Director's Note: Casey and Diana

I first read the script to Casey and Diana six months after my Mother had died. My Mother, Helaine Hertzlich, was a nurse practitioner and Rodgers and Hammerstein enthusiast with an uncanny ability to connect to gay men. She was healthy, then sick, then healthy again, then sick again, and then she was dead. I remember looking at my sister on the day we realized she was going to die. “Let’s do this right,” I whispered.

The mission of Toronto’s Casey House was to create a space where gay men afflicted with HIV/AIDS could die with dignity. While most of the world shunned a community crying for help, Casey House provided sanctuary ten beds at a time. In 1991, a visit from the People’s Princess put a dent in the wall of stigma that was (and continues to be) as deadly as the virus itself.

I couldn’t save my Mother, just as the care teams at Casey House could not save the residents, but in the days my Mom took to die, she and the chosen family that surrounded her bed brimmed with life. With Casey and Diana, playwright Nick Green submits a new piece into a rich theatrical legacy of queer plays, but narrows his scope to the space between a breath in and a breath out. Through a story about dying, Green celebrates the human capacity to endure.

It is a great honor to direct the first play in APT history to put an unmistakably gay character in the center of the story. I look forward to a future in which a queer character needs not a Princess nor a disease to take the final bow, but I am indebted to that princess and awestruck by the profound beauty and universality of this play. In honor of the many queer artists who did not live to tell their own stories, we share Casey and Diana.

Mom, I think you would have loved it.

– Michael Herwitz, Director of Casey and Diana