Buy More Cake

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“Buy More Cake!”

I found myself shouting gleefully at the end of the latest live production I saw: “Child-ish” (created by Sunny Drake) at the Tarragon theatre in Toronto.

I belong to a group of young professionals that are part of a theatre club hosted at the venue.

The Tarragon is a hidden gem. Its mission is pretty straightforward, being the premiere stop for emerging Canadian plays and playwrights. Their shows are almost always new, and typically really good. Even the one or two pieces a year I inevitably end up disliking still give me a lot to think about. I’ve been a subscriber for a decade.

Theatre is my favourite art form. It is eternal. As long as humans have been human we have been sharing stories. It won’t be as flashy as the latest Marvel movie - but the intimacy achieved by seeing a good play, and not having the option to turn it off, is so precious. Unlike Marvel, it doesn’t get stale after repeating the same structure. When you get to see something completely unique, directed and curated, but not synthetically altered or prescribed- it is a welcome change to the tried and true repetitive formula that comes when you fire up Netflix. For example, the show last night had an actor drop out at the last minute due to family reasons. So in a heroic effort, one of the production crew had to get scrappy - literally pick up a script, and perform in the show. It was something I had never seen before, and it worked!

There is a purity to theatre, an earnestness and trust that is established in the space. A film is strictly about you watching them. A play is about us. There is a tangible exchange of energy between performer and audience that affects the outcome of the experience. Good performers, bring out the best in audiences. Good audiences bring out the best in performers. I am a believer thatI have a job to do as an audience member. I paid for the privilege to be there, but I will let myself go and laugh a little harder. It helps. It gives others permission, and it signals to the performer that they are doing a great job.

Unlike many other art forms - they need you as much as you need them.

In the era of social media, quick hitters, pause buttons, swiping away, messages that fit 140 characters or less - live theatre provides us with an outlet where you are forced to reckon with ideas that don’t necessarily take centre stage in your life.

My favourite plays tend to explore ideas, issues, and arguments in nuanced ways. You might not like what they have to say but it’s good to listen nonetheless. You can think, relate, judge, sympathize or even hate. It’s all permitted.

You can sit and share in discomfort. You can be confronted with the emotions that elude us. You can learn, you can remember to be a human being.

I’d like to think that theatre will have its own version of the vinyl record resurgence. What’s more with the theatre is that it provides a platform for shared experience, diverse connection, and story telling across generations. You have a meeting ground, a venue to see art, a building to run into old acquaintances. You have a space for your children to learn to be bold and express themselves. Sometimes it is a a space where you remember what it was like to be a child.

Child-ish expertly transports us back into the mind of a child. There is an absurdity to seeing distinguished professionals be the conduit for such earnest, nonsensical dialogue. Though within the nonsense there is intense wisdom. The words are often utopian ideals in the minds of very young people who haven’t seen them tested. On the other hand they are spoken by the mouths of story tellers that want to believe them, and do - but maybe only sometimes. There is joyous glee in seeing a fully grown man shouting “buy more cake!”

While watching the show, I often found myself thinking: these kids aren’t really a tabula rasa - they are already influenced. Their perspectives have been warped by parents, teachers, youtube, etc. They’ve had the ideas implanted in them, and those ideas have begun to germinate and carry with them history and political agendas. Do we ever have true free thought or autonomy? Or does everyone’s world view boil down to influence, experience, and relativity? Forgive me, I like to get metaphysical.

I have no clue if this was what the playwright had in mind when Sunny Drake was writing Child-ish, but the point is - I sure as hell was not pursuing this line of thought on my way into the show 90 minutes earlier. I have gained perspective.

Like so many things in life, the more you give, the more you get. Theatre is no exception. You learn the language as you see more shows. You build up a vocabulary of theatre. You start to compare and contract shows you’ve seen in the past. The beauty of it is there’s no right and wrong. You just get to think and feel whatever you want to think and feel.

Although, there are times when an audience arrives at that elusive catharsis. The shared experience where everyone in an audience is feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. A mutual experience of profound emotion and understanding. An emotional release, and a conduit to the core of the human experience.

All this is to say, go see some theatre. It’s affordable and impactful, and it will make you feel a little more human. Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you to buy more cake!

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