The stillness of a 1950s Ontario farmhouse may not sound like the setting for a theatrical firestorm, but in Emily Paterson’s new play BUTCH/FEMME (which opens Sept. 21 at Theatre Passe Muraille, ok?) that’s exactly what it becomes. A knock at the door shatters Jenny’s quiet night, ushering in Alice, the woman she thought she’d left in the past. What follows is one evening of charged intimacy, old wounds, and the kind of truths that refuse to stay buried. Winner of the President’s Award for Outstanding Production at the Hart House Drama Festival, BUTCH/FEMME is more than just a period piece; it’s a poignant reflection on love, identity, and the vanishing spaces where queer women have gathered, loved, and survived. I caught up with Emily Paterson to talk about the play, the urgent need for sapphic stories on stage, and what it means to carve out space for lesbian narratives.
JG: BUTCH/FEMME is set in 1950s rural Ontario, yet feels acutely relevant today. What made that particular time and place the right backdrop for telling this story?
Emily Paterson: I was particularly interested in examining how the past influences the present and how past issues persist in the present. You know, I think there’s a tendency when we’re approaching historic stories to think this is in the past and this doesn’t happen anymore, but as the play progresses, I’m hoping the audience will slowly start to draw the connections between these past events and the present experiences of lesbians today. The rural setting was partially to look at the ways that queer people have always existed beyond the city, but also to grapple with these larger themes of community and seeking community and the tensions that arise if you are in an isolated place like a small Ontario town.
JG: You’ve spoken about the scarcity of sapphic stories onstage, especially those centring butch identities. Did you feel any challenges in writing a play that really centred not just lesbians, but butch identities as well?
Emily Paterson: I personally don’t think there were any roadblocks or struggles. I would say the most difficult part was finding the history and finding real historic archival things because I wanted to ground it in real history. I didn’t want it to be fictitious, even though it is fiction. The places that they talk about in the play are real, real events that happened and real ideas, etc. And that was the most difficult thing to find because lesbian history is so rarely talked about, but just queer history in general isn’t archived and kept track of the same way because these things were very secretive, especially in that time.
JG: How did you go about gathering historical context and finding these real stories to draw from?
Emily Paterson: There are a lot of good resources online. The Queer Archives have a great database for Toronto history. I looked at that a lot. Also, I was on ProQuest looking at old newspaper articles and things like that, finding firsthand evidence and accounts of these places that existed. That was all very beneficial to crafting this play.
JG: There’s a political layer in how BUTCH/FEMME speaks to the disappearance of lesbian bars and queer women’s spaces in Toronto. How do you hope audiences connect the personal drama of Jenny and Alice to these broader cultural absences?
Emily Paterson: Yeah, I think with the experiences of Jenny and Alice, the biggest arc of their relationship and the biggest struggle of their relationship was their individual desires for community and finding community, as well as their connection to the place they live in versus leaving and trying to go to the city. That’s a big cause of turmoil for them and a big internal conflict for both of them. And that is still a conflict that we find today as lesbians. In the play, Alice talks about a real bar called The Continental that did exist in Toronto from the late 1940s, post World War II, into the ’70s.
I’m really hoping that people of my generation and younger queer people who have not experienced exclusive lesbian bars and spaces in Toronto will be able to hear Alice’s story and be encouraged to make a space, to find a space, just like Alice wants. But then also really relate to Jenny and her struggles to really feel seen in a space. I’m also hoping to build on the lesbian history and tradition of using theatre as a space. And, turn BUTCH/FEMME into an event that is a lesbian space in itself. It’s a play written by a lesbian, for lesbians, about lesbians. You know, and I’m hoping in a sense that it will become a space in its own right.
JG: Why do you think that there has been such a struggle for lesbian spaces and bars to maintain a foothold in Toronto?
Emily Paterson: It’s definitely rooted in the patriarchy. Space is something that has historically always been dominated by men and masculinity, just like most facets of the world. Except for the home in a way. The home has always been seen as the space for women. And so we see bars pop up for women, but women don’t have the same financial capabilities as men. And overall, there is just this trend of men imposing themselves on spaces for women and not finding it fair that there’s a space that isn’t for them, especially a lesbian space, which completely decenters men.
Then also, like I said, economically, managers of these spaces might expand to a male audience or a general queer audience over a lesbian audience because women are spending less money at the bars because systemically they make less money than men do, you know? There’s a real imbalance of power and finances that just really don’t allow for lesbians to build a space or to have a space for very long before it gets overtaken by men or by a general queer audience.
JG: The title itself, BUTCH/FEMME, is bold, almost confrontational. What do those words mean to you, and how do you hope audiences wrestle with them as the story unfolds?
Emily Paterson: I really wanted a very bold and explicit title. I wanted someone to be able to see the title of the play and go in knowing exactly what they’re going to see. Butch and Femme are very polarizing identities. Butchness itself is an identity that still exists, but has decreased in popularity a lot. And butch and then fem, F E M M E, not F E M, are like the two ends of the lesbian presentation spectrum. There are presumptions about them that people make, especially around second-wave feminism. A lot of people would see butchness, and they would see being femme as trying to emulate heterosexuality or pretend heterosexuality, which is not true.
