Stage/Theatre

What: Roberto Zucco
Where: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St.
When: Thurs., Sept. 19 until Sat., Oct. 5
Why you should go: Director ted witzel says Bernard-Marie Koltès’s postmodern neo-noir offers a provocative blend of beauty and brutality.

THEATRE DIRECTOR ted witzel was in university when he first encountered French postmodernist Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Roberto Zucco, the jagged neo-noir he’s now staging at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (where he’s been artistic director for just over a year). In a post-rehearsal interview, he tells me about that first, charged reaction: “What the fuck is this writing?” he remembers himself asking. “I need to know what the rest of this play is, because these monologues are so unhinged… what is going on here?”

But it was only when he was living in Berlin five years ago that he started understanding how to approach this loose adaptation of mid-20th-century Italian serial killer Roberto Succo’s life. The missing ingredient? Rage.

After dashing to the corner of the rehearsal studio to retrieve a book of art by David Wojnarowicz (an East Village radical who, like Koltès, died young of AIDS), he tells me that seeing an exhibit of the artist’s work at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art gave him a new perspective on the anger spurring queer thinking in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

“Wojnarowicz’s work is such a different lens on the AIDS crisis — a different expression of queer rebellion and queer rage than I’d encountered in any of the more pop culture expressions of it,” he says. “Seeing this intersection of the forces of capitalism with the tenderness of the decaying and marginalized body… brought me so much closer to the experience of being queer and really fucking angry at the time.”

Several AIDS-related plays have hit Canadian stages recently, with Nick Green’s Casey and Diana finding particular success. But a lot of them are too well-behaved for witzel. “There’s been so many AIDS narratives… that have a kind of sentimentality to them,” he says. “But so many of them don’t adequately contain the rage or ask: ‘what does it mean to be in a queer space? What does the rage look like in ourselves, with each other?’”

This is witzel’s first time directing a full production in Toronto since the pandemic started. He tells me that while he’s nervous as ever — “I find the first day of rehearsal fucking terrifying and sweaty, it’s just awful” — it’s “been amazing” having his collaborators interact with this text he’s cherished for so long.

“With every piece, you spend so long with what you personally are finding inside of it,” he says. “I’m a night owl, so it’s usually at one in the morning that I’m digging into it and thinking about it, or it’s happening in my bathtub.”

Then, coming into the rehearsal hall, “It’s like you take something out into the daylight and see how the colours are different. Suddenly… it becomes a three-dimensional thing and a mirror for other people’s histories and desires and ways of seeing the world.”

And while the production deals with some complex themes, witzel is careful to underline that the team is also aiming to make it a great night out. “It’s a challenging play because it has brutality to it, but it’s also a very beautiful and sumptuous piece,” he says. “We’re gonna provoke you, and we hope it’ll change you. But above all, we’re not here to feed you platitudes: We’re here to show you a good fucking time.”