When the Citadel opened in its current iconic location in 1976 with a production of Romeo and Juliet, queer energy was all over the Shoctor stage. It featured a young Brent Carver as Romeo and a young Tom Woods as Mercutio. Carver went on to become a Broadway sensation, winning the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical in 1993.

Over the decades, queer themes appeared as both playwrights and plays examined the closet from the inside looking out and the outside looking in. For instance, when actor-director Tom Woods got the chance to direct gay playwright Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie in 2010, he chose to highlight that Tom, the main character, was gay—suggesting that Tom’s obsessive practice of going to the movies was a “1940’s code word for what was really going on at those all-night sessions”.

In “The Edmonton Queen” (2007), queer actor, playwright, and composer Darrin Hagen provides a beautiful and intimate portrait of how seeing the play Hosanna at the Citadel (written by queer playwright Michel Tremblay ) impacted him as an audience member throughout the different decades of his life: first as a fledgling drag queen, and then later as an actor.

"In 1983, a friend took me to see Tremblay’s Hosanna. I had just started hanging out with Queens and had done my first few shows. In 1993, I saw Hosanna again. My career as a club queen was, for the most part, behind me. I was trying to launch a theatre career. In 2003, I starred as Hosanna alongside Jeff Page’s Cuirette at Theatre Network. On closing night, I had trouble controlling the tears all the way through Act Two. Tremblay had written about my life before it happened. And I didn’t want it to end. Even the painful stuff. It hurt too beautifully." - Darrin Hagen

From Hagen’s and Wood’s interpretations of scripts through live performance, one senses the dynamic interplay between art and life: queer theatre reaches out from the stage to impact the audience members with both its power and promise.

The closet has always been a potent and complex metaphor for the LGBTQ2 community. The exploration of its influence has been provocatively explored on the Citadel’s stages, including in productions of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna (1975-76 , 1983, & 1992-93); Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1988-89); Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika (1996-97), Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (2005-06), and Brad Fraser’s True Love Lies (2010-11).

The groundbreaking Hosanna, written in 1973, was one of the first Canadian plays to feature a drag queen as the main character. Centered around a pivotal night in the relationship between Hosanna (a drag queen who dresses as Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra) and Cuirette, her ageing gay biker boyfriend, the play fearlessly exposes the cruelty of the marginalized community and asks the audience to consider and respect Hosanna’s self-definition and a spectrum of shifting, porous, and intersecting gender identities and expressions .

Argentinian playwright Manuel Puig’s 1976 play Kiss of the Spider Woman draws strongly on the playwright’s personal experiences . Set in an Argentine prison, it focuses on a relationship between two cellmates—Molina, a middle-aged genderfluid person, and Valentin, a young, cisgender, leftist revolutionary—and explores vital questions about the fluidity of gender, norms, assumptions, and expectations.

American Playwright Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika came to the Citadel as part of its 1996-97 season, just three years after its Broadway premiere in 1993. Angels is a complex and challenging play about the interplay of intersecting lives impacted by HIV/AIDS, politics, religion, homophobia, ignorance, fear, and hope.

When Angels was produced in Edmonton, there was palpable enthusiasm for the Broadway sensation. Predictably, there was also strong opposition, as provincial Conservative politicians and some journalists went out of their way to decry Angels, wringing their hands over so-called "community standards". Theatre critic Liz Nicholls soundly called them out, stating: "Our box office is a happening place. Wielding the club of 'community standards' on a play that The People clearly want to see is a shabby, undemocratic proposition. Angels has attracted a big audience around the continent and seems poised to do so here. Who is this audience if not members of the community?"

Audiences may have been excited to see the play, but on the opening night of Angels Part II, some patrons hid their eyes and expressed distaste when the two male characters kissed.

Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning one-person play I Am My Own Wife (2002), produced in the 2005-2006 season, is based on Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf’s autobiography and Wright’s conversations with von Mahlsdorf (1929-2002), a German antique dealer and trans woman who lived through the horrors of Nazi Germany and the repressive Communist regime of East Berlin that followed World War Two. Charlotte’s story of grit and survival highlights the resilience of a trans woman and her determination to survive and thrive no matter the historical context.

In the 1990s and 2000s, queer Albertan playwrights saw their own plays and adaptations performed on the mainstage as part of the Citadel Theatre’s regular season program. Some of those works included: Raymond Storey (South of China 1996-97); Ronnie Burkett (Billy Twinkle 2008-09, Penny Plain 2011-12, Daisy Theatre 2013-14 and 2014-15); Morris Panych (The Overcoat with Wendy Gorling 2006-07, What Lies Before Us 2006-07); Brad Fraser (True Love Lies 2010-11); Damien Atkins, with Andrew Kushnir and Paul Dunn (The Gay Heritage Project 2015-2016); and Tom Wood (A Christmas Carol 2000-18, Servant of Two Masters 2002-03, Vanya 2004-05, Peter Pan 2005-06, Pride and Prejudice 2008-09, The Three Musketeers 2010-11, Make Mine Love 2013-14, Sense and Sensibility 2016-17).

