What do you want Robert O’Hara’s Bootycandy to be? Ask, and it shall be given. Bawdy gay hookups? A dissection of the power dynamics in interracial gay sex? The swagger of Black queer comedy? Ask, and he’ll serve it up. In abundance. Until the table groans.
“I think the audience should choke,” says Sutter (Kyle Brown), the closest thing this gloriously outrageous play has to a centre.
A co-production by Obsidian Theatre and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Bootycandy unfolds as a satirical barrage of sketches. Over two hours, director Jay Northcott propels us from one to the next, with Brown at the centre and four other actors — Helen Belay, Meghan Swaby, Christopher Allen and Dan Mousseau — cycling through a delirious assortment of characters.
One might be tempted to search for a tidy thread through the chaos. O’Hara teases us with the semblance of one in scattered episodes from Sutter’s life. In the opening scene, we see him as a child, asking his mother (Belay) what a blowjob is. As a teenager, he longs to play the Scarecrow in The Wiz while his parents push him towards wrestling. By adulthood, he is cruising supposedly straight white men at a gay bar.
But Sutter’s biography is something of a digestive aid. The play’s real investment lies in dismantling the expectations imposed on Black stories and their tellers. Nowhere is that impulse clearer than in “Conference,” the unhinged scene that closes the first act. A white moderator (Mousseau) assembles a group of Black playwrights, then grows increasingly baffled as each describes their latest work. “What does it have to do with race?” he asks.
The play itself is O’Hara’s answer. Race is never absent; the playwright tangles it with sex, shame, pleasure, violence, and power until provocation tips into absurdity and any stable reading begins to slip away. Again and again, O’Hara sets up a familiar scene only to make it betray the role we have assigned it. In “Dreamin’ in Church,” Allen’s Black preacher is resplendent in high heels and a shimmering red dress by Arianna Moodie. Flourishing a Bible-shaped handbag and riding the cadences of the Black church, he scrambles the boundaries between sacred ritual and queer performance, turning RuPaul into liturgy.
Northcott keeps that instability on a remarkably tight leash. The production shifts registers at whiplash speed, swinging between bruising realism and grotesque exaggeration with a straight-faced intensity. One moment, Sutter is wrestling with his unrequited love for Roy (Mousseau) in a scene of aching vulnerability, Brown’s shoulders drawn inward and his brow furrowed with boyish unease. Next, Belay and Swaby, outfitted with fake breasts and a prosthetic pregnant belly, shout through an absurdist telephone exchange, cords snaking across the stage.
Designer Nick Blais extends that unease into the room. A narrow playing strip divides two facing banks of spectators, making looking feel faintly voyeuristic. The orange-washed set, meanwhile, evokes an ’80s nightclub, giving the script’s sexual energy a suitably gaudy frame.
In its impish act of insubordination, Bootycandy is uproarious and abrasive in equal measure. Every time it seems to resolve into something legible, it slips its shape again. Amid all that clamour, I left the theatre strangely woozy — still trying to impose order on a play whose great pleasure lies in denying me one.
Bootycandy plays at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre through October 17, 2026. Tickets are available at buddiesinbadtimes.com/show/bootycandy
Written by Robert O’Hara and directed by Jay Northcott, the production features Helen Belay, Kyle Brown, Meghan Swaby, Christopher Allen and Dan Mousseau. The creative team includes set designer Nick Blais, costume designer Arianna Moodie, lighting designer Darren Shaen, and sound designer and composer David Ariza, with Lish Evans as set design associate and Greg Carruthers as intimacy director. Farnoosh Talebpour is stage manager, with Jazmine De Sousa as apprentice stage manager
