A Nice Day in the Park with Sky Gilbert
20 Feb 2020.

In November 2018, Sky Gilbert severed all ties to Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, which he created and ran for 18 years. At the time, he had left the company to teach at the University of Guelph, but still mounted one show there every year in the spring. Then everything blew up. Sky wrote a blog article that offended someone, leading the theatre’s current artistic director Evalyn Parry to cancel a celebratory staged reading of Sky's Drag Queens in Outer Space. Then Sky announced that because of the cancellation, "I am withdrawing the workshop of my opera Shakespeare's Criminal (composed by Dustin Peters) from the 40th Anniversary Season of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. It's time for me to go." It all happened so quickly it left some of us in shock. So it is understandable that it took Gilbert over a year to process it. But process it he did, in the only way he knows how - he wrote a play about it.

Called A Nice Day in the Park, it concerns a confrontation between a young trans man, played by Harrison Browne, and an older gay man, played by Sky. Both of them work for an AIDS service organization. Though it is a bit weird that he is basically playing himself in this show, he tells me that, “I made my character a little more stodgy than I am.”

In the aftermath of the Buddies divorce, Sky was unfairly vilified by Twitter and Facebook activists with very low thresholds of tolerance. “I’m not on social media, so I don’t even know what goes on there,” he jokes. At the time, Buddies replaced the staged reading with a ‘long table’ discussion, which sounds like absolute torture. “I watched the whole ‘long table’ online and it was pretty fascinating. I compare it to the Salem witch trials,” he says grinning. Since then, he’s only been back once. “I went back to see a friend’s play. I snuck in. I feel that it is a dangerous place for me on every level. Believe it or not, I’m a pretty sensitive individual, and it wouldn’t be pleasant to be yelled at or confronted. But also artistically I have to separate myself from the theatre. I haven’t talked to Evalyn in person about any of this . . . The part that hurts the most is that, having been demonised, the incident has made it difficult for me to mentor young queer professional actors in the Toronto theatre scene, which is something I used to enjoy”

It’s flustering because although Sky Gilbert is technically an aging white man with privilege, he is also an old-school rebel, a radical and an activist. He’s never shied away from discussions of gender or sexuality, having written plays for Nina Arsenault and about Chelsea Manning. “I have no problem with trans people. I have trouble with trans theory, the idea that there should be no gender. I think gender is here to stay. We have to constantly rebel against it and challenge it, but to say that we’re working towards a world without men or women is not desirable.”

You just know that A Nice Day in the Park will be anything but.