Next season, Soulpepper Theatre wants to prove it’s ‘more than just a place that plays happen’

Uncommonly for a Toronto performing arts organization, Soulpepper Theatre has a full four performance spaces for its activities — three theatres and a cabaret — which it’s putting to robust use in its 2026-27 season, featuring 12 productions. But another area of the Distillery District theatre is currently capturing new artistic director Paolo Santalucia’s imagination: the lobby.

“It can hold 500 people,” said Santalucia of the high-ceilinged, brick-walled space that’s officially named the Sandra Faire and Ivan Fecan Atrium. “That’s more than any of our individual theatres can. That’s a practical fact but it’s also a metaphor for something I find really meaningful: The biggest space we have is a communal space.”

The new season includes world and Canadian premieres of contemporary plays, reinterpretations of classics, previous Soulpepper hits, and theatrical concerts, all linked by themes of radical love and connection — what Santalucia described in a press release as “a connective tissue of human compassion.” 

When we recently met on Zoom along with associate artistic director Luke Reece, the pair were keen to focus on the activities they are programming around and through those 12 productions — the connective tissue, if you will, that brings the season together. These include a burgeoning collaboration with the Toronto Fringe, live public forums with the Toronto Star, a film series in collaboration with Hot Docs, and Tuesday night gatherings for conversation and community.

In announcing his first curated season, Santalucia underlines that, for him, Soulpepper is not “just a place where plays occur. We’re also a place that believes really deeply that theatre can be a binding force in our lives. The container for the theatre is as important as what’s happening on our stages — the lobby is maybe even a more important meeting place than the seats in the audience, because that’s actually where the connection happens.”

Underlying such sentiments is the belief, Santalucia said, that “theatre and art make us better citizens of the world.”

Opening up Soulpepper’s spaces was a priority under previous artistic director Weyni Mengesha and executive director Gideon Arthurs, and Reece — who, like Arthurs, remains on the leadership team for Santalucia’s tenure — states this in material as well as conceptual terms: “We’re calling the public in and saying, ‘Hey, take ownership of the place, we get government funding, this is a space for you. Your tax money is going into this. So come on in, check it out, see what’s going on,’” said Reece.

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In the spirit of opening up the conversation about theatre as a space of collective reflection and community-building, Soulpepper emailed along responses from three of next season’s directors in response to the question, “What role do you think theatre plays in our city?”

“In a city in constant movement, theatre creates space to reflect together on what it means to be human: how we live, how we connect, and how we exist within the systems that shape us,” said Marie Farsi, who is directing Sophie Treadwell’s groundbreaking 1928 drama Machinal in a co-production with Necessary Angel Theatre Company.

“When we gather in a room with strangers to witness someone else’s experience, we begin to understand lives beyond our own,” said Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu, who is directing the Canadian premiere of Jocelyn Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre and Nightwood Theatre. “That shared act of listening and witnessing is what makes theatre essential as a civic institution.”

“These days it increasingly feels like audiences are arriving at the theatre with their own questions and conundrums,” said Andrew Kushnir, who’s directing Noel Coward’s Design for Living in a Soulpepper/Crow’s Theatre co-production. “In times when so much can feel like it’s falling apart, there’s something powerful about coming into a room together, bringing our questions, problems, curiosities, and cravings, and responding to them in real time.”

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For the last two decades, Soulpepper has been producing theatre throughout the year, not just in the usual fall-winter theatre season — something to which it recommitted as it came out of the pandemic. 

During the warmer months, the goal is to “match the energy” of Toronto summertime, said Reece, which led last year to a successful inaugural collaboration with Toronto Fringe, with Soulpepper serving as the festival hub.

Santalucia was delighted to inherit this relationship because he and Reece are “indie kids at heart” who started their careers in the Fringe — and because they value the festival’s transformational effects on Toronto: it “galvanizes the city around the belief that participating in artistic enterprise changes the social fabric of the place that we live,” said Santalucia. “And when the Fringe is in town, it really does.”

New this year, they’re extending the Fringe spirit into the fall season: from September 26 to October 11, Soulpepper will present the Fringe Curators’ Series, limited runs of outstanding productions from the summer festival, curated by the Creative Collaboration Initiative — Obsidian Theatre, Bad Hats Theatre, and Soulpepper itself.

The fall will also see the launch of Toronto Star Live, a monthly series of live events addressing big questions facing our city. The initiative grew, Santalucia said, out of mutual recognition that theatres and newspapers both need to think “outside the way we would normally do things” in the current moment of media evolution and socio-political complexity. 

The aforementioned film series stemmed out of a meeting between Santalucia and Hot Docs Film Festival’s executive director Diana Sanchez, around the time when they both took on their jobs last year. They found themselves bonding over the question, he said, of “how an international perspective on art changes the fabric of a city.”

“I just sort of boldly asked Diana how she would feel about curating a film series at Soulpepper,” said Santalucia. Her response was immediate and positive. The Hot Docs collaboration builds on Soulpepper’s already-existing series of free movie nights — events that bring in a local public who are “not necessarily coming to our plays,” said Santalucia, and who enjoy the relaxed atmosphere where audiences can come and go freely and bring snacks into the venue. 

A final initiative for 2026-27 — one that puts the Soulpepper lobby front and centre — is Pub(lic) Tuesdays, an invitation to come gather in the atrium on evenings when there won’t be shows happening: “A nice hang on a Tuesday night,” said Reece, to enjoy a drink, listen to music, maybe play a game, and engage in conversation. He and Santalucia will be there frequently to mingle, so the public “will get to know who the faces are behind this programming.”

The overall message, said Santalucia, is that “we’re more than just a place that plays happen. We’re an institution that believes that we can incite a great conversation and a feeling of belonging regardless of whether there’s a play on our stages or not.”

Subscriptions for Soulpepper’s 2026-27 season are now on sale. More information is available here.

Soulpepper Theatre is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Karen Fricker

Karen Fricker is Intermission’s editorial director and adjunct professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University. She has worked as a critic in Toronto, London (UK), Dublin, and New York City, and has a PhD in theatre studies from Trinity College, Dublin. Sustaining the field of theatre criticism in our digital age is a big focus of her work, through academic research projects and training/mentorship ventures including Page Turn and Youareacritic.com. She is co-director of the international research network Circus and its Others, and has researched the Eurovision Song Contest for two glorious decades and counting.

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