Free Lecture Series
To provide context and enrich the experience for a Saturday matinee audience, we invite great minds to speak on their areas of expertise in relation to the play. These pre-show lectures are on the Saturdays of the opening week for all our mainspace productions.
Upcoming Lectures
carried away on the crest of a wave
Clare Pain MD, MSc., FRCPC is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Director of the Psychological Trauma Program at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto. She has published two books on Trauma. Through her work with educational partnerships between the University of Toronto and Addis Ababa University Ethiopia, her clinical focus is on the assessment and treatment of patients, including refugees, who continue to suffer from the effects of psychological trauma. She has lectured and taught extensively on various aspects of psychological trauma including trans-cultural aspects; and increasingly on global mental health.
Past Lectures
And Slowly Beauty
Amanda Jernigan is a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor. Her works have been published in Canada, the United States and Germany, and are represented in the online archive of the Poetry Foundation. Her first book of poems, Groundwork, was published by Biblioasis in 2011. Her second collection, All The Daylight Hours, is forthcoming by Comorant Books.
The Amorous Adventures of Anatol
Mavis Himes (Ph.D., C. Psych.) on Freud’s struggle with what he called the dark continent” of women and his posing the oft-repeated question “what does the woman want?” Himes rephrases Freud’s question to ask, “What does Anatol want?” An exploration of male desire, the art of seduction and the obsessional. After the afternoon’s performance Himes will return for a post-show “couch session” with actor Mike Shara as Anatol.
Mavis Himes is a psychoanalyst in private practice as well as a consultant at Wellspring, a psychosocial cancer centre in Toronto. She is director of Speaking of Lacan Psychoanalytic Group Toronto (SOL), a group that sponsors guest speakers, seminars and reading groups. She is the author of The Sacred Body: A Therapist’s Body.
The Little Years
Sylvia Nickerson’s artistic practice has long been influenced by her engagement with math and science. She is both a visual artist and academic. Her illustrations have been published in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, as well as numerous magazines in Canada and the United States, and she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto in the history and philosophy of science.
No Great Mischief
Performer Stephen Guy-McGrath treats us to some pre-show music and discusses the No Great Mischief journey: from it's theatrical inception through to its fourth production.
Stephen Guy-McGrath was born and raised in St. John's, Nfld. He has worked with renowned comic creators such as Andy Jones and Rick Mercer and founded a sketch troupe Cat Fud with Mark Critch (of This Hour Has 22 Minutes). Other credits include: the celtic musical SwingStep; Fire, Tent Meeting (Bluewater Summer Playhouse), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Young Peoples Theatre), Power Of The Unemployed (The LSPU Hall in Nfld), The Edible Woman, Small Time, Raceday, Culture Shock, Marry Me A Little (Theatre On The Grand), Pélagie (Canadian Stage), Much Ado about Nothing (Resurgence Theatre Company), Three Penny Opera, The Time of Your Life, Three Sisters, As You Like it, Blink, Glengarry Glen Ross (Soulpepper), and every production of No Great Mischief to date.
The Real World?
In 1971, John Van Burek was the
Founding Artistic Director of le Théâtre Français de Toronto, which he ran for close to twenty years.
Throughout his career he has taught extensively, including at York University, Ryerson University,
the Nottingham School of the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University and Victoria University.
Mr. Van Burek is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Toronto Drama Bench Award for Distinguished Contribution to Canadian Theatre,
l'Ordre de la Pléiade (France), the Queen's Jubilee Medal and the prestigious Silver Ticket Award from the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts.
He currently sits on the Board of the Toronto Arts Council.
In the Next Room
or the vibrator play
Dr. Edward Shorter - Professor University of Toronto Departments of History and Psychiatry. Research areas include: Social history of medicine, and the history of sexuality
Erin Brubacher - Tarragon's Director of Education and Outreach and former Erasmus Mundus fellow in International Performance Research jointly with the University of Warwick and the University of Amsterdam.
Name in Vain (Decalogue Two)
The Children’s Republic
The Golden Dragon
Immigration is essentially relocation from one home with the hope of creating a new one. What is home? How is it made? How long does it take?
Join us for artist talks on two projects that, like The Golden Dragon, draw together stories that exist in side-by-side, in a contemporary city, at a moment in time... people searching for physical and metaphorical homes.
Former staff photographer for 'The National Post', Brett Gundlock is a photojournalist and artist. He has recently participated in shows at Harbourfront Centre; the Art Gallery of York University; the Format International Photography Festival in Derby, England and the Ian Parry collaborative show at the Getty Images Gallery in London, England. Brett is a founding member of the Boreal Collective, a dedicated group of Canadian-based photojournalists, committed to documenting issues of environmental, social, cultural and political importance in Canada and abroad.
Director of Education and Outreach for Tarragon, Erin Brubacher has developed an invitational arts practice, creating situations that interrupt the everyday. She holds a BA in Fine Arts Photography from Mount Allison University and an MA in International Performance Research jointly from the University of Warwick and University of Amsterdam; her practice-based dissertation has recently been nominated for a National Thesis Prize in the Netherlands.
The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs
A conversation on translation with Leanna Brodie.
Leanna Brodie is a writer, actor and translator whose plays For Home and Country, The Vic, and Schoolhouse are published by Talonbooks and have been performed across Canada. Her CBC radio dramas include Invisible City and Seeds of Our Destruction. She has twice been Playwright-in-Residence at the Blyth Festival and 4th Line Theatre, and has belonged to the playwrights’ units of the Tarragon Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille – which co-produced The Vic with Cahoots Theatre Projects. Her translations include Sébastien Harrisson’s From Alaska (selected as the first project of the Quebec Translation Exchange between CEAD and the Banff Centre for the Arts); Hélène Ducharme’s Baobab and Tiger by the Tail; Larry Tremblay’s Panda Panda; Philippe Soldevila’s Tales of the Moon; and Louise Bombardier’s My Mother Dog (Playwrights Canada Press).
The Clockmaker
The Year of Magical Thinking
The Misanthrope
in a version by Martin Crimp