Interview | Arkady Spivak: Adventures in Theatre
Barrie-based Talk Is Free Theatre is a regional theatre unlike any other, both because of its site-specific/immersive repertoire, and the fact that it tours the world to places where other companies fear to tread.
Among its travels, the 20-year-old TIFT has presented productions in Toronto, establishing its brand in the Big Smoke, as it were. In January the company came south of the 401 once again, bringing two plays, and Mike Bartlett’s Cock was so successful, that it was given a rerun in April in an east end industrial complex.
The brainchild behind the ambitious and adventurous TIFT is the company’s intriguing artistic producer, Arkady Spivak, who just turned 50.
Our (very)long-ranging Zoom conversation covered Spivak’s life and times, the founding of TIFT, and his philosophy of theatre.
The Theatre Child – Spivak’s Background.
Where were you born?
I was born to Jewish parents in Moscow, in what was then the Soviet Union. My dad passed away when I was five and a half. Before that happened, most of his family had immigrated in the late 70s to either the United States or Canada.
At that time, immigration was considered as betraying the homeland, so you had a tough time if you indicated that you wanted to leave. When Gorbachev became leader and permitted international visits, travel opportunities for ordinary Soviet citizens, who weren’t diplomats or Bolshoi stars, became possible.
We came to Toronto to visit my grandmother whom I sort of met for the first time. The moment we arrived back in Moscow, it was 1988, my mother immediately filed the papers for immigration, particularly so because the Soviet army was mandatory, and I was turning 15. I can do many things, but jumping over fences and digging trenches would not be some of them.
How did you get to Canada?
As Russian Jewish immigrants, we had to first go to Vienna, after which we spent nine months in Italy near Rome waiting to get our landed immigrant papers.
Millions of Russian Jews immigrated to Canada and the United States. In fact, there are so many that it’s very profitable for Russian stars to tour through the Russian diaspora cities of North America.
Did you have a theatre life in Russia?
Yes, I did. Because my mom became a single mother, backstage became my babysitting place. She was a musical director in one of the central theatres in Moscow that had sort of an interesting history. They had an orchestra for incidental music only, like during changes of scenery.
So, she took me backstage, initially out of necessity, but there were all these childless women, and everybody wanted to adopt me. I had a choice of 20 mothers to go with, and they were fighting amongst themselves over who was going to take me out tonight for ice cream. It got to the point where nobody was even asking my mother if they could.
You know, the theatre is a safe place for a young boy, no matter how magical or how debaucherous it can be. Tortured lives and magic right next to each other. It’s a place where anything is possible and there is a certain sanctity too. You could absolutely despise your co-star but once you’re on stage with them, you must look out for each other. In some way then, theatre is the only sacred place of humanity.
I presume you became a child actor.
I did at age 11.
Certain shows required a young boy, and they asked me to read a few things, and I did. I think I was pretty good. Because I was taking over a part from somebody, I wasn’t even rehearsed. They sort of gave me an order, and then I did my own thing.
They also knew that I came from a theatre family, so I was dependable. I will be there. I understand what it’s all about. My mother will not say, he’s not coming to a performance tonight because he has hockey. I think there was also that element that went into the decision to hire me.
I did three shows in professional theatre, two of them at the same time in a repertory system. Imagine the empowerment when two theatres must fight over schedules for an 11-year-old boy.
Russian theatre is not seasonal rep. It’s like perpetual rep so things are running forever. I got paid three rubles and 20 kopeks per performance. An average Soviet citizen’s salary was somewhere between 90 and 110 rubles a month, and if I did ten performances, I would have 35 rubles. That’s a lot of money by that standard – like now if your salary would be $50,000 or $70,000.
I also had my own theatre company.
You had your own theatre company when you were 11?
I forced all my classmates to join. We did fairy tales, and we had five of them that we produced at the same time.
We would tour around to orphanages. We didn’t even make a reservation. We just showed up, and I’d say, looking very official, or so I thought, stuff like, I’m representing Young Soviet Children of Theatre, and we are here to perform.
The orphanages all thought that it was easier to let us do the show than to kick us out, just in case we were sent as some sort of audit or something. In 20 minutes, we had 300 or 400 orphans in the audience.
And I wish I could pull that off again – when you persuaded somebody that they needed you and kind of forced the audience.
I was working in theatre and making a lot of money, and I had no expenses because my mother and stepdad were looking after me. I was a big friend.
And because I was a wealthy young man, my company would sometimes take a cab to the orphanages, but we had to get an adult to call them for us.
What do you mean?
A cab wouldn’t come when we would call them because they would hear an 11-year-old voice, and they would think it’s a joke. So, I hired a guy for five kopeks a time, which was the price of a beer, to call for us.
