Darrin Hagen brings Edmonton queer theatre history to the page in The Crown Collection

Thirty years after The Edmonton Queen first reached the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival, Darrin Hagen’s writing debut is returning in another form.

Edmonton publisher NeWest Press lists The Crown Collection for publication in September, bringing together three of Hagen’s plays: With Bells On, The Edmonton Queen: The Final Voyage and The Empress & the Prime Minister. The 224-page collection also includes reflections from Christopher Peterson, Ron Jenkins and Bradley Moss.

Its arrival follows a 30th-anniversary production of The Edmonton Queen at this summer’s Edmonton Fringe, with Lilith Fair, the drag persona of Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, performing Hagen’s work.

The revival and the new collection return attention to plays that span three decades of Hagen’s career and include some of his most sustained work with Edmonton queer history, drag culture and Canadian LGBTQ+ political history.

A play rooted in Edmonton’s queer arts scene

The Edmonton Queen grew out of Edmonton’s Loud ’N Queer Cabaret, which began in 1991 after Catalyst Theatre artistic director Ruth Smillie approached Hagen and Kevin Hendricks of Guys in Disguise about creating a space for queer playwrights and performance.

The Edmonton Queer History Project traces Hagen’s play to a short piece about his drag mother, Lulu LaRude, developed through Loud ’N Queer before the work reached the Fringe in 1996.

The early piece, called Nice Jeans, expanded from a short sketch into a longer Fringe production after director Ron Jenkins encouraged Hagen to develop the material further.

The Edmonton Queen: Not a Riverboat Story was published in book form in 1997, and Hagen continued revising the work in later years. The version included in the new collection carries the title The Edmonton Queen: The Final Voyage.

The play draws on Hagen’s own experience of Edmonton’s drag and queer nightlife and has also become part of the documentary record of that community. Hagen has since worked extensively on projects devoted to Edmonton queer history, including the Edmonton Queer History Project, where he is an original team member.

NeWest describes Hagen as a playwright, author, composer and queer historian whose body of work includes more than 40 plays and dozens of articles on queer history.

Three plays from different stages of Hagen’s career

The Crown Collection also brings together work that moved beyond the circumstances of Hagen’s 1996 debut.

With Bells On was commissioned by Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre in 2009. The comedy centres on two people trapped in an elevator on Christmas Eve, including a drag performer dressed in an elaborate holiday costume.

The play has since been staged outside Alberta, including productions in Ireland and the United States. It was later adapted into a musical by New York City’s Live & In Color, with its world premiere at Edmonton’s Theatre Network in 2023.

The Empress & the Prime Minister moves into Canadian political history.

Theatre Network gave the play its world premiere in Edmonton in 2019, with Hagen portraying drag performer and activist ted northe and Joey Lespérance playing Pierre Trudeau. Bradley Moss directed the production.

Hagen developed the play using personal interviews, historical political speeches, media coverage and debates surrounding the period when the federal government amended the Criminal Code in 1969.

Those amendments partially decriminalized some consensual private sexual activity between adults, but they did not end the criminalization, policing or discrimination faced by queer Canadians. Justice Canada notes that surveillance, harassment, raids and discriminatory criminal provisions continued after the 1969 changes.

From performance to historical record

Hagen’s work in theatre has increasingly overlapped with formal historical projects, although that work extends well beyond the three plays collected here.

He is an original member of the Edmonton Queer History Project, which documents people, events and places connected with Edmonton’s 2SLGBTQ+ history. NeWest published the project’s Cruising the Downtown: Celebrating Edmonton’s Queer History in 2025.

Hagen also wrote and directed the documentary Pride vs. Prejudice: The Delwin Vriend Story and composed music for the film. It examines the case of Delwin Vriend, whose dismissal from an Alberta Christian college led to the 1998 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in Vriend v. Alberta. Hagen received the primary 2025 City of Edmonton Film Prize for the documentary.

Publication gives the three scripts in The Crown Collection a life independent of any single production while preserving works created across very different periods of Hagen’s career.

That is particularly relevant for The Edmonton Queen, which began in Edmonton’s queer performance community and returned to the Fringe this year to mark 30 years since its 1996 debut.

The Crown Collection by Darrin Hagen is scheduled for publication by Edmonton’s NeWest Press in September 2026.