvement we can see.
We have set the organization up to generate the data it needs to shape sustainable operations, but we now need to gather that data and start dancing with it. We are iterating new revenue models in our nightlife operations and our fundraising, but we need to check our assumptions against how the next years play out.
We’re keen to start commissioning and developing another round of works to hit our stage in the next few years, and also review whether the development streams we have are optimized. Now that the organization and team are set up, we’re eager to get out into the city and the world, and build relationships around the core work that is going to define our time at Buddies.
How can our readers help?
Come and experience what we’re doing! See a show, stay for a drink, make out with someone cute in the bathroom!
We talk a lot at Buddies about how we might be trying to cultivate radical models in our every day, we’re also here to host the people who come to us to dabble in another world. The bottom line is we are working to build a place that feels more welcoming, more sexy, and more fun than most of the theatres we know, and offer people more than just tickets to a show, we’re offering a whole night out.
Honestly the best support you can give to any arts organization right now is to come out, and remember how great it can be to get out there. Sometimes I feel like the conversation around attending the arts in Toronto is so “eat your broccoli”—but honey that’s not us. If there’s one thing the queers know how to do, it’s show you a good time.
Do you have any events coming up?
Our 2024-25 season kicks off officially in September with a play I’m directing, the neo-noir masterwork Roberto Zucco by Bernard-Marie Koltès. In October we launch a new podcast with extraordinary author and artist Vivek Shraya called I Won’t Envy. In December we have an amazing world premiere production, Oraculum created by drag artists and Canada’s Drag Race finalists Denim and Pythia, and so much more in the new year as well.
Where can we follow you?
Website | Facebook | Youtube | Instagram
PAY IT FORWARD: What is an awesome local charity that you love?
Maggie’s Toronto is an amazing organization that offers social and medical support to sex workers.
