I’ve spent a lot of time immersed in Nick Green’s artistic brilliance, stealthy social activism and, yes, his superqueeroism. I’ve known him for nearly 20 years, since we toured as actors in a musicalization of Frankenstein by Edmonton’s “prairie gothic” Catalyst Theatre (it was very good). More recently, I’ve directed three productions of his play Casey and Diana across five theatre companies in the past two years, including its latest run in Vancouver, at the Arts Club.
This “dramedy” imagines the seven days leading up to Princess Diana’s historic visit to Casey House, Canada’s first freestanding AIDS hospice, and has fast become a theatrical phenomenon in this country. It has also, more personally, done so much to expand my own sense of queer belonging. I (along with many others) will be ever grateful to Nick for that.
I’ve come to think, through Nick’s play, that most people dying of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s faced three deaths.
Culturally speaking, we know one of the deaths by AIDS well: when the body finally gives out to an opportunistic infection. We’ve seen this death a lot in movies and in heartbreaking photographs. Prior to the lifesaving drug therapies of the mid-1990s, AIDS always finished the story.
But what Nick makes vivid in Casey and Diana is that before a physical death, so many people with AIDS died a social one first. In the second act, Thomas (our protagonist) says, “The door closes and the whole world is gone. You take a breath and the door closes and gone, gone.”
It’s the portrait of gay men — and there were far too many — rejected by their families and co-workers, by their health providers, elected officials, congregations, neighbours, the world at large. In Toronto hospital AIDS wards, these men lay in rooms with furniture pushed to the walls and meals left in the hallway by hospital workers too afraid to approach the sick. I’ve heard the stories firsthand. But Nick’s core artistic gesture isn’t to simply revisit the horrors and cruelty of this social death; it’s to remind us of how it was reversible.
What feels so subversive about Nick’s play, especially in this day and age, is that it’s tunefully written in the key of compassion.
Compassion, and its potential to transform suffering, is what journalist June Callwood mobilized when she founded Casey House in 1988: to give people dying of AIDS what she called a “velvet experience.” It’s what Diana did when she took these men by the hand. It’s what countless unheralded-but-heroic nurses, doctors and care teams mustered, trying to give people with AIDS something closer to a “good” death. And Nick, a profoundly gifted writer who could have written about pretty well anything, chose to focus on — and popularize — this part of our shared queer heritage.
Hugh Brewster, an organizer in Canada’s Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s and early contributor to the Body Politic (the magazine about which Nick penned his 2017 award winning play The Body Politic, and a collective of “superqueeroes” in its own right), wrote to me this spring to say of Casey and Diana: “This play is part of the resistance.” Hugh was speaking to the political moment we’re in, with queer lives and queer dignity under siege – and I agree with him. I also see how Nick’s work beautifully counters something else.
The third death happens when the departed is no longer remembered. Perhaps what I find most miraculous is that Nick has managed, for the time being, to rescue so many from that fate. With each of its performances, Casey and Diana has those who succumbed to AIDS being recalled, named and wondered about by those who survive them. Across Canada, rooms full of hundreds of people have been syncing their heartbeats with living memory and queer ghosts.
A few days ago, we received a three-page letter from a man who saw the play in Vancouver. “We were so young,” he writes. “Loss is the theme of the play, for me. Loss, and how we live with it. Loss of future, perhaps the most poignant. Loss, yet finding hope and humour and love. It’s our history.” He finished by calling Casey and Diana “a painful, joyful gift.”
For men such as Nick and myself, who came out in the late 1990s to a community chasm defined by trauma and absences that we couldn’t fully grasp, it’s a different kind of grief ritual. But what makes me hold Nick in such esteem is that he’s afforded us a script for it. It’s a truly heart-cracking piece of writing (smartly peppered with Steel Magnolias and the Golden Girls references because, as Thomas says, “You have to laugh to keep from dying”). And I can confirm: it has intergenerational healing properties. Nick is a full-time social worker in Toronto (along with his second full-time docket as a playwright); in him, we get an artist who wants to delight and move us, yes, but who also wants to improve our relationships to one another and ourselves. Especially the queer folks in the room.
He and I grew close in our 20s as tourmates (one day we’ll have to release the DIY music videos baby Nick and baby Andrew created to keep us sane on the road). What I discovered in that time was that we were forged from similar gay heartaches. In his program note at the Arts Club, Nick shares: “I was lucky in many ways; my family was/is incredible, I had a very protective group of friends…Still, I was bullied relentlessly. I was once called the ‘f’ word right in front of a teacher. He fidgeted and said nothing. I would have done the same. At the time, defending the gays could put one’s own sexuality in question. He was as scared as I was.”
What I’ve witnessed over the course of Nick’s career is someone who, time and time again, defies victimhood through creative acts. With uncanny skill, Nick creates queer acts of community and communion — for himself and so many others. In his own play, a gay man covered in KS lesions, facing his final days, gets to meet a princess and ultimately author his own death and legacy. AIDS does not finish this story; Nick’s ingenuity extends this story for all of us.
Andrew Kushnir is an award-winning playwright, director, dramaturge, and performer. He directed the original production of Nick Green’s Casey and Diana at the Stratford Festival and received both the 2023 Dora Award and Toronto Theatre Critics’ Award for his direction of Bad Roads by Natal’ya Vorozhbit.
