Royal visit to AIDS hospice sparks RMTC drama

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This article was published 19/03/2025 (580 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You’ve heard of a singing waiter. How about a waiting librettist?

About 20 years ago, Nick Green was a tuxedo-clad server at Johnson’s Cafe, a Jazz Age-themed restaurant in the tourist village of Fort Edmonton Park. The staff was required to direct diners to the omelette and waffle bars, but Green, a recent theatre school graduate, had another form of direction in mind.

“I talked my manager into letting me run a dinner-theatre series, and found myself writing four plays and musicals a year for about three years,” says Green, whose fact-based queer history show Casey and Diana opens Thursday on Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s John Hirsch mainstage after successful runs in Stratford and at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre.

“So I’ve been writing plays since 2006, but my early work is not really for too much public consumption, because it’s all pretty bad.”

Casting his fellow art-school alumni, who were also employed on the theme park’s 1920 Street, Green wrote such shows as the big-tent musical The Bearded Lady, the pulpy The Curse of Pigeon Lake and Poof, the Musical, a show about a teenage witch that was eventually nominated for an Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award.

“It was really my own playwriting school. At the time, I thought this was the best stuff ever written, and the audience reception was pretty generous, but re-reading it now? I think they’re best left living on my hard drives,” says Green, who was paid $100 per script.

After his time in Edmonton wound up, Green went to Toronto to pursue acting, but soon realized it wasn’t what he wanted to do for a living.

“Even when I had a gig, I was really unhappy as an actor. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t like the instability and I didn’t like serving tables,” he says.

Not quite ready to shut the door on a career in theatre, Green continued writing while completing a social work program at York University.

The pivot point for his playwriting practice came when fellow artist Jonathan Seinen was working on a Toronto production of The Normal Heart. In considering Larry Kramer’s groundbreaking drama about gay writers navigating the AIDS outbreak in 1980s New York, Seinen wondered to Green what the story onstage might have looked like if it were set north of the border.

“I think us Canadians are very used to seeing American stories as a surrogate for our own histories, especially when it comes to queer history. Many of the seminal queer plays are American, and we love them in Canada, but ultimately, they aren’t our stories,” says Green.

That set Green off on exploring the Toronto publication The Body Politic, published monthly by Pink Triangle Press from 1971 to 1987.

Within the magazine’s pages, Green was able to track the progress of the queer rights and liberation movements, and because many of its contributors and subjects were still around, he was able to interview them for the play that became Body Politic.

Produced in 2016 as a co-production between Seinen’s lemonTree creations and the influential queer company Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Green’s breakthrough work won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for outstanding new play.

Two years before Body Politic opened, Green’s research sent him to the basement of the Toronto Reference Library, where he was hit by an idea for another work of what he calls “queer Canadian historical fiction.”

“I was going through reel after reel of archived issues of Body Politic. I found it really moving, because if you fast-forward through microfiche, you see this blur of newspaper pages. It felt like I was quite literally fast-forwarding through time. You can see the evolution of AIDS being something talked about in the back section to the opinion section to the front page,” he says.

One story in particular stuck out to Green: an item about the upcoming visit, in 1991, of Princess Diana to Casey House, the country’s first free-standing AIDS hospice, still operating today as a specialty hospital where people living with HIV are treated.

“At the time I was very deep into Body Politic, but I earmarked it, thinking, this is something I need to revisit. And so when the time came and I was asked by the Stratford Festival to pitch some ideas of a show I’d want to work on with them, this memory leapt back into my brain.”

After eight years of development, Casey and Diana premièred in Stratford in 2023 — directed by Andrew Kushnir, who also helms the RMTC production — winning the OntarioStage Award for best new play and paving the way for a playwright’s dream run: by the end of 2026, Casey and Diana will have been staged 12 times in Canada and the United States.

“Canadian theatre requires patience,” says Green. “So one of the things I’d say is most important is working with people who honour your original intention and entry points. Over time, revisiting and trying to stay clear on what you want to say. It’s so helpful to have people on your team who can remind you what that initial spark was.”

For Green, that was the photograph of Diana holding the hands of a Casey House patient, an image that struck him — as a playwright, as a social worker and as a queer Canadian — as emblematic of the simple power of well-intentioned, judgment-free care.

It was worth the wait.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com