Buddies in Bad Times

Buddies In Bad Times

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is a Canadian professional theatre company.

Based in Toronto, Ontario and founded in 1978 by Matt Walsh, Jerry Ciccoritti, and Sky Gilbert, Buddies in Bad Times is dedicated to "the promotion of queer theatrical expression".

Gilbert was the company's first artistic director. Sue Golding played a pivotal role as President from the early 1980s to the early 1990s.

Buddies' inaugural production was a Gilbert written play, Angels in Underwear. An anthology of Beat poetry, Angels starred Walsh as Jack Kerouac and Ciccoritti as Allen Ginsberg, and was performed at The Dream Factory on Queen Street in Toronto in September 1978.

Gilbert, Walsh and Ciccoritti, along with playwright Fabian Boutilier, subsequently founded the Rhubarb Festival of Canadian Plays, first produced by the theatre company at The Dream Factory in January 1979 and featuring short plays written by local, unknown playwrights directed by all four of Rhubarb's founders.

The name Buddies in Bad Times was taken from the poem of the same title by the French poet Jacques Prévert. It was originally the expression of the close friendship that prevailed between Walsh and Gilbert during their years at York University and The Three Schools of Art.

Although the company, under Gilbert's leadership, eventually achieved notoriety and success in the 1980s as a so-called "gay" theatre company, it was not founded with that intent. Instead Buddies was among a number of alternative companies founded by a new generation of mid-1970s theatre school graduates (many out of York University) shut out of the "professional" theatre scene due to their youth. Other companies founded at this time in Toronto included Nightwood Theatre and Necessary Angel.

Shortly after Walsh and Ciccoritti stopped working with the company in its infancy, Gilbert moved its artistic direction toward the then emerging gay subculture of Toronto. Buddies has become one of North America's premiere examplars of the synthesis between so-called gay culture and modern theatre and has spawned the successful careers of dozens of Canadian actors, playwrights and directors.