How we make it work: Arkady Spivak, artistic producer, TIFT
Even if you’re a regular theatre goer in Toronto, I bet you haven’t heard of Talk is Free Theatre in Barrie, one of the most interesting arts organizations currently operating in Ontario. After 9 p.m. public transit heading back to Toronto goes kaput so you would have to drive to Barrie and back to see the shows—unless TIFT introduces some sort of a direct shuttle. (Consider this my lobbying effort, Arkady.) TIFT has recently announced its 24/25 lineup as well as the details of its September mini-fest about all things marriage and relationships, I Do, I Don’t, I Dare! It’s not easy running a theatre company in Ontario post-Covid, but TIFT’s Artistic Producer and head honcho Arkady Spivak’s enthusiasm for the job is unwavering. Here are some highlights from our kaffeeklatsch in a café off King East a couple of weekends ago.
His immigrant origin story: My widowed mother and I emigrated to Canada, where we already had some family, when I was 14. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down, perestroika and glasnost underway, but you still had to renounce your Soviet citizenship if you decided to live somewhere else. After some time in Italy waiting for our Canadian papers to be processed, we landed here in June 1990 and joined the Jewish-Muscovite diaspora. The departure felt traumatic back then for me, but now I think it was the best time to go because I got all I needed out of that culture without surrendering completely to it. And once you’re in a different country, there’s no purpose in living exclusively off your roots, so you should try to find a way into the new culture. I was a “backstage kid” and a child actor where my mom worked as a music director and accompanist, in one of the Moscow municipal theatres which had its crowning achievements in the 1950s, 60s and 70s but fell into disrepair in the 1980s, the building this major eye sore in the middle of Moscow. When I was growing up, the place programmed absurdist plays and there was a lot of Pinter, Mrożek, Ionesco, and some contemporary Soviet repertory. Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, one of the first productions after the ban was lifted from the work.
First jobs: As a Canadian high schooler I got really into languages and also almost immediately started working at McDonald's. For some reason I thought I had to completely let go of my backstage life and love of theatre. We thought that maybe you need to give up everything from the before life? I went to Glendon College at York University determined to study French and languages (oh well, I thought, you learn one new language, you can learn another one and then another one), but then I took my first drama course, and I was done for. Right away it was clear to me that I wanted to go into theater management because that offered a lot of other opportunities, like writing and directing. This is why a lot of people start companies: to give themselves that freedom. Not that I ever particularly availed myself of the opportunity! I much prefer curating and programming. I don't want to work on an actual project. I’m too impatient. I have a total platform to do any writing and directing I’d want, and I absolutely don’t want to. But I like that the possibility is there.
TIFT: I never actually graduated–I ‘graduated myself’ if you will–because I got busy working. I got a summer job at a company in Barrie that doesn’t exist any more, called Gryphon Theatre. It was a summer position paid for by Labatt, the beer company. (It’s funny, when we were starting TIFT, Molson was vacating Molson Park in order for a commercial village to be built and they gave us a drive-through beer store to use for a couple of years, which we remodeled as a black box theatre. I owe everything to Big Beer and I don’t even drink beer if given any other options.) I stayed with Gryphon for two years. During that time, I got together a bunch of artist friends who were close to my age, one of them was Mike Nadajewski who is a gigantic talent, and urged them to join me in starting a company. We could do, like, one project a year and the rest of the year I would have a job thanking donors at CanStage or something, to supplement my income. And then Joe Anderson who became our founding chairman, whom I met as a Gryphon sponsor, joined us; he was the publisher of the local Metroland newspaper in Barrie called The Barrie Advance and a lot of other community newspapers. He was very into the economic benefit of the arts, the Richard Florida argument back then. He asked me why I didn't start the company right there in Barrie, to which I replied, ‘Only if you promise to be the chairman of the board’. So that’s how we got going.
Theatre as location scouting: We receive operating grants now from all levels of government, but initially it was all based on a set of promises from the local philanthropy figures. What I think is special with TIFT, and this was deliberate, is that I don’t need the box office or a specific audience to inform what we do. Every regional theatre is like, Oh, we need to sell 5000 tickets for that play. We don’t. We’ve always operated in a 100-seat facility. I realized that for the kind of work that we were going to develop, to rely on a traditional audience would be very difficult. I think that, in essence, everything is producible. But it’s up to the producer to find the right place for it. People think that something is more important because it’s playing to thousands of people in Toronto. Why? So this next season we're not even doing anything at our Five Points Theatre because we’ve found more suitable locations for each of the works. I mean, buildings are great, but they cannot possibly inform what gets programmed. When you look at how Canadian theatre is programmed… the talent and the venue are never matched. I love the jewel that is the Winter Garden Theatre, but you have to put musicals there because it’s so expensive. And your greatest people are in basements. But I don’t mind basements.
→Previously on How we make it work: Charlotte Burrage
Diversity, but for real: Our model was diversified to begin with. Meaning, it needed to support almost total artistic risk. I think artistic risk is very important. Ideas fail, and people often think it’s because something was too ambitious, but I think it’s because something was too small. Thinking small, thinking you can predetermine every step and know what’s going to happen. It’s not that artists are scared: it’s that they’re made to feel scared by lack of resources, by constantly having to prove themselves. Nobody leads in Canada. Everybody is supporting what the producers are needing, what the communities are needing, what the boards prefer, and by the time it gets to the artists… they have to make an omelet out of eggshells, you know?
