Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre
Moderator: Roberta Barker
Bridget Baldwin, “Rita Reconstructed: The Queer Feminist Legacies of Rita MacNeil”
Performer and songstress Rita MacNeil has long been dubbed “Cape Breton’s First Lady of Song”. Awarded both provincially and federally for her musical and cultural achievements, MacNeil’s performance career has tied her to both stage and screen. As a result, there are abundant examples of how she shaped—and was shaped—by media. MacNeil has become deeply ingrained in the East Coast imaginary as a figure of success and resilience, often aligned with folk and Gaelic musical movements. In recent years, the efforts of feminist and queer artists across Canada have invited rethinkings of MacNeil which highlight her involvement in the women’s movement and her queer identity. Drawing from auto/biographical materials, archival performances, and plays about the singer, my proposed paper seeks to explore these myriad re-imaginings of MacNeil and her legacy. My paper brings these performances into conversation with current representations and reinterpretations of MacNeil, from Lindsay Kyte’s musical biography Dear Rita (2022) to the utilization of her gowns in the Highland Arts Theatre’s production of Hairspray (2025). These performed Ritas expand upon and reveal a careful mediation of self-presentation that worked to avoid “cancellation”—obscuring her efforts in the women’s movement, ignoring the discovery that she had been surveilled by the RCMP, and rendering invisible her decades-long romantic relationship with a woman. I aim to examine the messy contentions with historical fact and with Ian McKay’s notion of Nova Scotian “Folk” required when re-locating facets of MacNeil’s identity—once stifled—to the forefront.
J. Paul Halferty, “A Queer Inheritance: The Life and Career of Maxim Mazumdar”
A Queer Inheritance: The Life and Career of Maxim Mazumdar
In this paper, I examine the work of Maxim Mazumdar, prolific actor, playwright and director, who was born in Bombay/Mumbai, India in 1952, and moved with his family to Montreal, Quebec, at the age of fourteen. In his short but prolific life, he founded the Phoenix Theatre in Montreal, and both the Provincial Drama Academy and the Stephenville Theatre Festival in Stephenville, Newfoundland. He wrote a number of plays (at least five, probably more, two of which are published), and toured his plays internationally. He worked with Quentin Crisp and Eric Bentley in New York, and with Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, New York, where he performed his last play, Lupercal, in 1988, and whose annual new play competition is named in his honour.
As an immigrant and a gay man of colour, Mazumdar’s career and biography provide a unique lens through which to examine forces shaping theatrical production in English Canada in the late 1970s and 1980s – including the early onset of the AIDS crisis, which ended Mazumdar’s prolific career at the age of thirty-six, 28 April 1988. In particular, I am interested in how Mazumdar’s plays – including Oscar Remembered (about Oscar Wilde), Dance for Gods (about Ancient Greek theatre), and Rimbaud (about the French poet Arthur Rimbaud) – all examine aspects of gay life and history – indeed queer inheritance – through invocations of “high art” and European culture. My paper will use Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry to analyse Mazumdar’s plays, all of which imbricate canonical European texts and gay figures in resolutely queer ways. Mazumdar’s plays seem to engage in the kind of mimicry that Bhabha describes when he writes, “Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power” (153). Early in my research, I will visit Boston University archives, where Mazumdar’s papers are deposited, in March 2026.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoller, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 152-60.
Avery McMichael, “Writing Gender Diverse Characters for the Stage” In recent years, the number of transgender and other gender diverse characters on stage and in film has been slowly creeping upwards (Myers). However, most of these come from film and television, and many of them cause more harm than good. Transgender, non-binary, intersex, and other gender diverse characters are still grossly underrepresented within published plays (Murphy; Rowen). As members of a diverse artistic community, we need to be comfortable writing these characters, and we need to do it well. Bad representation is worse, oftentimes, than no representation. This paper, currently in progress, seeks to be a guide to the writing of gender diverse characters for playwrights and other theatre makers. The piece draws on a practice of autoethnography, utilizing my own experiences as a gender diverse scholar, playwright, and performer as a pathway into this needed discussion. The proposed work will offer writers, theatre makers, and other artists an opportunity to engage in representation with confidence and care.
Bibliography
Murphy, Natalie Jessica. Representation in the UK Theatre Industry. 2023. Canterbury Christ Church University, Master’s.
Rowen, Bess. “The Trans Theatre Tipping Point.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 45, no. 3, Sept. 2023, pp. 117–21. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_r_00688.
Biographies:
Bridget Baldwin is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph. Her research considers the intersections of gender, class, and nation in Atlantic Canadian theatre. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation, If I Got to Leave, attends to the migrations of white settler Cape Breton women in contemporary performance.
J. Paul Halferty is Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, where he also serves as Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. He is a theatre historian and performance studies scholar whose research examines the intersection of theatre and identity, primarily sexual, gender, national, and racial in Canada and Ireland.
Avery McMichael is a Master’s candidate at the University of Victoria. They are a queer storyteller, focusing on memoir theatre. They received their BA in Applied Theatre from Pacific University, and their MFA in Playwriting from the University of Nebraska. From 2018-2023 they co-ran the queer theatre company, Theatre Viscera.