He was a neighbor, a World War II veteran, and at some point he said to me that the price of beer was going up, and that I was taking advantage of a veteran who defended the country, so he’s raising the price to 10 kopeks per call, I then said, I’m going to replace you, and I found somebody who’d make the call for three kopeks.
Imagine, 11-year-old children arriving by cab to the orphanages to do the show.
Spivak’s School Days
So, you arrive in Canada when you’re 15. Did you take theatre arts in high school?
No, I never did any theatre in high school, first because, as an immigrant, you get the mindset that you’re going through a complete change of life, and, secondly, my spoken English was poor. I did study it in Russia, but it was more grammar and vocabulary. It wasn’t a language that you heard, so, at high school, it’s not like there were channels in English open to me, or that I wanted to hang out, because you could get bullied for not speaking well.
I started working at McDonald’s and they eventually made me a manager. I started by cleaning tables because I didn’t know any English. I couldn’t even take an order to serve a Big Mac, so I’m thinking, oh my goodness, from a theatre child to cleaning tables at McDonald’s.
So where did your interests lie?
I started studying languages.
I got into French. I picked up some Spanish on account of Italian that I never finished learning. I also tried to take German and Japanese in night school, but then I ended up not having enough time to do it properly.
It wasn’t until I went to York University, Glendon College, that I took my first drama course. My original intention was to be a French teacher, but then I got completely sideswiped right back into theatre.
In high school, I felt like a second offering to society because of my limitations. Then I met theatre people, which is when I recognized that I was nostalgic for Russia, not Russia itself, but the theatre scene. So, with the rediscovery of what I had lost, I realized that I had forgotten where I came from.
I don’t associate Glendon with theatre. I do, of course, associate it with French because it’s the bilingual college at York.
I went to Glendon because imagine the nerve, the audacity of me trying to teach French in Canada. But I also liked the fact that it’s very small, not a giant terminal like the main campus, and it was 15 minutes from where I lived, so I stayed at home. It was just easy and, at the time, appropriate.
There was a drama studies program there taught by Bob Wallace. You got trained to do many things, and so you would leave with a very strong understanding of theatre. It prepared you for leadership positions.
That led me to explore taking an arts administration course. It was a two-year program at the Scarborough Campus of the University of Toronto, but they wouldn’t accept my Glendon credits. I was told I’d have to take the whole four-year program because I didn’t have enough of the right courses to qualify for admission or something like that.
Well, I wasn’t going to sit there and start university all over again, so I switched my major to theatre at Glendon, and started a minor in marketing through the evening courses at York’s Atkinson College. I kind of created my own program. I stayed on for another year, for the fifth year, to finish off my degree.
And the truth is, I never officially graduated.
Spivak’s Life in Theatre Begins
Why didn’t you graduate from York?
In 2000, I got a job as a summer student at the Gryphon Theatre in Barrie, which is no longer in existence. At that time, it was the longest continuously running summer stock theatre in Ontario. It was also a satellite of the Capitol Theatre in Port Hope. We’d get their summer shows after they played there.
In the winter, the Gryphon presented acts like The Amazing Kreskin and The Nylons. There was also a children’s series. They asked me to stay on after the summer term because they were short staffed.
At that moment, York was going on strike, and I thought, why would I pay $10,000 a year for school, only not to go to school, when they’re offering me a position that I am actually training for? So, I stayed at the Gryphon.
I always told them that I’d be in Barrie for only a couple of years because I wanted to do something of my own. Like everybody else my age, I planned to go to Toronto to start a project.
So you are finally in Barrie, and we know you never leave. How long did you stay with the Gryphon?
The theatre was running at 30 percent occupancy that summer. I was hired to do publicity, but I started a rescue effort by doing all sorts of other things like fundraising. I also did box office management, grant writing, marketing, and executive admin work to help the general manager.
It wasn’t that anything was terribly wrong with the Gryphon. It was sort of just limping along forever and ever. It was a theatre that was dying, although it managed to hang on for another eight years, closing in 2010. I left in the summer of 2002.
The Founding of Talk Is Free Theatre
So now we finally come to the beginning of Talk Is Free Theatre.
As I mentioned before, I always thought that I would go to Toronto and work for Luminato or TIFF – something part-time, and also do my own producing.
And then came the fateful lunch with a gentleman who became our founding chairman.
His name is Joe Anderson, and he was the publisher of the local Metroland newspaper. He also owned various other community newspapers within a 150 km. radius of Barrie. He was very involved in the idea of the power of cultural economy, of building the arts in small communities, and he was also a great supporter of theatre.
