There is a discreet, repeated bit of sorcery in Tarragon Theatre and the Musical Stage Company’s world premiere production of After the Rain, when the scuffed black floor of a raised stage in the centre of the space is suspended like the lid of a grand piano. A spotlight hits the scuffs, creating a puddle of late-afternoon sunlight, those whitish streaks fuelling the impression of a luminous, dappled surface. I admired this trick, beautiful as it was minor. Each time it happened, I felt a little thrill at its human simplicity: one object becoming another with only a change in position and light. There’s a layering of perception — it’s a stage, it’s a piano — that makes me, the viewer, integral to the illusion. Not a trick. A contract.
“Every show has its own set of rules,” says Marie Farsi, director and dramaturg of After the Rain, the first time we meet from her home in Stratford via Zoom. “You’re signing a contract with an audience at the beginning of a show. How much do I need to evoke the place? How do I anchor everyone in the specificity of that world without over-illustrating?” For Farsi, there is usually an object, something found, perhaps not even especially magical, that becomes a conduit for the larger story. A stage becomes a grand piano, or a collection of miniature dog figurines provides a visual key to how we might see the humans that stand before us.
When we spoke, Farsi was in the final stages of prep for this year’s Dream in High Park, her own 90-minute adaptation of Romeo & Juliet set in 1930s/’40s Italy. “I try to renew our relationship to space constantly in my shows,” she says. The open-air amphitheatre stage in High Park offers a uniquely bug-filled opportunity for Farsi’s deft method of creative renewal, which thrives on limitations. “Shakespeare, through language, paints different locations,” she says. The outdoor staging, produced by Canadian Stage, calls on Farsi to evoke these different locations without the use of extravagant design, or even much time. It’s a challenge that Farsi is happy to tackle, and something she seems distinctively equipped to do.
Born in France to a painter father and businesswoman mother, Farsi was raised in a family culture of entrepreneurship, and she applies that energy to all the projects she “touches” (by her count, nearly 10 shows per year, including readings and workshops). Growing up in farm country in the north of France, some of her earliest inspiration came in the form of the nature that surrounded her and the animals in her life — cats, dogs, fish, and even birds (although she eventually tired of keeping them in cages). “There’s a secret to the natural world that we will never fully pierce,” she tells me. This, along with Pantufla, the dog that she and her partner (actor Tyrone Savage) adopted during the pandemic, motivated her celebrated 2023 adaptation of André Alexis’ novel Fifteen Dogs for Crow’s Theatre.
Whether exploring the connection between animals and humans, developing new plays and musicals, creating stop-motion animated films, or directing Shakespeare, Farsi is a master of the in-between, adept at being lost and finding art in the act of reorientation. At 36, she is mid-career, yet still emerging within the Habitrail-esque system of Canadian theatre. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
When Farsi was a teen, her family relocated to Quebec, not long after which she moved by herself to New Zealand to finish high school. After a year in Tauranga, Farsi returned to Montreal to pursue a degree in theatre performance at Concordia University, which drew her closer to the world of English-language theatre as well as other international traditions.
After graduating, she spent three months in Beijing studying Chinese opera; then Bali, where she developed her love of mask work and puppetry (“How does everyone know about the puppets?” she muses). She then settled in Vancouver in her early 20s, and like so many freshly hatched artists, cut her teeth in service. “Bars, restaurants, cafes — everywhere,” she says, which also gave her access to cheap, sometimes free space to stage site-specific performances.
“Marie believes in the holy purpose of art,” says Chris Abraham, artistic director of Crow’s Theatre and Farsi’s former mentor. In Vancouver, Farsi created theatre collaboratively and prolifically with companies like Théâtre La Seizième, Rumble, and Bard on the Beach, also doing stints in Montreal, Banff, and at the Stratford Festival, where she first met Abraham. In 2018, Farsi moved to Toronto to take on the role of associate artistic director at Crow’s, where she directed Dave Malloy’s intimate chamber musical Ghost Quartet in 2019. Since then, her work has continued to fill bigger spaces and play to larger audiences. Her budgets and ensembles have expanded, as has her reputation as a visionary director.
Abraham notes that Farsi’s rare aptitude as an artist is matched by her strong administrative skills. Farsi could’ve stayed at Crow’s indefinitely, settling her career in a more solid institutional context, he tells me. Instead, she chose to take the risk of being a free agent. “It was an incredibly smart, brave decision, which grew out of her fierce independence, her growing confidence in herself, and her desire to invest in her future,” says Abraham.
If there is a motif that emerges when speaking with Farsi, it’s that she doesn’t like to linger in the familiar. “When you immigrate at an early age, there’s always a feeling of being a bit on the outside,” she tells me. “It’s something you get addicted to.” In the same way that she strives to renew the stage in her work, Farsi’s creativity is cued by defining new spaces for herself, embracing a near-constant state of transition and translation. “I love being out of my comfort zone,” she tells me in two separate conversations: one referencing her impulse to travel, the other, her approach to theatre making.
