When Theatre Passe Muraille Artistic Director Andy McKim was putting together the 2009-2010 season, he wanted a theme that would unify the various elements he’d experienced not only as an artist, but as a Torontonian.
“One of the things that was important to me was the idea that Toronto is home to the world’s stories,” McKim explains. “We say, ‘Come here, and enter a new world’ –and it’s that feeling that we certainly wanted to celebrate.”

McKim enjoys the city so much, he and his wife take home vacations. “It’s a ridiculously interesting city,” he observes. “I love spending a week or two weeks exploring this city and what it has to offer. It is a city made up of so many communities, and is, arguably, the most multicultural city on the planet. We can only scratch the surface –especially in theatre.”

He also wanted to integrate Theatre Passe Muraille’s storied history into next year’s season. The theatre has an important place in Toronto’s performing arts community. Founded in 1968, the theatre premiered a number of important Canadian works, including The Farm Show and I Love You, Baby Blue. It nurtured a number of smaller companies in the 70s and early 80s, but faced eviction from its homebase on Ryerson Avenue, just off of the hip-meets-grungey Queen Street West area, in 2007. Thankfully, the City of Toronto stepped in, and TPM hasn’t looked back.

McKim, who had previously been Artistic Director of the esteemed Tarragon Theatre and had an illustrious directing career to boot, replaced longtime AD Layne Coleman in 2007. He saw within the drama of TPM’s nearly losing their building an opportunity.

“With our revivification being due to the city of Toronto taking a bold course of action, buying the building, providing us with an opportunity to move forward positively and with energy and support, we made a point of having a free performance in (my) first season with our first production, The Drawer Boy, and felt there was a kind of kinship between the city and us. I enjoyed that feeling, and we were just were interested in pursuing that connection.”

Only after he chose the city itself as a theme did Toronto Mayor David Miller remind him that 2009 is the 175th anniversary of the city’s founding, making the theme a nicely, and conveniently resonant one.

Annonunced in early April, Theatre Passe Muraille’s 42nd season will feature an array of talent from a wide spectrum of the Canadian theatre scene. Celebrated playwright Judith Thompson will premiere her latest work, Such Creatures, which is set to coincide with the anniversary of her first play, The Crackwalkers, being performed at TPM in 1979. BASH’d!, the gay-themed hip-hop musical that went on to become a hit off-Broadway, will also be produced, along with the Julie Tepperman/Aaron Willis work Yichud, which was last performed at the alternative Next Stage Festival this past winter. Indian theatre artist Anusree Roy, who previously graced TPM’s smaller second stage with one-woman shows Pyaasa and Letters From My Grandma, will be re-mounting the latter show, and Filippino company Sulong Theatre Collective will be presenting Future Folk, a multi-disciplinary piece.

Three works will also be presented in association with TPM; the theatre will work with emerging and independent companies like Alameda Theatre, Rusticle, and Contrary Company, the latter producing a re-mount of Icelandic-born, Scottish-raised theatre artist Maja Ardal's You Fancy Yourself.

McKim is confident that in programming such a diverse array of pieces, TPM is expanding its reach –and that of Toronto theatre –considerably. “There’s a hunger to find out more about all of our neighbours.” He says it was through reaching out to TPM’s neighbours that he discovered the Orthodox Jewish world presented in Yichud isn’t as distant as he had presumed. “Those folks practicing that orthodoxy live just up the street from the theatre. It was revelatory to me.”

Co-produced with the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, Yichud, which revolves around a Jewish marriage ceremony, is “the kind of production you experience from the moment you enter the lobby, as opposed to some of the playwright/story-focused work that we had represent us in the last season. Some shows have really strong production elements to them –BASH’d! and Yichud to name two –and that’s exciting, to be able to represent that kind of work.”

Similarly, McKim says BASH’d! provides an opportunity to reach across barriers of not only sexuality and gender, but culture, opportunity, and socio-economic divides.

“What’s so glorious about (it) is how accessible it is,” he enthuses. “It’s about two gay characters, yes, and gay-bashing is the focus point. (But) the show argues for an anti-violence message all around, even though its characters get sucked into a kind of violence as well, a violence of their own. The show as a whole is appealing for tolerance and for the lack of violence. It’s an appealing urban message.”

McKim says he programmed it because “I don’t believe it’s a play for a gay audience. It’s a play for a broad, diverse audience. In some ways, it’s far more provocative and entertaining when played for the larger audience than (for a) specialized one.”

Just as critical to Theatre Passe Muraille is the activity they conduct offstage. They’re currently working with a collective group who focus on the needs and concerns of immigrant women in the area. This sort of outreach “provides opportunity for the theatre to have a relationship with its immediate neighbours that’s meaningful both ways.” He hopes the relationship will lead “not only to them developing work that includes the voices of women from that community, and other communities of immigrants in the city, but also it will hopefully (have) a mentoring component.”

When it comes to the current economic climate, and how it might impact future theatre attendance, McKim is surprisingly upbeat. “In theatre generally, and in this theatre certainly, we live in such a restrained economic situation… so for our part, I don’t think it has that much impact. As far as our audience is concerned, I don’t believe the cost of coming to this theatre is so large compared to what people believe to be the merit of experience –being in a social setting, having the opportunity for a transforming, exciting, dynamic experience –I don’t think people’s desire for that will diminish. People are hungering for real stories about real people.”