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INTERVIEW | Arkady Spivak Of Talk Is Free Theatre: Adventures in Theatre

By Paula Citron on January 15, 2025

L-R (clockwise): Michael Toronto and Jakob Ehman in Talk Is Free Theatre’s production of Cock (Photo: Matthew MacQuarrie-Cottle); Tess Benger in Talk Is Free Theatre’s production of Cock (Photo: Matthew MacQuarrie-Cottle); Cast of For Both Resting and Breeding, Talk Is Free Theatre (Photo: Katie Edwards)
L-R (clockwise): Michael Torontow and Jakob Ehman in Talk Is Free Theatre’s production of Cock (Photo: Matthew MacQuarrie-Cottle); Tess Benger in Talk Is Free Theatre’s production of Cock (Photo: Matthew MacQuarrie-Cottle); Cast of For Both Resting and Breeding, Talk Is Free Theatre (Photo: Katie Edwards)

Barrie-based Talk Is Free Theatre is a regional theatre unlike any other, both because of its site-specific/immersive repertoire, and the fact that it tours the world to places where other companies fear to tread.

Among its travels, the 20+-year-old TIFT has presented productions in Toronto, establishing its brand in the Big Smoke, as it were. This January finds the company coming south of the 401 once again, bringing two plays this month, and another in the spring.

The Toronto plays are Adam Meisner’s For Both Resting and Breeding (Jan. 15 to 31) and Mike Bartlett’s Cock (Jan. 19 to 31), but here’s the kicker: the first play takes place in a private home in Parkdale, while the latter is set in an east end industrial garage.

The spring show, Darrell Dennis’ Tales of an Urban Indian, is performed on a moving bus. (Tickets here.)

The brainchild behind the ambitious and adventurous TIFT is the company’s intriguing artistic producer, Arkady Spivak, who is just turning 50.

The Russian-born Spivak grew up in a theatrical family in Moscow before immigrating to Canada when was 15. He ended up in Barrie working as a summer student for Gryphon Theatre in 2000. When the theatre asked Spivak to stay on, he dropped out of York and accepted the position, his ultimate game plan being to head to Toronto in a couple of years to begin his own producing projects.

Spivak ended up creating Talk Is Free Theatre in Barrie in 2002 when a local businessman, who believed that the arts mattered in small communities, suggested the idea and agreed to become his chairman of the board.

Our (very)long-ranging Zoom conversation covered Spivak’s life and times, the founding of TIFT, his philosophy of theatre, and of course, the Toronto shows.

What follows are excerpts from that conversation.

TIFT and Unusual Repertoire

How did you decide on TIFT’S very, shall I say, un-regional theatre repertoire? I began to hear about interesting things happening in Barrie early on in your existence.

We are funded as a regional theatre, but we didn’t want to fall into that structure, you know, doing five plays a season with the last one being a musical. Everything we do is always new. No two seasons are ever the same.

We’ve always been a hundred-seater type of operation. That’s what was unique about us. We didn’t have to fill a lot of seats, so we could do cutting-edge work as a regional activity. It was completely artistically liberating, sometimes even crossing the line.

I was asked recently on a Toronto Russian TV interview, how would I describe our programming. I was aggravated with them for all sorts of reasons, so I needed to do something punchy. I said, well, imagine a string on your underwear. You stretch it as far as you can, but if it breaks, you’ve gone too far. That’s our programming.

And that really is what it’s like.

How did TIFT develop a reputation for site-specific plays?

In our early years, we were given, sometimes donated, sometimes we rented, multiple venues, and then they got demolished. By necessity, we stumbled on site-specific work because we had to find performing spaces, and you could have audiences of various sizes.

In fact, for our entire 2025-2026 season, we are only doing site-specific work. We are not using a traditional theatre once. We are doing found locations in Barrie, just as we are doing in Toronto.

As Peter Brook said, it was something like, it takes one audience member and one artist to be engaged in storytelling. You don’t need anything else. I also believe that theatre can be created anywhere.

Site-specific is theatre at its purest level.

How do you actually choose repertoire?

We’re known for a certain work aesthetic, which is this mischievous pushing the boundary, poking a needle, that sort of stuff. But then, we [have] also done a Sondheim musical and the classics. Underneath all of this, though, is that we are fundamentally an artist’s theatre, particularly an actor’s theatre.

We used to do only work that was already created or orphaned by other theatres. We never commissioned new work, but that changed during the pandemic, especially because people were writing at home, so if someone had an idea for us, we’d tell them to write it at home and get back to us.

And then there are the ensemble collaborations where you build something together.

When I look at an original play for consideration, I ask, is there any excitement in it? I have to make sure that the opportunity is transformative. And then it is deciding which artists should be involved. So, the project is really tied to specific artists. At the end of the day, that’s the most important deciding factor because I don’t have to do new plays unless somebody wants to do them. Why would I torture the audience?

And so, I just want to make sure that there is an artistic reason for putting on the play.

I want to hear about the touring because I understand that it is quite extensive.

We go on the road, not because we didn’t get enough audiences in Barrie, or we’re trying to break down barriers. We tour for different kinds of reason altogether, although I should add that I adore touring, shamelessly, I have to confess.

