The Café

ITSAZOO Productions and Aphotic Theatre (Canada)

Unfortunately, due to the impacts of COVID-19, the presentation of The Café has been cancelled. If you have purchased tickets, please contact our Patron Services Team to exchange or refund your tickets.

Shortening the gap between audience and performance, this collection of plays is an invitation to eavesdrop, to observe, to indulge your inner voyeur. Audiences sit in a cozy coffee shop while a series of dramas plays out at various tables. A married couple works through racial tension in their relationship, a young journalist has her notions of “queerness” challenged by a Polish expat, an Indigenous woman counsels her autistic brother—these scenarios and more unfold before your guiltlessly watchful eyes. The stories are interconnected—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—and each one is repeated up to three times. 

This intricately orchestrated affair has the semblance of real life: café staff sell food and beverages, and audiences are free to wander from table to table, play to play. The artists work carefully to evoke a familiar phenomenon: that tantalizing feeling of having overheard something fascinating in public. From those provocative snatches of speech that we catch in bars, on buses, in cafés, nine different playwrights have conjured life stories; watching them unfold at this proximity is a delight.

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