Cast Set For ROBERTO ZUCCO At Buddies In Bad Times Theatre

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre has revealed the cast and creative team for the opening show of the company's 46th season, Roberto Zucco by Bernard-Marie Koltès translated by Martin Crimp.

witzel will direct a cast of award-winning actors in this rarely performed neo-noir masterwork from legendary postmodernist French writer Koltès.

The cast features Jakob Ehman in the title role, with Samantha Brown, Fiona Highet, Kwaku Okyere, Oyin Oladejo, and Daniel MacIvor.

The creative team includes set and costume designer Michelle Tracey, lighting designer Logan Raju Cracknell, sound designer and composer Dasha Plett, and dramaturge Gislina Patterson.

"This incredible team contains a broad spectrum of queerness in terms of generations and approaches, politics and locations, and I'm thrilled to bring them together for our season opener," says witzel. "Roberto Zucco is a piece so exciting and challenging that it begs to be done at Buddies. It's wild and violent, but it's also tender, funny and epic. The queerness of the piece lurks just beneath the surface, as an experience of the world's violence-it's a lens and not a storyline."

"Buddies has long been the institutional home for formally daring, carnal, contemporary performance that pushes Toronto the Good out of its comfort zone," he adds. "Blending the brutality of Tarantino with the mythic scope of Pasolini, this piece demands ferocious actors and a daring design team-I'm pinching myself at the talent that's gathered to (re)introduce Toronto to Buddies as a place for boundary-pushing queer aesthetics."

Set in France in 1989, and written as Koltès was dying of AIDS, the play traverses the realms between true crime and mythic fantasy. It delves into the criminal underworld of Europe, offering a critique of rampant capitalism and liberal family values.

Witness the living through the eyes of the dead. Roberto Zucco lures us into the wet streets and gloomy rooms of 1980s Europe, where a charming antihero battles his cosmic urge to kill. Koltès' sordid swan song is Greek tragedy kissed by Gregg Araki-breathlessly violent but with a pitch-black wit and occasional syrupy sweetness that leaves you disarmed. It shines a blistering sun on our darkest impulses; by the end, you'll wonder if we're just flightless birds in the face of our fates.

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