Frontmezzjunkies reports: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Announces 2025 – 26 Season
These are the things we longed for.
June 2025 (Toronto, ON): ted witzel, Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, today announced the company’s 47th season featuring work from some of Canada’s most imaginative playwrights and artists, including world premiere productions from Bilal Baig, Jill Connell, and Susanna Fournier, critically-acclaimed work from Makram Ayache and Gabriel Dharmoo, new performance art from xLq, and the 47th annual Rhubarb!—Canada’s longest-running, genre-bending live arts festival.
Photo by Fran Chudnoff.
“Gathered around the phrase, ‘these are the things we longed for,’ 2025 – 26 has what’s maybe a more literary approach than last year. I find these works, both collectively and individually, to be arrestingly tender, poetic, and intimate. There’s something deeply disarming about the expressions of yearning that thread through the season. A longing for bodies, for touch, for intimacy, but also for seismic paradigm shifts, great unmakings, even for destruction; this longing is always reaching for revolution and utopia, against all the odds.” – ted witzel, Artistic Director, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
The season contains a number of exciting creative partnerships, including Nuit Blanche and xLq, In Arms Theatre Company, Factory Theatre, Toronto Dance Theatre, It Could Still Happen, House of Beida, and the Howland Company.
THE SEASON
The Green Line
Written & Directed by Makram Ayache (The Hooves Belonged to the Deer)
September 19 – October 4, 2025 | Opens September 25
In Arms Theatre Company in association with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Factory Theatre. Toronto Premiere. Winner of the Betty Mitchell Award for Outstanding New Play 2022.
Memory is a funny thing, so quiet if left undisturbed.
Two love stories twist together in two Beiruts riven by time and conflict. In 1978, two women share spit on the ends of cigarettes and yearn for tenderness under the tumult of war. In 2018, a foreigner and a local flirt over vodka sodas as their contradictions collect like condensation on the sides of their glasses.
Poetic realism braids past and present into the green line of vegetation that bisected the concrete of Lebanon’s capital during the civil war. The Green Line, named a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award, unearths queer history that has always been there, whether our ancestors wanted it to be inherited or erased.
The Herald
March 4 – 14, 2026 | Opens March 5
Written & Directed by Jill Connell (The Tall Building; Arctic Ocean)
An It Could Still Happen production in partnership with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. World Premiere.
The plan will always feel like a mistake. Practice the mistake.
A lecture on Antonio Banderas’ astrological chart, a chorus of garment factory workers, and a long walk in a small mortal body. Jill Connell’s poetics work their way backward, interlacing Greek myth and the grindset, trying to figure out how we got here. The Herald questions the choreography of labour as it asks us for faith and gives us something like meaning, or at least a new way of paying attention. By the end of the play, all of us will know how to be in Shoppers Drug Mart, wondering how to handle time, and what will happen to all the work we do not make.
Kainchee Lagaa + Jhooti: The Begging Brown Bitch Plays
April 1 – 18, 2026 | Opens April 2 as a Double Bill
By Bilal Baig (Acha Bacha) | Directed by Tawiah M’Carthy (CS’s Topdog/Underdog)
A House of Beida and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre co-production. World Premiere.
I’ve been a bitch as long as I can remember.
The Begging Brown Bitch Plays are about lying, sex, and rebirthing oneself: over and over and over again. Bilal Baig, Peabody Award-winning co-creator of CBC/Max/Sphere Media’s “Sort Of“, explores deception, desire, and family fractured by displacement in these two unflinching stories of Brown trans women caught between worlds.
In Kainchee Lagaa, Billo is a sex worker who spends most of her time waiting for men and eating tandoori chicken in bed. She’s saving up to run away with someone special, so tip generously. On the other side of the world, her estranged brother Arsalan is looking for something that feels like home, trying to reach back toward Billo before his survivor’s guilt swallows him whole.
In Jhooti, Sakeena leaves home for good while her sister is at work. Sakeena is a Bollywood Item Number Girl. Actually, I’m sorry, she’s not. She’s not from here, though. But she’s not a liar. She’s finally arrived, and no one has ever believed her, so can you blame her for telling the truth, even when it doesn’t match the facts?
take rimbaud
Written by Susanna Fournier (Lulu v. 7: Aspects of a Femme Fatale) | Directed by ted witzel (Buddies’ Roberto Zucco)
May 6 – 23 | Opens May 7
A Howland Company production in partnership with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. World Premiere.
This is why I quit art.
Four poets, a sloppy love triangle, an unfinished art film, and an electric oven. Can we still talk about the apocalypse as if it hasn’t already happened? It’s 2014 in Toronto (hell) and 1871 in France (also hell). The poets torture themselves to make work that means something right now, but time feels slippery, and no narrative can keep them safe. Nevertheless! Sappho’s brand manager has suggestions for her website, and queerness is really marketable right now. Especially if the queers in question are already dead.
A performance poem traversing the worlds of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Sylvia Plath, Sappho, and post-art school malaise, take rimbaud flirts with creation, revolution, and violence at the end of the world.
Rhubarb! 47
Festival Director Ludmylla Reis
February 4 –14, 2026
I eat both, and maybe even a third — all at once. They mix inside of me, and I birth out a hybrid. Diverse, unnatural, impure, unlabeled, beautiful. I make new life with my cultural cannibalism. My creation-creature is a mix of all their original beauty and their primal beast.