At lunch I told him that I was going to be moving on to do my own projects, and he said, why not do them in Barrie? And I answered, if you’d like to be chairman of the board, I might be persuaded. We gave each other a week to think about it. When we got together for the second lunch, both of us said yes.
So, I started TIFT in the summer of 2002. If you’re counting professional, semi-professional, and community groups, we were about the fifth or sixth theatre company in Barrie.
And you know, to this day I think it’s probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my life, asking Joe to be chairman. That sort of chutzpah pays dividends, you know. It was the opportunity to develop a vision for a theatre, and because of that, a model that borrows from all sorts of frameworks.
What is your performance space like in Barrie?
TIFT quite deliberately does not own or manage spaces because we didn’t want to get into venue management. For the first decade, we were all over the place. Then the city built a lovely 100 to 200 seat black box theatre that opened in 2011. We rent space there. We can only use 100 seats because we need some room for the stage and other things.
Imagine a small community like Barrie building a self-standing black box theatre that is not attached to anything else, or a monument to someone. It’s called Five Points Theatre because it’s located at the five-point intersection, the central Barrie intersection.
Anybody can rent space. There’s a priority of who gets their dates in first. The rent is very affordable, $200 to $400 a day, depending on if you’re not for profit, or if you are corporate.
The theatre is very basic, but very clean basic. It even has nine stalls in the women’s washroom. Let’s say in our 100 seats, it’s half and half gender-wise, so 50 women. That means there is a stall for every five and a half women.
Pretty good, wouldn’t you say? I don’t know why I’m so proud of that fact because I never get to use them.
TIFT and the Unusual Repertoire
How did you decide on TIFT’S very, shall I say, un-regional theatre repertoire? I began to hear about interesting things happening in Barrie early on in your existence.
We are funded as a regional theatre, but we didn’t want to fall into that structure, you know, doing five plays a season with the last one being a musical. Everything we do is always new. No two seasons are ever the same.
We’ve always been a hundred-seater type of operation. That’s what was unique about us. We didn’t have to fill a lot of seats, so we could do cutting-edge work as a regional activity. It was completely artistically liberating, sometimes even crossing the line.
I was asked recently on a Toronto Russian TV interview, how would I describe our programming. I was aggravated with them for all sorts of reasons, so I needed to do something punchy. I said, well, imagine a string on your underwear. You stretch it as far as you can, but if it breaks, you’ve gone too far. That’s our programming.
And that really is what it’s like.
How did TIFT develop a reputation for site-specific plays?
In our early years, we were given, sometimes donated, sometimes we rented, multiple venues, and then they got demolished. By necessity, we stumbled on site-specific work because we had to find performing spaces, and you could have audiences of various sizes.
In fact, for our entire 2025-2026 season, we are only doing site-specific work. We are not using a traditional theatre once. We are doing found locations in Barrie, just as we are doing in Toronto.
As Peter Brook said, it was something like, it takes one audience member and one artist to be engaged in storytelling. You don’t need anything else. I also believe that theatre can be created anywhere.
Site-specific is theatre at its purest level.
How do you actually choose repertoire?
We’re known for a certain work aesthetic, which is this mischievous pushing the boundary, poking a needle, that sort of stuff. But then, we also done a Sondheim musical and the classics. Underneath all of this, though, is that we are fundamentally an artist’s theatre, particularly an actor’s theatre.
We used to do only work that was already created or orphaned by other theatres. We never commissioned new work, but that changed during the pandemic, especially because people were writing at home, so if someone had an idea for us, we’d tell them to write it at home and get back to us.
And then there are the ensemble collaborations where you build something together.
When I look at an original play for consideration, I ask, is there any excitement in it? I have to make sure that the opportunity is transformative. And then it is deciding which artists should be involved. So, the project is really tied to specific artists. At the end of the day, that’s the most important deciding factor because I don’t have to do new plays unless somebody wants to do them. Why would I torture the audience?
And so, I just want to make sure that there is an artistic reason for putting on the play.
You seem to have a pool of actors that you draw on.
Yes, we do. We call them a constellation. It’s about 40 people. When we use the same actors, which we absolutely do, we don’t use them in the same way. You see, it’s not like in a rap theatre where everyone is stereotyped.
We’re fortunate that we can attract actors to Barrie to do shows for us. They’re not going to come unless they need it artistically, which is why I said before, that we’re an actor’s company. We only get those people who actually want to be here, because they like our artistic offering.
So, in reality, my job is to figure out what’s hidden inside the actors. What is the next best opportunity I can give them.
How does one develop an audience for cutting edge work in a small community?
This is important. We were given an opportunity to develop an audience for the work as opposed to for the organization.
