Out and about for a winter’s tale
Al fresco events help city embrace darker days
"The whole thing is an exercise in spontaneity. Dog walkers might come through in the middle of a scene . . . Stuff happens all the time." JENNIFER BREWIN
TAILS FROM THE CITY
Sometimes it seems like Toronto shuts down during the wintertime. People batten down their hatches, turn up the heat and disappear until the spring thaw. All this despite being a Canadian city. Aren’t we supposed to be heartier than this?
Other Canadian cities embrace winter in various ways: Quebec has its winter carnival and Montreal holds Nuit Blanche in deepest February.
“Every year winter comes around in Toronto and people are surprised,” says Jennifer Brewin, director of a new outdoor winter theatre production called
Tails From the City.
“Even people who come to the shows from Ottawa don’t arrive with a hat on.”
It’s a peculiar effect this city has on Canadians. Perhaps the city’s location on the southern edge of the country gives us the impression we’re more tropical than we really are.
Yet the city is slowly coming around to accepting winter — despite proclamations of “snowmageddon” during routine blizzards — with events such as the outdoor Craft Beer Festival at the Steam Whistle Roundhouse in January.
Tails From the City, staged at the Evergreen Brick Works, is another way to accept the season on its own terms and is the fifth time Brewin’s company, Common Boots Theatre, has produced a sitespecific work here.
The play is an hour long and theatregoers follow the action around on foot. They’re given hot chocolate and Timbits when it’s done.
This year’s production is written by Toronto playwright Marjorie Chan and the holiday-themed play involves a young girl named Billie who wanders out into the city on Christmas Eve and spends the night with squirrels, raccoons and other animals that live in the city’s backyards, ravines and streets.
“I grew up on the edge of the Rouge Valley,” Chan says of her Scarborough roots. “We went into the ravines and explored them as kids, alone until it got dark.”
Though she can’t imagine kids having the same amount of freedom today — at some point in the recent past we decided the city is too dangerous for children to roam free in — Chan says the play is a conversation about living in the city, our attraction to the wild and our struggle with it.
Despite the bubbles of safety kids are kept in today, they still instinctively know how to be at peace with winter.
“The play is for adults and kids, but it’s the kids who guide us, they come prepared and know what to do,” Brewin says.
Chan, Brewin and the actors spent two years workshopping the collaborative play, often trying things out in public at the Brick Works.
“We looked at video after video of raccoons, then the actors would go out and perform as them without costumes, and people would recognize them as raccoons,” Chan says.
“I think it’s why we love and hate them. They’re anthropomorphic: they look like us, they’re familiar, but they’re also selfish and maybe we recognize ourselves in them.”
“The audience is such an active ingredient in the story,” Brewin says of the unique nature of a play in which the audience walks with the performers.
“The whole thing is an exercise in spontaneity. Dog walkers might come through in the middle of a scene. There’s the weather. Stuff happens all the time.”
Every performance has the potential to be quite different than the one before.
“It’s kind of an insane and stupid thing to do,” Brewin says of the challenge. “It’s amazing for the running crew. Tracking props that have to be used half a kilometre later. It’s like air traffic control.”
If you’ve been to the Brick Works before, Tails From the City offers an intimate exploration of the site, getting into some of the nooks and crannies you might not have otherwise explored. Tails From the City opens Monday and runs until Dec. 30. Tickets can be purchased through wintertheatre.brownpapertickets.com. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.