started going on about 'them homos' and 'their Aids' and talking about quarantine," he says. At the time, Burkett was performing a nightly revue in Calgary, where he ad-libbed each performance based on the news of the day.
In all of his work - which includes 'Happy', a musical based on the five stages of grief, performed two years ago at the Barbican to great acclaim - Burkett blends autobiography with fantasy, creating daring cultural commentary.
His previous experience as an Aids 'buddy' in Calgary became

Burkett: camp humorist and puppeteer

Edna's own, and she began doing Aids volunteer work in these revues.
Another phone-in show, in 1994, about the Canadian Red Cross Hepatitis C scandal - Hep C 'victims' were compensated for the 'dirty blood' by the Canadian Government - was the impetus for Burkett to create 'Street of Blood'.
In the show, Edna's adopted gay son, Eden - who worships a faded Hollywood star named Esme Massengill whom Eden also believes to be his birth mother - returns home to Turnip Corners, Alberta. His icon, Esme, is also there performing an off-off Broadway try-out of a musical about the Virgin Mary. Eden is an angry subversive, beaten by a homophobic father in his childhood, who believes that by committing acts of terrorism against the gay community he will shock them out of their assimilationist complacency and mobilise them against their true enemy, the Christian Right.

Esme and her troupe also happen to be vampires who are trying to control