Why does theatre matter today?

Theatre matters because it's one of the few spaces left that can interrupt how divided we've become. We've all retreated into corners, consuming only stories that confirm what we already believe — theatre can break that pattern. It disrupts our hypnotized connection to convenience and asks us to engage and commit for two hours: no scrolling, no pausing, no algorithm curating the experience. Just people, live, in a room, working through something together in real time.

That feels especially urgent right now. Film and television work has been contracting for years, and AI is encroaching fast on the kind of screen work actors and writers used to rely on. Theatre is AI-proof. You can't synthesize a live performance — the risk of it, the fact that anything could go wrong, that the actor in front of you is genuinely present and could stumble or surprise themselves. That's not a flaw to engineer out. That's the entire point.

At Mitch and Murray, our mandate is "Storytelling for the Brave": we choose plays that ask something of an audience — courage, empathy, discomfort — rather than plays that flatter them. Eureka Day, our upcoming production, does exactly that, turning an unsparing but compassionate lens on a community that means well and still fractures. Theatre doesn't just entertain. Done right, it makes people a little more willing to sit with each other.

What's a project you're particularly proud of?

Instantaneous Blue, my first full-length play. It premiered in January 2023 at The Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island, marking Mitch and Murray's tenth anniversary and our first original Canadian work.

It's semi-autobiographical — both of my parents fell into decline with dementia and Alzheimer's at the same time, and I was living the "sandwich generation" reality: raising a young child while also becoming a caregiver to my own parents. The play follows a couple welcoming their first baby while shepherding his declining parents through their final years, and it came directly out of that period of my life.

We drew an audience of almost 2,000, got national media attention including a CBC interview, and held a post-show talkback with the CEO of the Alzheimer Society of BC, with partial ticket proceeds going to the Society. But what's stayed with me most is how it seems to really touch people whose lives have been affected by this disease — that's particularly relevant here, since BC has the greatest number of aging people in the country. I didn't write it to be clever. I wrote it because I was in the thick of it.

It's the project that taught me what this company is actually for.

What helps you stay curious?

There's a Muhammad Ali quote I come back to: a man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life. That's the standard I try to hold myself to — staying curious means being willing to actually change your mind, not just collect more evidence for what you already believed.

Practically, that means a concerted effort not to fall prey to algorithms. I try to be an independent thinker rather than a passive consumer of whatever gets fed to me, and to actively resist getting swept up in groupthink and tribalism — which is easy to do right now, in almost any direction. I'd rather try to get an aerial view of an issue than dig into a trench on one side of it.

That instinct shapes the work directly. It's why we programmed Heroes of the Fourth Turning and Eureka Day back to back — one interrogates the far right, the other the left — because I think the job of an artist, and honestly the job of a curious person generally, is to resist easy sides.

What advice would you give someone entering the field?

Know your worth. Don't let anyone — a casting director, a producer, an acting teacher — convince you that you should be grateful just to be in the room. But also: listen to everything and treat nothing as gospel. Take the advice, weigh it, and make your own decisions about what's actually true for you and your work.

You need to love the process, or you won't last. Study. Take class. Put yourself through the actual grind of creating something, not just the fantasy of having created it — that's how you find out whether you genuinely love this, or whether the reality of it isn't for you. A lot of people are in love with the idea of being an actor, or a writer, or a director, and not the actual work.

And be honest with yourself about rejection. This business runs on it — constant, relentless, often for reasons that have nothing to do with your talent. If you can't take that, and there's anything else professionally that would make you happy, go do that instead. Genuinely. Don't enter this crazy business out of obligation or vanity.

But if you love it — if the process itself is the reward — then dive in with both feet.