At Next Stage 2024, two shows complicate the meaning of a night out, Theater News

It’s not news that the hospitality industry is intertwined with theatre. Think of audiences and artists celebrating festival season with drinks at the Fringe patio, or the countless theatre-makers who work Joe jobs as bartenders, servers, and hosts. So why is it that onstage, hospitality work and workers are so rarely the narrative focus? At the Toronto Fringe’s 17th annual Next Stage Theatre Festival, running from October 16 to 27, two shows are raising that bar. 

Gemini, by Louise Casemore, and Prude, by Lou Campbell, explore the hospitality industry and bar culture from different perspectives. Both Campbell and Casemore also perform in their pieces. (It’s a further coincidence that they have the same initials.) Their shows follow a handful of Toronto Fringe Festival productions that have offered audiences deep-dives into bar culture, including 2024’s 86 Me: The Restaurant Play, by Dead Raccoon Theatre, and 2018’s A Brief History of Beer, by Wish Experience. 

“I always describe Gemini as part fairy tale, part cautionary tale,” Casemore said in an interview. In this intimate two-hander, Casemore plays a bartender opposite Governor General’s Award-winning artist Vern Thiessen, who portrays a regular at the bar. Gemini premiered in Calgary in 2017, and had a successful run as part of the High Performance Rodeo in 2020. This iteration is directed by Chantelle Han and Mitchell Cushman.

“I grew up in the bar industry,” Casemore said. “I worked in bars and restaurants and nightclubs all through my early development, and as I came into my playwriting practice, I was mystified that there weren’t a lot of depictions of hospitality culture on stage. Gemini is a love letter, but a complicated one — as the hospitality industry can be.”

In the script, Casemore strove to highlight “the richness, the beauty, the charm, the camaraderie that exists amongst hospitality professionals. I used to say that being a professional artist is another way of saying that I will be a lifelong server or bartender. Those two things are worn with pride, and are really tied into the fabric of the art that I create.”

As well, “[something] I was curious about in Gemini was trying to unpack these sometimes decade-long relationships — friendships — [with customers] that felt incredibly meaningful to me,” Casemore continued. “I’ve gone to the weddings of customers. I’ve gone on vacations. If you work in a place for long enough, you can build relationships that feel meaningful and fulsome. But at the end of the day, when there’s money exchanged at the end of that, what’s the territory that we’re playing on?”

Whereas Gemini asks audiences to pull up a bar stool, Lou Campbell’s Prude busts out the air horns and hypes the crowd up. 

“I like to tell people that [Prude] is a TED Talk gone wrong,” said Campbell in the same interview. Directed by Stevey Hunter, this mash-up of drag and standup has toured across Canada to critical acclaim, with stops including the Toronto Fringe Festival, Vancouver’s rEvolver Festival, and Halifax’s Outfest. 

In Prude, Campbell plays a motivational speaker called the King of the Party. Clad head to toe in salmon-coloured spandex (costume design is by Everette Fournier), the King teaches the audience how to have a great night out: “The three big rules are to look hot, get fucked up, and find someone to hook up with as fast as possible,” explained Campbell. “Slowly, throughout the show, those three rules are pushed to their extreme.” 

At its core, “Prude is about how compulsory sexuality, binge drinking culture, and bar culture intersect,” Campbell said. “I started writing it because for me, when I was an adolescent and into my young adulthood, I found that all social experience was completely tied to bars and to drinking heavily.”

Like Casemore, Campbell is a bartender as well as an artist. Both playwright-performers acknowledge how intertwined the performing arts are with hospitality work — not just in the obvious ways, but subtler ones too. 

“There was a report that Alberta Playwrights’ Network helped put out in the 2000s, written by Ben Henderson,” said Casemore, who herself spearheaded a 2021 report called Surveying the Landscape: The New Play Ecology in Canada. “One of the conclusions was that the best advice for playwrights was to be very charming at a cocktail party, and have a gregarious nature [that allowed them] to build relationships and communications.”