The slippery state of translation is a generative one for Farsi, one that she wittily explored in Fifteen Dogs, when the gods Achilles and Hermes grant the animals human consciousness and a conditional ability to communicate: the humans on stage cannot understand them, but the audience can. As a francophone artist now working mostly in English, Farsi’s engagement with English text is surgical in its aim, but always playful.
During a table read at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre a week or so after our first meeting, Farsi is entering the third day of rehearsal with Romeo & Juliet’s vibrant cast of 12. She spends nearly two hours working through a scene of pivotal violence — the twin killings of Mercutio by Tybalt, and Tybalt by Romeo — quizzing actors Dan Mousseau (Mercutio), Praneet Akilla (Romeo), and Ziska Lewis (Tybalt) on their characters’ intentions through the text. “Why did you say that, Romeo?” she asks. “What does ‘slander’ mean?” The words are the thoughts, she tells Akilla, as he works to locate Romeo’s voice in himself, and vice-versa.
Farsi gently probes the actors as they articulate meaning to themselves, never losing sight of the fact that they have to project that meaning to a vast and miscellaneous outdoor audience during the most sweltering part of Toronto summer. “I want to make sure we understand it really well before we get up on our feet,” she tells the room.
Watching is a dense experience, so I can only imagine how it feels for the actors. But Farsi’s sense of timing seems especially well tuned to her cast’s energy. Abraham ascribes it to her “delight and affinity” in working with actors.
Sitting outside the theatre on her lunch break, Farsi tells me, “I’ve learned how truth is revealed in translation, and I feel like that’s my job as a director — I have to translate the piece from the page to the stage, and all the meanings that can be derived from that process of translation.”
Farsi’s cut of Romeo & Juliet is set in Italy during the rise of fascism, an era of polarization and fear that Farsi selected for its relevance to our current political climate. “I really believe in the human capacity to understand the other,” she says. “Right now, the world is divided, and I think that’s why theatre is so important. We have to cultivate that empathy, which means: ‘I’m not you, but I want to understand as closely as possible what it might mean to be you.’”
Farsi brings this visceral sense of empathy to her projects by centring many of her productions — like After the Rain and Fifteen Dogs — in the fourth wall-breaking point of view of a main character-cum-narrator. “That question of subjectivity in the theatre has been very interesting for me. I think it’s an illusion that we can portray something objectively.”
While there’s a crystallizing focus to Farsi’s way of making theatre, her ambition is also informed by a personal search for connection, for beauty, for nature, for spontaneous delight onstage and off. “She likes things to be beautiful in very particular ways,” says Abraham. “There’s a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ for her.”
Which is not to say that Farsi is intractable. There’s a warmth to how she leads her collaborators that seems drawn from faith in herself and those in her orbit.
Playwright and actor Rose Napoli, who wrote the book for After the Rain, notes a moment early in the project’s development when she realized something important about Farsi. “We were workshopping a particular section and found ourselves at odds. The actor didn’t know which of us to listen to. So Marie said, ‘Actually, Rose and I don’t agree right now. She sees it this way and I see it this way. We’re not on the same page.’ The fact that she was able to let it be part of the process, part of the room: As soon as she said it, I knew that this was my partner. She was the right person for it.”
This flexibility in process reflects in how she tells the stories she selects, like Fifteen Dogs, set for its fourth production at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre this September (and where After the Rain will also appear in early 2026). As Napoli explains, Farsi’s agility is girded by a firm stance on what the ultimate communication is with the show.
Abraham too points to Farsi’s deep convictions about whatever play she’s directing — what it means, how it should work, and how it should feel. “It’s her path to getting there that’s so artful,” he says.
“Rehearsal is my time to perform,” Farsi tells me, and I see it expressed in her gentle interrogations of the moment when text meets voice. We’re in the middle of Act Three, scene one, shortly before the Romeo & Juliet team is set to break for lunch. Mercutio, struck by Tybalt, veers from joking banter to pained acknowledgement of his mortality. “Why did you say that?” Farsi asks Mousseau/Mercutio. “Well,” he deadpans, “Because I’m in the scene. I’m sorry Marie, I won’t do it again.” Everyone laughs at this purposeful miscommunication, which highlights the strangeness of a group of adults sitting around a table pretending to be vengeful, verse-speaking Italians; to the challenge of decoding meaning under meaning; to the pleasure of doing it in the company of people who are game to do it with you; to the freedom to make a joke because you know it will make your director laugh.
People are drawn to Farsi as a collaborator because of how she works, Abraham tells me, because of that driving curiosity. As he puts it: “They want to get on the ride with her.”
Canadian Stage is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Naomi Skwarna
Naomi Skwarna is a National Magazine Award-winning writer with bylines in the New York Times, Vulture, The Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Hazlitt, the British Journal of Photography, and others. She has written previously about theatre for NOW Magazine and the Toronto Standard, and sometimes still does via her very intermittent newsletter, Seeing is Forgetting.
LEARN MORE
WRITTEN BY
Dahlia Katz
Dahlia Katz is a professional photographer who specializes in portraits, promotion, lifestyle, events, weddings, and the performing arts. She is also a director, dramaturg, and puppeteer.
LEARN MORE
