Where research meets theatre and theatre meets research.
Amy Ferguson in the Australian production of The Love Booth.
Photo credit: Cas Bukor
Welcome to Gailey Road, where research meets theatre and theatre meets research. Founded in January 2007 by Artistic Director Tara Goldstein Gailey Road is an independent theatre company based in Toronto. Since 2007, we have worked with over 65 writers and 185 theatre artists and artist-researchers. In the last seven years our projects have focused on themes of queer and trans activism and advocacy.
Léa Roback Bio Project
Tara’s biography about her great aunt Québec social activist Léa Roback is now published and available from Lived Places Publishing.
Although she is well-known for her union and peace activism within Québec, Léa Roback is lesser-known in English Canada. Tara’s biography introduces a new generation of activists, educators and artists to her activist life and work.
To view the 1991 documentary film about Roback’s life and activism by Québec filmmaker Sophie Bissonette titled Des Lumières dans la Grande Noirceur click here →
Home of Her Heart
Image credit: benjamin lee hicks
At age 10, Luisa is separated from her birth country and family when she is adopted and transported from Colombia to Canada. Seven years later Luisa still has questions. Why did her mamá die of pneumonia when antibiotics could have saved her? Why did her papá disappear? When a long-awaited trip to Bogotá is suddenly cancelled, Luisa leaves Toronto without permission to return to the orphanage she last knew as home. Determined to find answers and reconnect with her birth family, Luisa risks alienating her adopted family to make a place for herself in Bogotá, the home of her heart.
At age 16, Nana Lottie flees Nazi Germany through the Kindertransport Program, where she comes to England to wait for her parents to rejoin her. Caught up in the brutal violence of the Shoah, they never come. After losing her entire family, Lottie needs to find a way to carry on.
Spanning borders from Colombia to Canada, Germany to England, a grandmother and her granddaughter, both survivors of state violence, search for family and a place to call home.
Recent Work
The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays
By Tara Goldstein with Alec Butler and Jenny Salisbury
The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays is a set of seven short plays that share stories of a variety of queer lives and queer activism in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The title play The Love Booth tells the story of how two lesbian activists and one masked gay psychiatrist pushed the American Psychiatric Association to take homosexuality off its Diagnostic Statistical Manual in 1973 so that homosexuality was no longer considered an illness that needed to be cured.
Out at School
Gailey Road’s verbatim audio-play
LGBTQ Families Speak Out (2014-2020) is an arts-based testimonial research project that features interviews with LGBTQ families across Ontario sharing their experiences in public schools. The study includes:
The play is divided into 3 parts, with each part ending with an original song composed and sung by Canadian queer folk musician Kate Reid. Each of Kate’s songs are based the testimonies and stories the families shared in the interviews.