We know when a show is alive and when the show is not, and those that have a life, we put aside and come back to it in a year or two. We’ll re-rehearse it, and then take it somewhere else because Barrie people have already seen it.

Our touring thing, generally speaking, is going to places where other companies don’t go, like Surinam or Fiji, countries that really don’t have a theatre scene. Because we do site-specific work, we don’t need traditional theatre venues, so we can perform there. They are also new strategic markets that we like to explore.

Similarly, because of site-specific work, we tour markets in Canada that bigger companies can’t do, like Iqaluit and Dawson City. And what ends up happening is we usually associate with an emerging theatre company.

On the other hand, we’ll take something bigger like our Sweeney Todd production, where the audience follows the actors around, to a major capital like Buenos Aires, because this kind of immersive work or grassroots musical does not quite exist there.

Sometimes presenters and programmers will reach out to us because they are interested in the work we do. I also meet a lot of people at international theatre conferences, so you build up a list of contacts. And then there’s the internet. I figure out the vibe, sort of collecting people who love a crazy theatre adventure.

And on occasion, we’ll come to Toronto.

When you go to Suriname, you’re not going to attract hype or presenters or programmers or colleagues or national and international media. So, it’s really important that we establish a brand of some sort through a place like Toronto. It’s sort of like a vaccination. Do you need a COVID vaccine, but you’ll be smart to get it anyway.

But, you know, with all of this, we only did one quick project in the States. People say, why don’t you go to the States? I’m like, what am I going to offer to the States that they don’t have already? Or what am I going to offer to the States that other Canadian theatre companies can’t?

Jamie McRoberts and Richard Lam in For Both Resting and Breeding, Talk Is Free Theatre (Photo: Katie Edwards)
Jamie McRoberts and Richard Lam in For Both Resting and Breeding, Talk Is Free Theatre (Photo: Katie Edwards)

The Plays Coming to Toronto

Let’s talk about For Resting and Breeding.

For Resting and Breeding is a Canadian play, which we did not develop, but which we love. We did it in Barrie in 2018 and took it to Australia in 2020, and then to Chile and Argentina. Before Toronto, we’re doing a short stint in Windsor. After Toronto, we go straight to Japan.

For the play, we needed to find a house in Toronto for our site, so I blatantly put on Facebook that I was looking for a residential house to do a show. Robert Sirman, who is a big supporter of our theatre, trepidatiously but with optimism, reached out and said, well, they are actually away in Mexico for the whole of January, and we could have the house. That was an amazing offer.

I discovered For Resting and Breeding when I went to a play reading in 2017 because it had a lot of my people in it, and I was absolutely blown away by it. Adam Meisner is a great new playwright out of Ottawa. I think he lives in Toronto now.

I just love it when people write plays because they have something to say, not because they were asked to write a play. And this was one of those cases.

Adam created a future genderless society that has nothing to do with gender politics or gender studies, none of that. The play just uses gender as a plot device, as a kind of fantasizing about future life.

What I love about this is the whole idea of legacy, of history. It’s a look at the present from an imagined future, and it really talks about how we’re wanting to be remembered by showing us a society of how people have evolved, not how technology has evolved.

The play is set in one room of the house. The audience does not move.

These futuristic humans have discovered the only surviving house built in 1999 by Millennials and have established it as a museum. They then try to figure out what things were like back then, not unlike when we work on a Shakespeare play and imagine what things were like 400 years ago in his time.

I think it sounds delightful. How did you find Mike Bartlett’s play Cock?

Michael Torontow is our longtime colleague in so many different capacities. I gave him a strict order that he needed to find a play, ideally a comedy, because he’s predominantly known as a wonderful musical theatre performer, but I’ve sensed there is a greater actor in him.

When you’re a good-looking man, you’re not taken very seriously. You’re just used for your good looks, and I wanted to uglify him for his own benefit. He thought of Cock and specifically asked for Dylan Trowbridge to direct it. Dylan looked at it very seriously because he would never say yes to anything unless he finds the reason to do it, and he said yes, and then we put together the rest of the company.

Cock is about a gay man who has been in a relationship for seven years, but who falls in love with a woman — and all the chaos that ensues.

I decided that I was not giving them a theatre because it says in the script that it requires no set and no props. Well, we’re a company that does site-specific work, so we performed it in the warehouse basement in our storage locker in Barrie. In Toronto, it’s in an industrial garage. We need something where a brawl can take place.

The last play is Darryl Dennis’ Tales of an Urban Indian.

That’s coming in May. It was recommended to me by Mario Crudo, who was the former artistic director of Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay.

That show was programmed in the theatre, but then we lost the venue at the very last minute, so I just put it on a bus out of despair because tickets were already purchased.

Last fall we celebrated our 750th performance of the play, and Nolan Moberly is our eighth actor. It’s a dark comedy about a man who grew up on both a reservation and in a city, and the actor plays all the characters in his life.

What about your personal life?

Let’s just say that I’m married to the theatre.

Do you have any last thoughts?

This is the most wonderful thing about what we do. It’s kind of, I like to say, polarizes us into harmony. I think a great work of art has a capacity to speak individually to everyone in the audience as opposed to a general mass.

I think that’s what makes a good play.

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Paula Citron
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