Going places: Our budget is about a million and a half, roughly. We get a grant from the Canada Council but if we want to tour, we can apply to get the much higher, touring grant for this or that project. Touring is essential for us, artistically too. We go to places where we can show something new, something that doesn’t exist there. We wouldn’t tour Sondheim, say, to Chicago–what would be the point–but we did take our production of Sweeney Todd to Buenos Aires. Now that’s a big theatre capital, but they don’t usually see grassroots musicals in immersive stagings–and the way Mitchell Cushman directs shows, he makes you think every building was built for the show he’s directing specifically. In Barrie, we do funky things. If they work, they get around. If they don’t work, seven people will have seen it. It’s all good.
Ensembles, pros and cons: I’m not big on mandates (say, you only do plays by Shaw and his contemporaries, or only show plays by women, or whatever). Shouldn’t you be doing plays because they’re the most irresistible piece of language for you at this moment? As opposed to because it’s your mandate? I don’t mind the ensemble system, but also I don’t believe that the repertory system works in its totality either. An artistic director has to have freedom of thought and choice. They must persuade everyone that the play is worth doing. The problem with the European repertory theatre system is that it glorifies the institution. Casting is often by type (I need three leading players, three supporting, one buffoon type etc). Whereas I like to mix it up. We started this thing in a pandemic no less, called Artist BIG (Basic Income Guaranteed): we put 40 artists on a certain amount of guaranteed work for three years. We tell them, you’ll have work from the theatre for the minimum value of X dollar amount, and then we negotiate specific work through individual contracts like you would ordinarily. This provides some continuity–it’s a semi-ensemble, if you will–without it being permanent.
Coming up: I wanted to make more room for comedy at TIFT, particularly the de-romanticized ones. (This is why The Cabinet Minister’s Wife by Branislav Nušić is there next season, to be directed by Layne Coleman and adapted by Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman. I mean, there’s not a single wholesome character in that play. There’s nothing polite about it.) Also, I don’t do agenda-driven theatre… what I’m trying to stay away from is the thinking that something is pertinent because there was an article about it in a newspaper the other day. Pertinent is Death of a Salesman. You know? There’s a lot of opportunism on this score because now everybody flies flags for everything. I think the DEI endeavours are perfectly legitimate, if they’re authentic and not misused. I do think part of my job is to look who the underdog is and to let them speak. Who has a voice and who’s been silent? Create conditions for those who have stayed silent to speak up. That’s all. And this goes for every aspect of theatre, starting with actors themselves. Who are the people that I think haven't actually been doing the work that they should be doing? As simple as that. And what happened to language diversity? Can artists who, say, emigrated from Japan find work here, or are we just interested in hiring Canadians of Japanese descent? What happened to the recent Ukrainian arrivals? Barrie alone has, like, ten established artists in its midst. What are they working on? But funders are forever catching up with actual needs. The diversity requirements in funding are now addressing problems from 25 years ago. It’s an incredibly complex country, and it’s hard to find the perfect arts funding formula.
We’re reviving Tales of an Urban Indian next season which is going to celebrate its 750th performance and which will take place on a moving bus. We’ve toured the show to Fiji, New Zealand, Australia twice, Chile, Argentina and Surinam. Our cash cow musical this season is The Frogs, the Aristophanes/Sondheim thing. We’re also doing this British play called Cock, which is about nobody getting what they want. Marcia Johnson’s Perfect on Paper, in a surprise location in downtown Barrie. And much else.
On recent cases of actors refusing to say offensive words in character: As a producer, I’m accountable to the entire ensemble, and to the audiences. At the same time, every artist has a right to accept or not accept what is being offered, including the material. If they change their mind in the course of the process, Equity [their union] has a two-week out. There are certain moratoriums, like you can't leave the production at specific times, let’s say the opening night or after opening night, because it's a strain on everybody else. But you could say, I'm leaving the project in two weeks. To which the producer can say, here is your two weeks, goodbye. I'm replacing you. And that exists for all sorts of reasons. Volatile work environment that is uncontrollable, for example–this happens sometimes. It could be that an actor got a job at the Stratford Festival and it's more advantageous for them to go there. It's not the desired outcome, but it does happen. There’s an out.
But I think I can guess why the refusal to say certain words. Artists have to go in front of people and they're judged incessantly. They don’t want to have an egg on their face and never work again, after saying certain lines. It's really more about how they're perceived in front of casting directors, than about the morality of saying something, I think. You see, everybody wants to take a risk, but everybody wants to work. If you’re an actor and take a risk and it doesn’t work out, who's going to look out for you afterwards? Who's going to say, honey, you fucked it up, but you're a genius? Nobody does that. People dispense with the artist. So I understand. Another reason touring is great. Nobody can hire you in New Zealand, no casting directors will come searching for locally hirable talent. So let’s go for it.
As told to Long Play, July 2024