On a more individual level, according to Campbell, “there’s a performative element to the service industry. A lot of Prude — and I’m sure there are elements of this in Gemini, which I can’t wait to see — is about the question, ‘What is the armour you put on to face the world?’ [That applies] whether you’re an actor or a server.”

Campbell described how both bartending and acting require sometimes-heroic amounts of empathy. “So rarely are bars credited as what they are,” they said, “which is a safe consumption site. People don’t understand the type of work and empathy that goes into a job like [bartending.] It’s seen as an easy thing, when really you’re doing the work of a therapist. Sometimes you’re monitoring people to make sure they’re safe. Obviously, being an actor, empathy is so central, and you need that to be able to perform and convey emotions, so I do think they’re deeply interconnected.”

“The Venn diagram between bar culture and the arts is a circle, in a lot of ways,” Casemore said. “The way that we [in the arts] celebrate and promote and share and decompress — bar culture is baked into that.”

There’s an extra layer to Gemini and Prude that makes their explorations of bar culture that much richer. Both productions at Next Stage will take place in an actual bar: Tallulah’s Cabaret at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

“One of the hard lines for me [with Gemini] is that the show is never to be done in a conventional theatre,” said Casemore. “A bar is the space for this show: that’s [the audience] it’s for, and that’s where it belongs. I was very excited that Prude had that sensibility as well. So we sweet-talked our way into Next Stage putting us in Tallulah’s — which is a first for the festival!”

“I’m so excited to do it at Tallulah’s,” agreed Campbell. “I’ve actually dreamed of doing it there since I started writing Prude. It’s a full-circle dream-coming-true moment. I give big props to Louise: she was the one to be like, ‘[Gemini] can only exist [in a bar space.]’ I think that helped Next Stage make the decision that they should use the cabaret.”

Casemore explained how each production of Gemini changes based on the bar where it takes place. “There are always rewrites to integrate the reality of the neighbourhoods, the space, the city we’re in,” she said. “When we did High Performance Rodeo, we were at the Royal Canadian Legion Number One: Canada’s literal first legion hall ever built. Nothing more legion hall than darts, right? So we actually built playing darts [into that production.] We were tossing darts over the heads of audience members on really busy nights.

“Where will Tallulah’s live inside this iteration of Gemini?” Casemore wondered. “What will be specific to this space? I’m excited to discover what that is.”

For Campbell, performing Prude at Tallulah’s is a chance to acknowledge the evolution of their own relationship to bar culture. “Prude explores my understanding of my own sexuality and asexuality, but it also became an exploration of my own substance abuse issues,” said Campbell, who is sober. “Toronto generally is a place where I struggled deeply with my addiction. To be back performing this play while being in a healthier space for myself is really exciting.”

Campbell hopes Prude will encourage audiences to recognize the empowering nature of saying no. “No is just as powerful as yes,” they said. “Prude Magazine — which is not attached to the show, but we happen to both love the word prude — they have this amazing motto that is ‘Free by our yes, free by our no.’ It’s about slut and prude empowerment together. I really live by that. With sex, with drugs, with everything, you have agency. Whatever your choice is, it belongs to you.”

Gemini, likewise, is “an invitation to have a larger conversation,” said Casemore. She hopes audience members who don’t work in hospitality will “walk away from the show recognizing the amount of hospitality people they interact with on a daily basis, and maybe have a drop of consideration or curiosity about their own relationship with hospitality folks.” 

And “for my bar people [in the audience],” Casemore added, “I just want to love you and hang out with you. I’m really excited to connect with [the Church street] neighbourhood in particular, which has a really rich restaurant and bar scene. There’s no folks like bar folks.”

The 2024 Next Stage Theatre Festival runs from October 16 to 27 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Tickets are available here.

WRITTEN BY

Nathaniel Hanula-James

Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.

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