In the lesbian community, we know butchness is about using masculinity and masculine presentation, not for violence like traditional masculinity, but for care and protection, and to protect women and to stand up for women. And we know hyperfemininity in a lesbian sense is about using your hyperfemininity not to fall into societal expectations of women, but to use your femininity as a tool to find power and empowerment in your femininity. And so, titling this play with these two very polarizing and distinct identities, I’m aware that people are going to go in with these assumptions about what they’re going to see. They’re going to see a very cold, stone butch, you know, on stage and then her femme. And they’re going to think, this is a lesbian couple, and they’re going to think they know exactly what it is, you know? But as the play progresses, you realize that maybe these notions of what Butch and Femme are aren’t quite what people assume and aren’t necessarily this pretend heterosexuality that a lot of people think it is and that there’s a lot more nuance to these identities that have become less and less popular over time.
JG: Oh, for sure. How did you approach playing with those tropes and the stereotypes associated with Butch and Femme identities without getting lost in the cliches and being able to expand it out into something different?
Emily Paterson: A lot of this play is very much grounded in reality. It’s naturalistic, that’s how we’re presenting it. Having these two characters just seem like very real people was very important for me, to humanize them and not have them lean into these cliches. I also found that using secondary sources and talking to butches was very important for capturing the right feeling and the right experience because I’m not butch myself. Reading books like Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg and talking to people in the community who are butch was very important to me to make sure I was presenting an authentic representation of what butchness is and to challenge these assumptions about masculinity and presenting as masculine. I don’t want to spoil anything in the play, but there’s a progression throughout the play. You’re going to meet Alice, and you’re going to think she’s exactly the hard, cold, stone butch you’re going to assume she is. But as she reveals more about herself throughout the play, that’s when it starts to become challenged and warped.
JG: How has the play evolved since winning the President’s Award for Outstanding Production at the Hart House Drama Festival?
Emily Paterson: It’s definitely evolved a lot. When I went into the festival, I knew it was a festival setting. I had participated in other shows in the festival for the previous two years of my degree, so I was familiar with the setting, and I had a sense of what reads very well in a festival setting and what doesn’t. BUTCH/FEMME wasn’t done when I put it in the festival. I had reached an impasse with it where I knew it wasn’t done, but I didn’t know where to go with it. And I was like, you know what? I really think I just need to get it on its feet, get it out there, and have it be embodied to see how it would develop. Then it read very well at the festival. I think because it wasn’t complete, people wanted more.
Since Drama Fest, I’ve been working with a lot of creators. Marjorie Chan (artistic director at Theatre Passe Muraille) has given me some great advice. She gave me some great feedback on the play in the adjudication at the festival itself. Scholar and queer artist Moynan King has also been a huge help. The play was 45 minutes long at the festival because we had a time constraint there, but now I’ve made it longer. It’s about an hour to an hour and 10 minutes. So I’ve made it longer. I’ve expanded their story. I’ve given more complications to their relationships and their histories, and more nuances to these characters, and they feel a lot more fleshed out. The play really feels complete to me now, which it didn’t back in the festival setting. And I’m really grateful as well because it’s not completely different. We brought back our original actors, Annabelle Gillis, who plays Jenny, and Tessa Kramer, who plays Belle. They’ve also helped with the development of the script and their portrayals of these characters, and what they tell me they believe about these characters and they believe about these characters history. It’s really been a collaborative process and a very slow process to bring it to this more complete version that we’ll see at Theatre Passe Muraille.
JG: Looking ahead, what kinds of queer stories do you still feel are missing from Canadian stages, and what do you hope BUTCH/FEMME sparks in terms of future representation?
Emily Paterson: I’m hoping it’ll create a renaissance of lesbian theatre. Maybe that’s a very bold thing to say, a very confident thing to say, but I know I’m not the only person right now writing lesbian theatre. In the Heart House Drama Festival, I think there were nine shows this year, and three of them told sapphic stories, one of them being BUTCH/FEMME. If a third of the student festival for the up-and-coming artists of Toronto theatre are portraying sapphic stories, that’s huge. Even just how much BUTCH/FEMME has really resonated with people. I have people who I don’t know telling me how excited they were about BUTCH/FEMME when they say it was announced. We need more lesbian theatre. The 90s were like a real heyday of lesbian theatre, especially in Toronto at Buddies in Bad Times. And then it kind of dissipated in terms of other forms of representation, other stories we want to see, which is all important. All forms of queer representation are important. But we’ve been seeing fewer and fewer lesbian stories on stages in the last 15 to 20 years. I’m really hoping that BUTCH/FEMME will bring new sapphic stories to the forefront and continue to explore different aspects of sapphic identity and various eras of sapphic history.
BUTCH/FEMME runs Sept 20th to 27th, with a big opening night performance on Sept 23rd. Tickets available here.