In addition to plays appearing on the Mainstage, the Citadel’s Teen Festival for the Arts (1988-1994) gave many young local LGBTQ2 playwrights, composers, set designers, and aspiring actors their breakout start. Teenfest featured notable queer playwrights such as Brad Fraser and Kent Staines, who were commissioned to write plays. Fraser’s Teenfest works included Blood Buddies with Jeffery Hirschfield, Young Art, and Prom Night of the Living Dead with composer Darrin Hagen. Kent Staines contributed Hero Bound. With many queer artists at the helm of the artistic production, the Teen Festival provided a vital platform for young queer Edmonton artists to develop, hone, and begin showcasing their talents. The Festival also fostered relationships that proved foundational to emerging artists just beginning to establish professional networks. Many of the LGBTQ2 artists that took their initial steps at Teenfest remain active in the industry even today.

In the broader community, the Citadel Theatre was also an important gathering place for education and remembrance. Early LGBTQ2 community events at the Citadel included performances by Heather Bishop and Connie Caldor (1986), Day Without Art (1990), and The Names Project (1990-91).

Day Without Art began in New York in 1989 and quickly spread to become an international day of mourning and remembrance in honour of the millions of creative people whose lives were lost to HIV/AIDS. On December 1st, as part of World AIDS Day, galleries worldwide were closed and symbolically shuttered with window coverings, and theatres refrained from performances to commemorate lives lost. Activist and producer Kevin Hendricks initiated Day Without Art in Edmonton. On December 1st, 1990, Edmonton’s arts community went dark. At the Citadel, all windows facing the street were covered with brown paper bearing a simple, stark logo as a visible sign of remembrance. In 1990 and 1991, in collaboration with the AIDS Network of Edmonton and the WORKS Festival, Hendricks also brought to the Citadel one of the most moving and significant works of activist art of the HIV/AIDS era: The Names Project. This Canadian instalment of the AIDS Quilt consisted of hundreds of individual quilts, which hung from the ceiling of the Lee Pavilion and formed a maze in the Shoctor Lobby. Each quilted panel was created by families, friends, and loved ones of people who had lost their lives to HIV/AIDS, and honoured the courage, lives, and legacies of the people they loved. The Names Project was both a moving homage to the strength and struggle of the many lives lost and a powerful educational platform to emphasize the scale of the pandemic and the effects HIV/AIDS had on everyone.

In June 1993, Edmonton’s Pride Week film festivals took place in Zeidler Hall. This Film Festival was preceded by two student-led LGBTQ2 Pride Week film festivals in March of 1992 and 1993: Voice and Vision, which premiered John Greyson’s controversial film about gay-bashing, The Making of Monsters , and Speaking in Tongues.

In 1997, award-winning playwright, composer, and actor Darrin Hagen launched his first book, The Edmonton Queen, in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre lobby. It was a most fitting setting, as Darrin’s New Year’s Eve story in The Edmonton Queen ends with him losing a sequined high heel (as well as having a balloon breast deflate with exquisite timing) at the stroke of midnight in Shoctor Alley, mere metres from where the book was launched.

Also, in 1997, the Loud & Proud Cabaret debuted at the Citadel after Catalyst Theatre decided to end their run of the highly successful Loud & Queer Cabaret. Citadel staff who had hands-on experience with Loud & Queer were inspired to create a brand new event in its absence. Loud & Proud helped to launch that year’s Pride Week festival. Sponsored by Edmonton Vocal Minority (EVM), Loud & Proud took over the Citadel stages with multiple events. Drag artist Christopher Peterson presented his “one-man/many women extravaganza” EYECONS on the Rice stage. On the Maclab stage, Christopher Peterson and Darrin Hagen—both in drag—hosted Drag Fest ’97, a cabaret, catwalk, and talent competition, featuring four Edmonton queens vying for the title of DQ ’97, dazzling in original creations designed by four queer Edmonton designers (winner: Paprika), as well as a musical performance by EVM. Klodyne Rodney hosted Sister Sappho Stage in the Tucker Amphitheatre, a lesbian cabaret featuring Lin Elder with music, poetry, and comedy. Brad Fraser’s film Parade was also screened in Zeidler Hall. An Aprés Party followed all events at (La) Lee Pavilion. This may have quite simply been the most unapologetically queer week in the Citadel’s history.

Other notable queer-positive events hosted at the Citadel over the years included Dave Jackson’s infamous Hell Parties (all-night raves held in the Lee Pavilion); countless iterations of Late Night Madness and Women in Comedy on the Maclab stage, presented by the Edmonton International Street Performers’ Festival (often featuring visiting queer artists from across the globe); the First Night Festival 2000 (Y2K), where Darrin Hagen performed The Edmonton Queen in the Rice Theatre; the Kaboom Festival (produced by Workshop West, also on the Rice stage), which featured Daniel MacIvor’s play In On It and dozens of other events like Pride dances and Fruit Loop parties.

For many queer artists, directors, playwrights, and performers, the Citadel wasn’t just a venue; it was a home. Edmonton has been fortunate to develop into a world-class theatre community where queer lives are not just lived and performed but celebrated and elevated into art. The Citadel is proud to continue that tradition today and into the future.