Robert O’Hara’s semi-autobiographical Bootycandy arrives at Buddies in Bad Times as a bristling live-wire experience, co-presented by Obsidian Theatre. It offers a funny, bawdy, bruising, and biting insight into how Black queer people form—and resist—the policing of identity by family, faith, art, desire, and social expectation.
This elliptical play follows Sutter, a Black gay man, from childhood into adulthood through a collage of loosely connected scenes. The title is a childhood euphemism for the penis, taught to Sutter by his mother. It returns throughout the play as a reminder of how early the language of shame, desire, and racialized sexuality is coded. O’Hara’s structure is deliberately kaleidoscopic: it presents in succession ten sharply contrasting vignettes that pivot from farce to confessional to satire to grief — creating a rhythm that feels both improvisational and meticulously scripted.
That rhythm demands a production willing to match its chameleonic volatility, and Jay Northcott’s brisk, assured direction ensures just this. The Canadian premiere leans into the script’s tonal whiplash without sanding down its jagged edges. The staging plays with ’70s and ’80s sitcom gloss, hyper-real close-ups of memory, and the kind of theatrical sleight-of-hand that turns a living room into a church sanctuary, then a bar, then a conference breakout room — all in the space of a breath. Nick Blais’ orange and plexiglass set structures suggest both domestic comfort and institutional weight, with certain pieces suspended from the ceiling (one of which, at least to my eye, resembles a penis cut in half … perhaps a visual reminder of how the pressures of the body and the implications of sexuality are always hovering, literally, right over our heads). Arianna Moodie’s suggestive costumes allow for lightning-fast changes as one character transforms into another, while Darren Shaen’s lighting and David Ariza’s sound design sharpen the comic beats … and underscore the sobering aftershocks.
The show depends on performers who can change registers as quickly as the script demands, and this superb ensemble is packed with them. Kyle Brown anchors the evening as Sutter, tracing the character’s evolution at all ages with a wary, watchful, understated intelligence. Christopher Allen is a marvel in multiple roles – particularly as a drag-queen preacher who commands the stage with flamboyant and fearless charisma, and later as Sutter’s granny, filled with the sass, wit, and wisdom of generational memory. Dan Mousseau brings a winning combination of nuance and excess, plus impeccable comic timing, to Roy, a passive-aggressively closeted gay man and conference moderator who is sidelined by the panelists, and to Clint, a traveller whose search for connection in the wrong places is rendered with pathos and perversion.
And Meghan Swaby? Well, she is a special delight. Her over-the-top turn as a mother instructing her son on how he will spend his summer “manning up” is simply delicious — pitch-perfect in its blend of maternal authority, comic timing, witless conviction. Swaby and Helen Belay are perfect complements in their scenes together, such as a gossipy multi-person telephone tag exchange about baby names that crackles with the kind of specificity that makes us laugh before we realize all the implications. Later, the two reunite as a lesbian couple bearing those baby names, who are undergoing a “disconnection ceremony.” In both, their synchronicity crackles.
What makes this production so remarkable is its refusal to let the audience settle into a single mode of watching. The first several vignettes can feel disconnected: comic sketches, domestic scenes, sermons, and confessions arrive without an obvious through-line … until suddenly, their purpose comes into focus. O’Hara’s structure is deliberately destabilizing: pendulum swings of tone keep us off-balance, thwarting our assumptions about what kind of “story” we are watching. And just as we grow comfortable laughing, the simpler comedy sharpens into satire. Then just as satire seems to have the upper hand, it gives way to grief, ragged desire … or brute violence. The bar-room game of Truth or Dare that anchors the second act is the play in miniature: an invitation that escalates, a dare that stops being a game, and a truth that arrives like a glass of cold water flung in the face. It also exposes the loneliness beneath Sutter’s bravado: he engineers the encounter, forces his friend’s complicity, and turns his incapacity for intimacy into something sinister.
The unpredictability of the viewing experience cannot ultimately be separated from the fact that everything in Bootycandy is seen through the lenses of race, queerness and inequality. Sutter’s journey is never simply a coming-of-age story: it is an account of how a young Black gay man learns to tread the world’s assumptions about his body and his identity. The play shows how racism and homophobia operate not only through overt hostility but through the casual hierarchies of everyday life. Its humour is outrageous, and it never offers relief. Instead, comedy becomes a scalpel, cutting into the hypocrisies that families and communities inherit and perpetuate. Sometimes, it hurts to laugh.
In this Buddies and Obsidian Theatre co-production, the play’s American text opens onto distinctly Canadian conversations about Black queer life and belonging… about how race, sexuality, and community are also negotiated north of the 49th parallel. In the director’s note, Northcott asks whether a Black queer artist in Canada can honour the complexity of a Black American story. The production takes that question seriously without pretending to resolve it. Northcott also invites the audience to “release [its] need for structure” and enter the play’s contradictions—between individuality and community, history and the future, pleasure and pain.
His production, which is one of the most fascinating and provocative shows of the new theatre season, makes that invitation almost impossible to resist. I laughed, flinched, winced, and gasped—and I left not with comfort, but with startling images and meaningful questions. Bootycandy is theatre that pokes, prods … and bites, in all the right ways.
Bootycandy runs until October 17, 2026, at Buddies in Bad Times (12 Alexander St., Toronto). Tickets are available at buddiesInbadtimes.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
