The playwright discusses the long journey of 333, a tour encounter with a man who said he was detained during the 1981 raids, and his new autobiographical work, Die, Die, Lavinia.
A scene from the 2026 Atlantic Canadian tour of 333: The Toronto Bathhouse Raids, written by Jay Whitehead.
Photo credit: Andrew Lewis
Jay Whitehead was backstage in Sackville, New Brunswick, this summer, preparing for a performance of his play 333: The Toronto Bathhouse Raids, when word reached him about a man at the theatre. The man said he had been detained during the actual 1981 police raids on Toronto's gay bathhouses, the events at the centre of Whitehead's play.
Whitehead never spoke with him, but recalled watching him leave the theatre “visibly emotional and seemingly deep in reflection.” The encounter stayed with him. “Here we were, in this tiny Maritime town, about to perform a fictional account of an event that this man had actually lived through.”
The moment was one of several encounters during the play's four-community Atlantic Canadian tour that connected Whitehead's work with people who remembered the police raids and their aftermath. Others were younger audience members who recognized aspects of their own experiences in the characters, particularly Honey, the queer elder Whitehead plays in the production.
The play centres on Honey, Darren, a closeted married man from Alberta, and Eddy, a Latin American immigrant employed at a bathhouse. Their fictional stories unfold against Operation Soap, the police operation that targeted four Toronto gay bathhouses on February 5, 1981. According to The ArQuives, Canada's LGBTQ2+ archives, 306 people were charged: 286 patrons as “found-ins” and 20 managers or owners as “keepers” of a common bawdy house. Thousands protested the raids the following evening, and the response became an important part of Canada's gay rights history.
A student assignment revisited
Whitehead first encountered the history while studying theatre in southern Alberta. He grew up in a Mormon family and says he had been taught to feel ashamed of his sexuality. University gave him an opportunity to learn about queer history that had been largely missing from his childhood. “I was thirsty for that history,” he said. “I wanted to understand the stories of my people that had been denied to me.”
In 2004, a playwriting assignment asked him to create a fictional scene inspired by a historical event. Recently introduced to the bathhouse raids, he wrote a conversation between a drag queen and a closeted gay man in a holding cell. Those early characters would eventually become Honey and Darren, although neither remained quite as Whitehead first imagined them.
Nearly a decade later, Whitehead had returned to his alma mater as a faculty member when the professor who had assigned the scene approached him at a retirement party. The professor remembered the piece and urged him to revisit it. Whitehead held on to the suggestion, but the script remained in a box until the COVID-19 lockdowns, when he found what he believes was its only surviving paper copy.
By then, his understanding of the story had changed. He began to develop a third character, Eddy, and drew on years of personal interest in queer history, particularly oral histories preserved by The ArQuives. “Those firsthand accounts were the most compelling to me because they told the human stories, the individual experiences of people caught up in this extraordinary event,” he said.
His own background informed Darren, whose life involves concealing his sexuality in Alberta, and Honey became increasingly personal as Whitehead explored her identity. Eddy required more work. Whitehead credits actors who read and performed the part, along with dramaturg Santiago Guzmán of Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre, for helping him consider the character's experiences as a Latin American immigrant alongside the other two characters' lives.
Theatre Outré staged an early one-act version of 333 in Lethbridge in 2021. It went to the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in May 2022. Looking back, Whitehead describes the Lethbridge presentation as an early workshop in which the staging was more literal and much of the character development was still ahead.
Honey was originally called Rue, and Eddy was initially Teddy. Garry Williams originated Rue in Lethbridge, Jordan Payne performed the role in Dublin, and Edmonton actor Andrés Moreno played Teddy in those productions. For the Atlantic tour, Diego Guerrero took on the expanded part of Eddy. Calgary actor John Tasker has performed Darren throughout the play's development, and Whitehead says their work together changed how he understood the character: “I would go so far as to say that Darren's subsequent development was a collaboration between John and me.”
