Sara Farb loves rehearsal.
The figuring out and trying of things; the remembering how much nuance can exist when words are lifted off the page; the not knowing and then walking away with a clearer answer.
“There’s so little pressure [when we] just figure out decisions and learn together,” she shared over Zoom. “I find this moment when audiences come in just kind of disorienting because I’ve grown accustomed to the security of the room.”
All of a sudden, Farb remembers she’s being watched. “There are a lot of eyes,” she said.
Farb began performing professionally at the age of nine when she played Young Jane in Jane Eyre at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. She said acting “just clicked” for her in a way she “never really even had to think about.” And yet, still, the Canadian theatre gem is not shy to admit that the eyes affect her. Perhaps this raw honesty is part of what makes her such a magnetic performer.
She’s not wrong, though. Over 3,600 eyes could be on her per show at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, where she recently opened her first production of the season and is currently in previews for her second.
This is Farb’s seventh season at the Stratford Festival. Since her 2013 debut, she’s played a total of 16 characters including Anne in The Diary of Anne Frank (2015), Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2016), and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (2017). This season, she’s playing Rosalind in As You Like It — who “always felt like a bit of a daunting notion” — Fanny Dashwood and Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility, and Emilie in Dangerous Liaisons.
“This place is so great to work at because one day I go to work and put a mustache on and the other day I’m wearing a beautiful gown,” she said, adding that sometimes she gets gifted the kinds of years where her roles couldn’t be more different.
2025 is definitely one of them. It’s also the first season since 2015 that Farb is doing three shows at the same time. “I honestly think that two is the same as three,” she said, half-joking. “If you are already doing multiple shows, throwing another one into the juggling pile is the same.”
To Farb, repertory theatre feels like a sport. She really enjoys the pacing of a more spread-out rehearsal and production schedule because it gives her a lot of time to digest what she’s done and to think about what worked and what didn’t. Plus, since many of the straight plays only get performed twice a week, “there’s also a built-in enjoyment of being able to do something and relish its rarity.”
The first show out of the gate for Farb this season was As You Like It, which opened on May 26. It’s a production she’s deeply proud to be a part of — a “surprisingly dark and powerful” version of the Shakespearean comedy.
Director Chris Abraham’s rendition is set in the aftermath of a horrific catastrophe in the not-so-far future. Rosalind is doing her best to survive after being banished to the unknown, and, as Farb put it, “it’s sort of not going great.” Duke Frederick (played by Sean Arbuckle) is the authoritarian leader of a despotic and terrifying regime. There’s fear and food scarcity across the board, and all of these banished lords are making do in a sort of encampment, finding hope in a desperate time.
“It’s incredible because we’re dealing with events that are conceivable and with people and characters who are recognizable in sort of the archetype of what we see day-to-day in global politics,” said Farb. “What’s been cool is none of the design or conceptual elements feel like they’ve been imposed on the play. It all feels very true.”
Throughout the rehearsal process, Farb said Abraham would do occasional check-ins with the cast and company, and it became clear that everyone saw the show as a kind of “special event.”
Sense and Sensibility opens next, on June 19. It’s a world premiere adaptation of the Jane Austin novel. Farb said this show is all about the “insidious and pervasive nature of gossip.” In Kate Hamill’s script, five actors play five gossips and shepherd the story along. Aesthetically, it’s true to the Regency Period, but content-wise “it’s a very similar energy to whatever happens on the internet.”
Dangerous Liaisons doesn’t open until August and rehearsals have only just begun, so Farb couldn’t speak to the world that will be built there. But she believes it’s fairly true to the time that it’s written in. (There’s that word again — “true.”)
Of all the characters Farb is tackling this season, Rosalind definitely has the most to say. Farb said getting to play her has been a thrill, but there were a couple of weeks back in March when she was looking at the extensive chunks of dialogue and wondering, “How am I going to do this?”
Typically, Farb doesn’t begin memorizing text until she’s in rehearsal and blocking, but that wasn’t the case with Rosalind. “I was very, very nervous because I’d never done prose before in Shakespeare,” she said. “It’s a very, very particular skill.” (While some of Rosalind’s text is in verse, she primarily speaks in prose without a set rhythm.) Farb had to figure out an effective way to learn her lines, and this included recording herself and listening to it back, which is something she’d never done before.
Lady Middleton, on the other hand, speaks very little, in single phrases and short sentences. Farb described her as “totally out to lunch, pleased with everything, and really just happy to be there.” In Hamill’s adaptation, this character’s lines are written very strangely on the page. (Every. Word. Or two. Is separated. By. A. Period.) So Farb made a choice to just follow the punctuation, and it ended up dictating everything about Lady Middleton.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Fanny Dashwood, who’s “really very rude and a bit of a villain.” But nothing makes Farb more comfortable than playing a villain. “You have a very sound reason for defending your case,” she said, “and I find it quite thrilling to be hated like that.”
When Farb takes a step back to look at this season as a whole, she said it’s some of the most gratifying acting she can think to do. It’s also a lot to carry, especially when you factor in all those watching eyes. Jumping in and out of three completely different worlds while juggling four distinct characters is not nothing.
“It’s exhausting, like, I won’t lie to you,” she said. “It’s a very particular kind of body exhaustion and mental exhaustion. It’s the kind of thing where you’ve got all of these tabs open and don’t realize it when you get home and it’s like, ‘why am I so tired all the time?’”
But after a long day at the office, a very special set of brownish eyes look up at her. They belong to Pickles, a four-year-old terrier mix. And he doesn’t even know what acting is (no, he’s not in Stratford’s production of Annie). Pickles isn’t waiting for a performance from Farb; he’d simply like a treat.
The Stratford Festival’s 2025 season runs until November 2. More information is available here.
The Stratford Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Magan Carty
Magan Carty is an actor turned journalist whose passion for the arts runs deep. They spent over a decade performing in theatre productions across Canada and are now working as a writer and producer for CBC Radio’s flagship national program, The Current. Magan lives in Toronto with their twin black cats, Juno and Lenny.
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