Coal Mine Theatre stays small but ambitious
A round of applause for a price hike?
Sounds implausible, but such is the love that audiences have for the Coal Mine Theatre that they greeted news of rising ticket costs at the tiny east-end venue with the opposite of resistance.
“Ted gave a speech every night after Orphans and said that next season we have to raise the prices,” explains Diana Bentley, who cofounded the theatre with Ted Dykstra, speaking of a show they staged in April. “On numerous evenings the audience started applauding with enthusiasm.”
The local audience has been behind the project from its founding four years ago: “They have such passion; they’ve really possessed the theatre . . . We feel really supported,” Bentley says. (For the record, single tickets this year are $42.50, up from $35, and four-show season passes cost $140.)
The project began to germinate in late 2013 when Bentley was performing in an indie production in a basement theatre on the Danforth below the Magic Oven restaurant. Various people involved in that project tried to keep the space open as a theatre, but nothing really stuck. Dykstra told Bentley he was thinking of putting on a show there himself. Her response: “Not without me!”
While Dykstra is a veteran player in Canadian theatre — a founding member of Soulpepper and an actor/director/composer/writer who cocreated the widely-toured 2 Pianos 4 Hands — actor and producer Bentley’s roots are in the indie scene. “That’s become part of our brand,” she says, “a combination of an independent, gritty storefront approach with high-level professional theatre.”
The theatre is clearly at the centre of the couple’s life: they were married there in January.
They nabbed some well-known talent for their inaugural production in November 2014, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf---er With the Hat — among them actors Juan Chioran and Melissa D’Agostino, and director Layne Coleman. They broke even and paid everyone involved, “albeit a small amount,” Dykstra says. “But from that point on we decided we would never not pay anyone.” They put on two more shows in the basement and started what they call the Wall of Fame: “If you donate 100 bucks we write your name on the wall. People loved that, so we started planning a second season,” he says. Those first three productions — Bull by Mike Bartlett and David Greig’s version of August Strindberg’s Creditors, as well as the Guirgis play — were all “about narcissism and there was a dark underbelly to them,” Bentley says. That plus the intimacy of the space (only 80 seats) made people start to call their work “challenging and gritty.”
Their second season opener, The River by Jez Butterworth, was “a much softer text,” according to Bentley, and they’ve continued to refine what they’re looking for in plays: “great storytelling . . . a certain calibre of writing.”
They will continue to prioritize work Toronto audiences have not seen before; all their shows thus far have been local premieres.
After their first landlord lost his lease, the company worked briefly in a pop-up venue and, after a brief and stressful period of homelessness, found its current rental premises at 1454 DanforthAve.: next to, serendipitously enough, the transplanted Magic Oven.
At the moment, the Coal Mine functions without government funding on box office, donations and limited corporate sponsorships alone. While Bentley and Dykstra say applying for subsidy may be in their future, this seems a ways off.
Growth at this point may mean doing eight rather than six performances a week, paying artists more (always a priority) and — most immediately — hiring a general manager to make the company a “trifecta.”
Their fourth season opens next week with Annie Baker’s The Aliens, which Bentley calls “a big win” given how well the Company Theatre’s production of Baker’s John was received last year. In fact, all three of Coal Mine’s plays this season are written (and in the case of Dutch writer Lot Vekemans’ Poison, translated) by women, something that Dykstra says he only realized when he saw the season poster.
“I noticed before that,” Bentley says dryly.
The season’s fourth show is a concert version of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album, which they assure will not be a costumed tribute-band affair. “Just the album,” Dykstra says, and there will be room for dancing.
Running the Coal Mine does not pay enough to keep body and soul together for its self-styled “chief engineers” — Bentley is currently appearing in two TV series (Discovery Canada’s Frontier and SyFy’s Channel Zero, which airs in Canada on Showcase); and Dykstra continues to direct and act at Soulpepper as well as jobbing elsewhere (including directing A Few Good Men at Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius this month).
Lots on their plate, but it’s all good. “Not to overuse the word that’s so overused right now, but we feel blessed,” Bentley says. The Aliens plays at the Coal Mine, 1454 Danforth Ave., from Sept. 17. See coalminetheatre.com for information. Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with critic Carly Maga.