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Directors Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner reconfigured the Bluma Appel Theatre for Concord Floral. Risers were placed on the stage floor, ascending from stage right to stage left, for the audience to sit on and look down onto a playing space demarcated by a rectangular patch of AstroTurf. This arrangement forced spectators to see the materiality of the setting, drawing attention to the significance of terrain, both metaphorical and literal, in the performance. Concord Floral explored liminal terrain in its setting, process, themes, and politics.
As the winner of the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award and Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award for English-Language Drama in the same year, Jordan Tannahill, age 29, maps the transitional terrain of being both emerging and established in Concord Floral in his dramatization of the lives of contemporary teenagers. The exploration of this liminal terrain theatricalized several important questions central to Tannahill’s life and work: geographically, the play considered how suburban development threatens the delicate ecology of the environment; temporally, the production metatheatrically staged the perilous terrain traversed between childhood and adulthood to highlight the harm of bullying faced by young people today; and thematically, the ghost...