Whitehead continued rewriting after the Dublin performances, through a period of personal change that included a move across the country. The script eventually became a two-act play, a development he hadn't planned. “I'd simply followed the characters where they needed to go,” he said.
Four communities and a difficult budget
After moving to Prince Edward Island, Whitehead wanted to introduce himself to the local theatre community. Working with longtime collaborator Williams, who lives in Halifax, he arranged a staged reading at The Arts Guild in Charlottetown in February 2025. Whitehead stepped into the role of Honey, with Tasker returning as Darren and Guerrero joining as Eddy. Audience encouragement persuaded him to pursue a full production.
Touring support from the Canada Council for the Arts and Innovation PEI helped make that possible, but the production still needed substantial additional financing. Whitehead says the Canada Council grant was limited to half the tour's final budget. He wanted to pay the performers and production team fairly, so he and producing partner DaPoPo Theatre launched a grassroots fundraising campaign, supplemented by other contributions, personal funds and ticket revenue. “Producing the tour was an enormous challenge, particularly when it came to balancing the budget with my commitment to compensating everyone fairly,” he said.
The tour ran from June 18 to July 4, 2026, beginning at The Arts Guild in Charlottetown, then visiting Sackville and Parrsboro before finishing at Halifax's Bus Stop Theatre. Williams directed the production. Ian McFarlane designed the set and lighting, Aaron Collier the sound, Diego Cavedon-Dias the costumes, and Dylan Brentwood handled violence and intimacy direction. Caroline Bromley and Jeffrey Bazett-Jones joined as ensemble members, with Oliver Chaffey as stage manager.
McFarlane's design also marked a change from the earlier productions. Taking inspiration from Honey's opening address, he proposed making the theatre's mechanics visible onstage, including lighting equipment and technology evocative of the period. Whitehead says the approach suited a script that had become more self-aware about the act of telling this history.
Whitehead recalls conversations after performances with older gay men who remembered the period, including people who had lived through the raids. The Sackville encounter was particularly striking, though he never learned more about the man's experience directly. He was also surprised by the response from younger queer audiences, especially trans audience members who connected with Honey's attempts to understand an identity before having familiar language for it.
As a gay man from Generation X, Whitehead says he had sometimes worried about how he would relate to younger queer people and their evolving vocabulary. The tour challenged those assumptions. “I hadn't anticipated that 333 would help me feel more connected to our present community, but perhaps that's been one of its greatest gifts,” he said.
Whitehead is now in preliminary conversations with theatre companies in Canada and the United Kingdom about possible future productions. Nothing further has been announced, although he hopes the Atlantic touring company can perform the expanded script again.
A new work in Halifax
Whitehead has another work coming before an audience this week. On Friday, October 16, he is scheduled to read a draft of Die, Die, Lavinia at DaPoPo Theatre's Live-In Festival in Halifax. He describes the new piece as a theatrical memoir about growing up gay in a Mormon family, told through absurdist humour and the pop culture that occupied his imagination as a child.
The cast of influences is unusual even by the standards of an autobiographical play: Lavinia from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Stephen King's Carrie, C-3PO from Star Wars, Steph from The Goonies and singer Belinda Carlisle all enter the world Whitehead is creating. Their presence reflects the elaborate imaginary lives he constructed while trying to make sense of himself.
“Where 333 began as an attempt to understand a queer history I'd been denied, Die, Die, Lavinia is perhaps an attempt to understand the personal mythology I created in its absence,” he said. The new work takes him into more explicitly autobiographical territory, but he is sharing it before knowing exactly what form it will take. “I'm excited, and a little terrified, to share it at this stage,” he said.
Die, Die, Lavinia is scheduled for Friday, October 16, from 7 to 9 p.m. at The Nest, 6068 Quinpool Road, Halifax. It is part of DaPoPo Theatre's Live-In Festival; the organizer lists a $25 suggested donation with pay-what-you-can admission for individual events.
