Butch/Femme – Review of 2025 Production at Theatre Passe Muraille

Butch/Femme is a new play by Emily Paterson written during her second-year course in playwriting. That is commendable and as always, a welcome to a newcomer in that field in Canada. I wished that I could come out of the premiere of the play with a rave review but I will not be able to do that much as I appreciate a new work,

especially by a young writer on her first attempt.

Butch/femme of course refers to the relationship between two lesbians where one partner is a butch, a woman who takes some male characteristics, and a femme who is more feminine and may not even being suspected of being homosexual. Much more can be said about the butch/femme relationship but what I have said should suffice for my review of the play.

Butch/Femme, judging by the set, takes place in the 1950’s in town near Toronto. Alice (Tessa Kramer), wearing a leather jacket and T-shirt is butch whereas Jen (Annabelle Gilles) wears a nice blue dress and makeup and presents as an attractive woman without any hint of homosexuality. She is a femme.

We see Jen in the opening scene tidying up her apartment when her doorbell rings and Alice enters. Jen is surprised to see her but lets her in. In the next seventy-five minutes we will witness the former lovers reminiscing and recounting their life together, their separation a year before, the effects of that separation and the attempts at reconciliation.

The two lived and loved in an unnamed town and that resulted in Jen making huge sacrifices for being in love with a lesbian. Her family disowned her and she had to give up the middle-class dream of marriage, children and relations with her family. Alice found the situation untenable and moved to Toronto for greater freedom. Jen was angry and deeply hurt by the abandonment and at the unexpected visit a year later. She is reluctant to forgive Alice for her conduct.

That gives the play a limited scope as it deals with an array of reminiscences and revelations. Jen has managed to recover her relations with her parents and found a heterosexual relation that promises a traditional middle-class life. There was some heterosexual intimacy but I am not sure how Jen felt about it.

There are some issues with the performances of Kramer and Gillis. They spoke matter-of-factly for much of the time and the emotional levels that the script calls for were apparent infrequently. We expect some evidence of the love that they experienced and greater emotional depth of the anger and hurt felt by Jen and the abiding love felt by Alice.

I had trouble hearing or understanding parts of the dialogue. Did director Emily Paterson hear everything that was being said on the stage at the back of the theater? There were bits of dialogue that I simply could not make out.

To be fair, Tessa Kramer is a second-year student at the University of Toronto while Annabelle Gillis seems to have more extensive experience on the stage. This play is Emily Paterson’s first foray into writing and directing a play. Let’s applaud all three ladies for their effort.

Credit to Aria Koval for Set Design, Salma Qureshi Wennekers for Costume Design and Eden Phillips for Lighting Design.

Butch/Femme by Emily Paterson, in a Theatre Passe Muraille presentation of The Green Couch Theatre Company production will run until September 27, 2025, at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. www.passemuraille.on.ca (416) 504-7529

Tessa Kramer and Anabelle Gillis. Photos by Jae Yang

‍