Welcome to Rhubarb! 47.
Rhubarb! is Buddies at its rawest: a hotbed of unruly creatives queering what it means to make and experience art. Canada’s longest-running genre-bending Live Art festival has brought you, every year, well-crafted chaos. Ludmylla Reis returns for their second year as Festival Director and they present you a group of artists smashing unfit things together into… well… art.
PRESENTATIONS
Bijuriya
November 26 – 29, 2025 | Opens November 26
Created and performed by Gabriel Dharmoo
Gabriel Dharmoo’s Bijuriya code-switches between drag, song, and sound as it navigates its creator’s dual personas. Through an exuberant medley of drag and humour, as well as an eclectic array of musical genres—ranging from original pop tunes to experimental soundscapes and Bollywood soundtracks—this performance playfully examines the role of vocality in self-expression, utilizing song, speech, and lip-syncing as tools for exploring cultural identity.
Gabriel and Bijuriya’s self-reflexive dialogue offers profound insight into the fluidity of human experience. This production is part of the Queer Voices Canada series supported by Canadian Heritage.
Make Banana Cry
January 14 – 17, 2026 | Opens January 14
Created by Andrew Tay + Stephen Thompson
A Toronto Dance Theatre production in partnership with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Toronto Premiere.
“banana” isn’t just slang—it’s a symbol of the performance, erasure, and reclamation of self.
Choreographers Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson are the co-creators of Make Banana Cry, a genre-defying work merging runway aesthetics with contemporary performance and dance. A subversive fashion show featuring a parade of body politics designed to trouble the Western gaze.
In an attempt to shake off the weight of representation and fetishization, an international cast of six East Asian artists critique, parody, and protest stereotypes of “Asian-ness.” Slipping between the codes of couture and contemporary art, straddling spectacles of consumption and entertainment, Make Banana Cry is an impressive demonstration of physicality, an unrelenting examination of Western xenophobia, and an ingenious show of humour and wit. Presented for the first time in Toronto after critically acclaimed performances at Impulstanz (Vienna), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and Festival TransAmériques (Montreal).
Nuit Blanche: Alphabet Soup
October 4, 2025
A special edition xLq WISHING WELL party
In partnership with the City of Toronto
Welcome to the ALPHABET SOUP! Which letter are you?
The iconic pop art performance duo xLq is back for the second year of Nuit Blanche at Buddies, taking over Tallulah’s Cabaret for an eccentric, chaos-forward, outrageously playful dance party inside an installation of letters.
Buddies will be covered in letters: on the walls, ceilings, and floors. Find them, unscramble them, spell a word, and meet a new friend or lover. No matter which language you speak or which alphabet you use, we need you here. We’ll have queer techno/house DJs playing all night, performers stirring the pot, and actual soup to eat!
Toronto Burlesque Festival
November 13 – 16, 2025
Let’s go ghouls!
Toronto Burlesque Festival is back at Buddies, and things are getting hot, sticky, and a little scary. From fantasy creatures to fantastic femme features, join us for four days of deliciously daring, enticingly edgy burlesque, blending dance, drag, cabaret, and circus arts into one sumptuous spectacle.
Whether you’re a burlesque aficionado or a first-time attendee, this year’s lineup of local and international performers will be sure to bewitch you. Dust off your dancing shoes, polish your rhinestones, and get ready for The Toronto Burlesque Festival – Things that Go Bump in the Night! 2025 Festival Headliners: Tre Da Marc (Minneapolis); The Foxy Lexxi (Montreal); Bettie Bombshell (Australia); and Judith Stein [FIRST Canadian Legend of Burlesque].
AND MORE!
ArtAttack!
November 6, 2025
One of Toronto’s best-loved and most outrageous art auctions, ArtAttack!, Buddies art party fundraiser extravaganza, offers art aficionados and novices alike an exclusive chance to take home a work of art by over 60 visual artists while enjoying an unforgettable night full of surprises. Live auction curation by Natalie King, Luke Painter, Mia Sandhu, and Thomas Schneider will offer the best in contemporary Canadian art.
Tallulah’s Cabaret
Buddies’ in house queer bar is open for parties and events all year-round, presenting the best queer nightlife that Toronto has to offer. With local brews and sober options that aren’t an afterthought, Tallulah’s is the come-as-you-are bar for old friends, new lovers, partiers, poets, and curious passersby.
Plus, New Ho Queen, last season’s inaugural Party-in-Residence (Night of the Dolls, Hiss Hiss B!tch, and Honey) returns for the 2025 – 26 season. Stay tuned for party dates! Check out buddiesinbadtimes.com/events or @tallulahscabaret for upcoming events.
Season tickets are on sale now. Visit BuddiesInBadTimes.com to learn more.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre | buddiesinbadtimes.com | @buddiesto
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is the world’s largest and longest-running queer theatre. For 46 years, Buddies has carved out a sexy, disobedient edge in Toronto’s theatre scene and has been a world leader in amplifying queer voices and developing their stories for the stage. In its year-round theatre season, Buddies is a home for artistic risk—a place where emerging talent hone their radical visions, and where established artists to do the daring works other theatres might shy away from. Since 1979, Buddies has welcomed over one million audience members and premiered over 1,000 new works for the stage. BMO is Buddies in Bad Times’ Lead Season Sponsor.
