The Greenhouse theatre festival grows new Canadian plays

After a year off, Tarragon Theatre’s Greenhouse Festival is once again giving new Canadian plays a safe place to blossom.

The residency program incubates productions in their early stages, offering artists the time and space to test nascent ideas in front of audiences. This year’s festival runs Jan. 27 to 31 in Toronto and features four works-in-progress.

Though only in its third edition, Greenhouse has proven a valuable sandbox for theatre makers navigating a national ecosystem where development and rehearsal costs continue to rise. Several projects nurtured at the festival have gone on to further success, including Graham Isador’s Short Sighted and Adam Francis Proulx’s Emilio’s A Million Chameleons.

This month, fully realized versions of two more Greenhouse offerings — Guilty by Association’s 2021 and Kevin Matthew Wong’s Benevolence — played at New York’s Under the Radar Festival, a prestigious showcase of experimental theatre from across the globe. And now, the productions are launching into B.C. dates. 2021 is playing the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver on Jan. 23 and 24, and in March, Benevolence will tour to Victoria’s Belfry Theatre and Kamloops’s Western Canada Theatre.

From seed to flower

Greenhouse fostered Benevolence — a solo show exploring Wong’s Hakka identity — by supporting the artist’s non-traditional creative process, which draws on his personal video footage. “I think Canada knows how to support writers … but there are many fewer places for creators who start without text to really [build a project] from the ground up,” he tells CBC Arts in a phone interview. 

The residency offered Wong a few weeks of rehearsal, followed by four public performances.

Spectators produced around 200 pieces of written feedback. “People were so enthusiastic about the show, and so they would leave [sticky notes] in this dim sum steamer container that I had in the lobby,” he says. “I keep them around to cheer me up or to remind me about what's significant about the show.”

Wong frames this type of engagement as meaningful for attendees, as well. “A subconscious thing that the festival was telling the audience was that they matter — not in a transactional way,” he says. “They matter for the art to live.”

After appearing in the inaugural edition of the Greenhouse Festival in 2023, a completed version of Benevolence premiered at Tarragon last April. Wong says that the buzz around the Greenhouse run helped “fast-track” the full production. 

“I find Canadian theatre so glacial. The speed is just embarrassingly slow, whether it's the granting or the way that our theatrical seasons work,” he reflects. “What was exciting about Greenhouse was that people saw a proof of concept that they were excited about and they wanted to engage with as soon as possible. And that still took two years.”

The roots of Greenhouse 

The Greenhouse Festival debuted three years ago, during Tarragon’s first season programmed by artistic director Mike Payette. He and theatre artist Justin Miller — then the company’s artistic producer — wanted to raise visibility around what it takes to develop original plays.

“It is a hope of mine to champion the good word of new play development and what dramaturgy looks like in Canada, specifically,” says Payette. “The general public doesn't really understand what it takes to create … the productions that they see at the end of the day.”

Payette’s inspirations include other Canadian new works festivals such as Fresh Meat Fest in Ottawa. He describes Greenhouse as a riff on Tarragon’s now-defunct Spring Arts Fair, which began in the mid-1980s and ran for two decades, playing a role in the development of iconic Canadian plays like I, Claudia and 2 Pianos 4 Hands.

Greenhouse’s first two iterations were expansive, spanning two weekends and taking over much of the Tarragon Theatre building. In 2024, for example, a rehearsal studio hosted a giant, participatory blanket fort. 

While the Tarragon team liked that the Greenhouse Festival spoke to a “larger discourse of new play creation in Canada,” the scale wasn’t sustainable.

“It's expensive,” emphasizes Payette. “The project wasn't supported by an outside source, and so there was a good amount of financial and staff resources that went into [it].... To have seven to nine productions [in residence] is a lot.”

The solution? “We were like, ‘Let’s keep it alive, but let’s see if we can make it a biennial thing,’” shares Payette, “so that we can protect our staff … and allow there to be a level of sustainability.”

That’s why the festival didn’t occur in 2025 — and won’t in 2027. “We hope to bring it back for [2028],” Payette says.

Tiny Bear Jaws says sorry

Curated by Miller with input from the current Tarragon team, the 2026 Greenhouse lineup includes a hip-hop dance-theatre show, a shadow puppetry project and an unticketed magic-theatre hybrid. There’ll also be a special presentation from Miller’s drag alter-ego Pearle Harbour and a free, nightly event called the Planter Box Cabaret with rotating programming.

In addition to these offerings — with mainly Ontarian roots — the festival will feature Edmonton-based writer-performer Elena Belyea, who is the artistic director of Tiny Bear Jaws.

The company’s Apology Show investigates the concept of apologies through monologues, audience participation and original pop songs. 

When spectators enter the production, they can fill out a questionnaire about an apology they’d like to receive. Belyea then incorporates some of those responses into the show.

Belyea is primarily using the Greenhouse run to test this audience-performer relationship, they explain. “With this particular piece, because audience interaction is so essential to its spine … an audience who's down to play is so, so, so helpful.”

They welcome the chance to focus on process rather than product. “One of the things that I'm still so appreciative of with Greenhouse is that it's explicitly a lab where you're [meant] to come in with a question … you want to research,” they say.

Payette echoes this focus on exploration by pointing to metrics of success that stretch beyond whether participating shows live on after the Greenhouse Festival. “Even if a project didn't manifest in a more full production, those artists were able to have an environment to try ideas,” he says. 

“To have that space and that home to just create and to vibe? That, to me, is a success of the whole operation.”

The Greenhouse Festival runs Jan. 27-31 at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.