A play returns, in full bloom
Jordan Tanahill revisits Concord Floral, with some help from the original teen star
Q What do a defunct suburban greenhouse and a collection of medieval Italian novellas have in common? A Jordan Tannahill.
The award- winning young playwright happened to be reading the latter ( The Decameron by Boccaccio) when he went to a party at the former (Concord Floral), and inspiration struck. This was back in 2012. He called up his artistic collaborators Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner, and the three of them brought in a group of young people to develop the first incarnation of Concord Floral for Canadian Stage’s Festival of Ideas and Creation. The result: a spooky suburban re- imagining of The Decameron featuring teenagers.
Four and a half years later, the play has won rave reviews both in Toronto and Ottawa, and now it is back at Canadian Stage under the direction of Brubacher and Spooner – this time at the Bluma Appel Theatre ( to preserve the intimacy of the show, the audience is seated on stage with the performers, leaving the auditorium eerily empty).
Teenagers grow a lot in four and a half years, though. Original cast member Erum Khan was 17 in 2012. Now she’s 22, and too old to be on stage. So she joined Spooner and Brubacher behind the scenes as their assistant director.
“It’s been the biggest thing in terms of shaping me as a human. Not even just as an artist,” she says. “Because I’ve been part of this group since the beginning and I understand our process, which is a big part of our work here….It’s about really digging into what are the choices we make and how do we make them. So being part of that has really affected my psyche about how I approach anything.”
So Concord Floral ( the play) has become as important to the lives of its young cast members as Concord Floral ( the greenhouse) is to the characters they play.
And working with this group of young people has become incredibly important to Brubacher and Spooner. How are the teens different from the adult actors they’ve worked with? “They’re more mature,” Brubacher quips.
Seriously, though: “Working with young artists we have an opportunity to model and work with them to create a way of working that embodies a world that we hope for. And that’s a real gift,” she says.
“The cast represents such a diversity of communities in a number of ways. On stages when we have teenagers, they are played by 26-yearolds. So it shouldn’t be radical but it is.”
Spooner and Brubacher especially love watching older members of the audience connect with younger people. “I’ve seen older and younger audience members just talking to each other, and that’s so nice,” says Brubacher.
“This is a stereotype but it comes from a real place, sometimes older audience members have bad perceptions of younger audience members, and think that if they’re talking or making noise they’re bored or ignoring the show, but really they’re just being engaged in the work. If they’re talking to each other they’re talking about what’s happening, it’s as alive as it can be. And I think with this show, the audience members really feel that.”