Interview: Emily Paterson of BUTCH/FEMME at Theatre Passe Muraille

What’s it like to have a major Toronto theatre opening before your university graduation?

Emily Paterson’s BUTCH/FEMME opens Theatre Passe Muraille’s 2025/2026 season after receiving top honours at the University of Toronto Hart House Drama Festival. In 1950s rural Ontario, Jenny’s life is disrupted when former flame Alice returns from Toronto to share her experiences in the big city and lay to rest questions about the relationship she left behind.

The Green Couch Theatre Company production questions the binary meaning of the labels “butch” and “femme,” while examining the need for human connection that’s only amplified within marginalized groups.

BroadwayWorld spoke to Paterson about the play’s journey and how she hopes the production will create a sapphic space to reflect on other spaces Toronto has recently lost.

BWW: What inspired you to write BUTCH/FEMME?

PATERSON: I started writing this play in my second-year playwriting class. I'd recently finished reading Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, and I was doing some own personal research on the history of sapphic spaces and stories in Toronto, and then I had just finished reading a crucial piece of lesbian literary canon. I was very inspired by this, and I was playing around with this big lesbian breakup story.

Then, as I kept working on the play, I realized it was a lot simpler, but also more complicated than I was initially envisioning. The part that should be focused on was their relationship dynamic and the history aspect of this play, and the history of these lesbian identities that do exist in the present, even if it's in a different way than they did back in the time this play is set.

BWW: You've already had a production of it at the Hart House Drama Festival. What was the experience of the first production like?

PATERSON: It’s very different, because that was campus theatre; it was entirely student-run. The drama festival is run by theater professionals at Hart House, who are employed by the university. But everything else about the production is entirely student-led. The coordinators are students, the producers are students, the directors are students, all the playwrights are students, all the actors. So, it's a real learning experience in how to put something together, and it's a festival environment, so it's a lot quicker. We had 6 weeks to put it together, and it's a lot more stripped back in a festival setting. It's a lot of learning there, and figuring things out. It's very DIY; there aren't as many resources when you're doing it in that setting, whereas doing it professionally, we have a lot more tools that we can use to put together a great show.

BWW: How did you go from the student theatre festival to the Passe Muraille stage? What was that process like?

PATERSON: It was a “being in the right place at the right time” sort of situation. Marjorie Chan,  the artistic director of Passe Muraille, was adjudicating the Hart House Festival that year, where we were competing. She awarded BUTCH/FEMME Outstanding Production, which is the big award of the festival. I sent her a very straightforward email a couple days after, just thanking her for the award, and I asked her if she had any advice. I wasn’t done with this project; this was me trying to get it on its feet for the first time. I asked if she had any recommendations of where I could go? What I could do with it?

I thought she was going to tell me to do a Fringe Festival, but instead she said, what if you did it here? What if you did it at Passe Muraille as part of our season? It was honestly the most life-changing moment. I was in line in the dining hall, and then I just see this email that I never expected I would get at this point in my life. I learned since that she was actually planning on reaching out to me about it.

BWW: You said you weren’t done with the show yet, when it was in the competition. For the version that you're presenting at Passe Muraille, have there been changes? Have you revised the script, or made creative changes?

PATERSON: It's the same, but different. It's still the same cast, Annabelle Gillis and Tessa Kramer, who play Jenny and Alice. Anya [Ivantchenko], our sound designer, has composed new music for us alongside some of the original design, but we do have a new lighting and set designer on the team. There are some creative team differences, but a lot of the core of the team is the same. I've added to the story. I haven't changed anything necessarily, but I've added to it to make their story more interesting and have more depth. With the festival, we were working on a restricted time of 40 or 45 minutes, but now I have unlimited time. At its core, it is still the same message and idea.

BWW: In terms of the message, you’ve said that you’re interested in exploring the erasure of sapphic spaces in Toronto. For a long time, there were few open sapphic spaces in Toronto, and then there was a heyday with several, and now there’s again a dearth of these gathering places. What is the connection between the disappearance of these spaces and your play?

PATERSON: A major part of the theming of this play, and something both of the characters talk about, is their search for community and their need for community, and the different ways they find it, and the different places they find it. I was very inspired by some archival research I did about the Continental, which was essentially the first lesbian bar in Toronto. It doesn't exist anymore, it was condemned in the 70s, but it was the spot for lesbians from the late 1940s through to the 1970s when it got condemned.

And it's this notion that there's always been a space for lesbians historically in Toronto. If you go back into the archives, if you look at newspapers, historical accounts, there's always been lesbian bars in Toronto. We're just finding in the last 10 years or so that they're disappearing.