Most theatres are so institutionalized now that the programming gets chosen for administrative institutionalized reasons. People agonize about what to program to sell tickets. I never had that obligation. My obligation is to develop a season that is as eclectic as possible with complete artistic freedom.
. I also should say, however, that the choices need to be justified and warranted. And our stakeholders need to know that nothing is taken for granted.
We are trying to do something different, yet it is quite remarkable that our organization thinks like a project-based company, but it actually does business like a large theatre. So, it’s everything of everything. Sometimes I talk about us as being glorified fringe, except that everybody actually gets a salary.
We operate within the union equity parameters. I’ve done the research. We are, in central Ontario, the only professional full equity house operating a traditional winter season.
So, it’s that opportunity that we’ve earned. We put on work typically associated with a large urban centre like Toronto or Montreal, but we’re performing for the benefit of a non-urban place and a non-urban audience. And I think we are somewhat unique in that case, in that particular morphing of different practices.
I would call our audiences sophisticated, but I would also add, everyday sophisticated. It’s not people who need us for the status, because we offer nobody any status. Going to the Stratford Festival for a weekend is a status thing.
We attract a person who is naturally intrigued, someone who enjoys artistic adventure, or who needs the artistic adventure. Or they just love the audacity of what we do.
I should add that we occasionally draw people from Toronto, but there is a barrier. We’re not considered the North Pole, just the town before it. It’s a barrier that we’re trying to do everything possible to break.
Half of our operation takes place in Barrie where we put on a full season, and then we tour.
TIFT And Touring
I want to hear about the touring because I understand that it is quite extensive.
We go on the road, not because we didn’t get enough audiences in Barrie, or we’re trying to break down barriers. We tour for different kinds of reason altogether, although I should add that I adore touring, shamelessly, I have to confess.
We know when a show is alive and when the show is not, and those that have a life, we put aside and come back to it in a year or two. We’ll re-rehearse it, and then take
it somewhere else because Barrie people have already seen it.
Our touring thing, generally speaking, is going to places where other companies don’t go, like Surinam or Fiji, countries that really don’t have a theatre scene. Because we do site-specific work, we don’t need traditional theatre venues, so we can perform there. They are also new strategic markets that we like to explore.
Similarly, because of site-specific work, we tour markets in Canada that bigger companies can’t do, like Iqaluit and Dawson City. And what ends up happening is we usually associate with an emerging theatre company.
On the other hand, we’ll take something bigger like our Sweeney Todd production, where the audience follows the actors around, to a major capital like Buenos Aires, because this kind of immersive work or grassroots musical does not quite exist there.
Sometimes presenters and programmers will reach out to us because they are interested in the work we do. I also meet a lot of people at international theatre conferences, so you build up a list of contacts. And then there’s the internet. I figure out the vibe, sort of collecting people who love a crazy theatre adventure.
And on occasion, we’ll come to Toronto.
When you go to Suriname, you’re not going to attract hype or presenters or programmers or colleagues or national and international media. So, it’s really important that we establish a brand of some sort through a place like Toronto. It’s sort of like a vaccination. Do you need a COVID vaccine, but you’ll be smart to get it anyway.
But, you know, with all of this, we only did one quick project in the States. People say, why don’t you go to the States? I’m like, what am I going to offer to the States that they don’t have already? Or what am I going to offer to the States that other Canadian theatre companies can’t?
Is there a financial incentive for touring?
in all honesty, yes.
Barrie is wonderfully supportive, but it’s a small business economy. We don’t have the head offices of major corporations or a lot of wealthy patrons. Our budget is a million and a half to two million dollars every year, and our major support is $10,000 in philanthropy.
We are fortunately supported by all levels of government. However, on a million-and-a-half-dollar budget, we are only able to receive $60,000, let’s say, from the Canada Council for the entire season in Barrie, with all the overhead costs and youth outreach and all those things.
But we can get up to $200,000 a year to tour one or more projects internationally and another $200,000 to tour within Canada. Therefore, the anomaly is that there are all sorts of money to keep shows around, but not very much to create them in the first place. So, we, in a way, use touring to finish our shows off.
Epilogue
What about your personal life?
Let’s just say that I’m married to the theatre.
Do you have any last thoughts?
This is the most wonderful thing about what we do. It’s kind of, I like to say, polarizes us into harmony. I think a great work of art has a capacity to speak individually to everyone in the audience as opposed to a general mass.
I think that’s what makes a good play.
What you will see in one of our shows will excite you, but it may excite somebody else for a completely different set of reasons, and then there’s the third person who will have hated it entirely.
And I think that this is absolutely marvelous. It’s not about whether somebody liked it or didn’t like it. It’s about what it meant to them at that moment in time.