Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre opens their 2025/26 season — the company’s 47th — with Makram Ayache’s award-winning Canadian play The Green Line. The play is presented in partnership with In Arms Theatre, the MENA Collective and Factory Theatre.
It’s the Toronto Premiere for the play, which features an entirely Arab cast. All of the actors are making their Buddies in Bad Times and Factory Theatre debuts: Waseem Alzer, Oshen Aoun, Basma Baydoun, and Zaynna Khalife.
The Green Line
The Green Line is a tragic story about intergenerational queer history in Lebanon using a poetic approach.
Two love stories take place in Beirut, a city that changes drastically with time. In 1978, two women yearn for each other with a backdrop of war. In 2018, a foreigner and a local drink vodka sodas, flirting as they try to sort out their differences.
The “green line” is a line of vegetation that cut the city in half curing the civil war. The Green Line reveals queer history that has always existed, no matter how contentious.
The civil war in Beirut is mashed up with a modern nightclub in following a family’s quest to recover their past.
The play was recently named as a finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards, and was also a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award, and Winner of the Betty Mitchell Award for Outstanding New Play in 2022.
“It’s an honour to offer this story at a time when Arab voices are so acutely being erased and mischaracterized within the superstructures of media and politics. Working with a full Arab team on a bilingual production is the kind of thing I only dreamed I could achieve with this story. We started exploring The Green Line in the 2019 Rhubarb Festival at Buddies, and now, to bring it back as its director, helming my own company, and with the support of Buddies and Factory Theatre, feels like the perfect offering for its Toronto premiere,” says Makram Ayache, Playwright & Director, The Green Line, in a statement.
On the creative team, set and costume design is by Anahita Dehbonehie, lighting design is by Jareth Li with associate Kit Norman, and sound design is by Chris Pereira and Heidi Chan, with stage management by Laura Baxter.
The Green Line will be on stage from September 19 to October 4, 2025, with opening night on September 25. The production is bilingual in English and Arabic, with subtitles at every performance.
- Find tickets and show information [HERE].
Buddies In Bad Times 2025/26
Since 1979, Buddies has welcomed over one million audience members and premiered over 1,000 new works for the stage. The 2025/26 season at Buddies features work from some of Canadian playwrights and artists, including world premiere productions from Bilal Baig, Jill Connell, and Susanna Fournier, work Gabriel Dharmoo, new performance art from xLq, and the 47th annual Rhubarb! genre-bending live arts festival.
“Gathered around the phrase “these are the things we longed for,” 2025 – 26 has what’s maybe a more literary approach than last year. I find these works, both collectively and individually, to be arrestingly tender, poetic, and intimate. There’s something deeply disarming about the expressions of yearning that thread through the season. A longing for bodies, for touch, for intimacy, but also for seismic paradigm shifts, great unmakings, even for destruction; this longing is always reaching for revolution and utopia, against all the odds,” says ted witzel, Artistic Director, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
- Find details about the whole season [HERE].
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