We don't have a designated lesbian bar in Toronto anymore. The only one that we have that is somewhat more sapphic-oriented is Crews and Tangos on Church Street, which is under threat now as well of being downsized. We're just increasingly seeing a loss of space. I had a great discussion with Moynan King, who's a queer artist, Canadian artist. And we were talking about how lesbian stories and narratives do come in waves. There was a real heyday in the 90s, like you were talking about, of a lot of lesbian theater, and theater and cabaret and performance-based spaces have always been there for lesbians, even if bars necessarily haven't.

But now we've seen those disappear, and I'm hoping with BUTCH/FEMME to have it not only be a reflection or a discussion on this issue of community and this desire for community and space, but also for it to become a space in itself, because it's a very explicitly lesbian play. I'm hoping that it will curate a sapphic space around it, when people go to see the show, when they talk about the show, we will create a space where one doesn't exist anymore.

BWW: What do you think is behind the disappearance of these spaces? Is it corporatization, or is it the increasing move to online connection, or something else?

PATERSON: I agree with online, I think, like with most things, the pandemic had a large effect on this loss of space in the last 5 years. But I think, overall, it's a systemic issue rooted in the patriarchal power over space. Space is a very political concept, and the idea of having a space for marginalized political identities, because queerness is a political identity, is a systemic issue.

Men will always have that precedent, because they have more money and power than women in most cases, and so when there is a place that is specifically reserved for women, and specifically women who de-center men, like sapphics, you will find eventually that there is this desire for the patriarchal power to assert itself over these spaces, whether it is through economics, the managers of these places going, we need more money, let's advertise to a more general audience, let's advertise to gay men as well, or whether it is through force, through bar raids and harassment from the police that shuts down these bars that exist.

BWW: However, the setting of your play is actually not Toronto, but a more rural area. What do you see as the difference between rural and urban sapphic life?

PATERSON: I'm from rural Ontario. I'm from a small town, not as rural as the one in the play, but from a small town that really doesn't have a lesbian culture and space, and the difference is very apparent, especially moving here at 18 for university when I did. I went from being in a place where there wasn't really a place to be queer, there wasn't a space to be queer, to meet other queer people, to being in a place where you can walk down the street holding hands with your girlfriend, and no one cares. And for it to be very open and accepted and normalized here.

I set this play not directly in Toronto, but Toronto-adjacent, where they're talking about Toronto. One character, she moves to Toronto, and then she comes back, which is the inciting incident of the play. She shares what she learned since moving to the city, and the differences she's observed. For the characters in this play, for the time they're living in, Toronto isn't necessarily a more accepting space than their rural hometown ends up being, but in the present it is a very, very different experience, and a very liberating experience to come to a place where you can be so openly queer, where queerness is so normalized, and it's not something that “others” you, like in a more rural setting.

BWW: Are there reverberations in the play of the current state of things, or is it fully a period piece?

PATERSON: It is a naturalism period piece, so it is historically accurate, stays rooted in the past.

But what I'm interested in exploring by setting a story like this in the past is the way the past is speaking to the present, and the way we can see present issues reflected in the past. I think there's a tendency, when people are approaching a historic story, especially something in relation to queerness, which is so much more accepted than it was back then, to assume this is the past, this is history, things aren't like that now.

But very quickly, when watching BUTCH/FEMME, you realize a lot of the problems and the issues they're talking about in this play still exist: this desire for community, this desire for space, the complications of their own identities that they have, their own inner struggles. It's very much still relevant to the present. You just don't notice it as quickly because it is so rooted in history, you know? It takes a minute to realize that, oh, these are still issues that are happening now, which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to give the audience a moment to think and reflect on how these problems are appearing now.

BWW: It's also cyclical, right? We’re seeing that in the US especially right now, but even in Canada, there are certain aspects of queer acceptance where we feel that we have made these significant advances, and yet backsliding is so easy. The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth.

PATERSON: It always goes back, yeah. Exactly.

BWW: Is there anything else that you want the audience to know, going into this show, in terms of what to expect?

PATERSON: I really want to challenge people's assumptions about, specifically, the labels “butch” and “femme.” It presents itself as being a very binary thing. We're talking about “butch,” which is one end of the lesbian identity scale, and then “femme,” which is the opposite. I want people to challenge the assumptions they make about these identities, especially because these are identities, specifically butch, that are very misrepresented and underrepresented, and also very misunderstood.

I want to challenge people's notions about these identities, and perhaps give them space to reflect more on how these identities exist, even if it's in different language today, and the histories of these identities, not just for queer culture, but for society as a whole.