Published Winter 2025

To show the spectrum of our humanity, the Festival's 2025 season turns to the gods. The theme Apollo, Venus, Mars: Reflections on Harmony, Love and War bonds the playbill with a reminder that these are not three isolated states, in life or in art.

Shakespeare didn't hesitate to tangle up the trio. In The Winter's Tale, helmed this season by Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino, love is grounds for war. When a jealous king suspects his wife is having an affair, paranoia consumes him with a fury that shatters all harmony. The play changes tone midway, from drama to romance and comedy, with divine intervention from Apollo—god of music, dance, truth and healing—who helps the story's fraught characters restore balance.

Apollo, like Venus and Mars, was a source of inspiration for Cimolino this season, as he contemplated creating a playbill reflective of a world he describes as feeling "torn between loyalties and loves." The artistic director expands, "We as a society have trouble understanding each other's points of view. Our feelings run deep. So deep that at times we refuse to see reason. This, of course, is the kindling for war."

From Shakespeare's genre experiments in The Winter's Tale to more such crisscrossing in contemporary dramas and knee-slapping musicals, the insights of the 2025 lineup are bound by common threads. Each production, explains the director, "explores seemingly intractable divisions and their journey to harmony." That and "most end happily."

We could use a few happy endings. The 2025 season announces itself on the cusp of a "connection recession." According to Psychology Today, the number of close friends people report having declined 22 percent from 1990 to 2024, while most of the global workforce—72 percent—feel lonely at least monthly.

Our media consumption habits echo this trend; algorithmic streaming is displacing living, breathing art, including theatre. Post-pandemic, theatregoers are still sluggish to return, marked pointedly by Broadway's audiences, still down years later. At a time of peak remote work, close friendships are on the decline as declarations of loneliness rise to "epidemic" levels. Under the weight of all this, theatre opens itself up to audiences as a sanctuary. It offers space to play with the best and worst sides of human nature, all through shared experience. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with strangers, we feel something together as a community, inching humanity a little closer to harmony.

This season's Forgiveness understands that endeavour well. Directed by Stafford Arima, Forgiveness—adapted from Mark Sakamoto's acclaimed memoir following two families on either side of the Second World War—is a story of would-be enemies who find harmony in their shared experience. Mitsue, a Japanese Canadian woman, is interned on a sugar beet farm in Alberta. Ralph is a Canadian POW held in Japan. Years later, Mitsue's son and Ralph's daughter fall in love.

Forgiveness deals with war, racism and PTSD—prodigious level conflicts. Still, the play is full of hope and "delivers a powerful message about the possibility of finding peace in the most unexpected places," says Arima. "True harmony is not just about the absence of conflict but also about acknowledging past wounds and choosing to heal from them." Even horrific beginnings originating from war can evolve into happy endings.

Mars, god of war, oversees more than battling nations. War is also marital strife. Political rebellion. Murder. Inner demons. And that's just the plot of Macbeth. Multidisciplinary artist Robert Lepage returns to Stratford to direct the tragedy, exploring the nature of kinship in subcultures. In his production, Shakespeare's antihero lives among rival biker gangs. The director was drawn to gangs as "factions [of society] that are patrolling, ambitious, at war constantly," like the Bard's storied royal courts. As he points out, these groups also share similar positive characteristics. "There are family values. The sense that you belong." In the director's perspective, this thread of belonging is crucial, as the play hinges on creating empathy for Macbeth. He is "a villainous, bloody assassin," says Lepage; this identity alone attests to his innate need to be part of a clan.

Macbeth's desire to belong is a trait shown to be both redeeming and dangerous. For Lepage, this feeds contemplation of "what drives a human being to become a monster?" Lepage considers the human first. "You cannot play Macbeth if you judge him, if you hate him, if you don't try to understand him. That's the big challenge."

"True harmony is not just about the absence of conflict but also about acknowledging past wounds and choosing to heal from them."

Mars, god of war, oversees more than battling nations. War is also marital strife. Political rebellion. Murder. Inner demons. And that's just the plot of Macbeth. Multidisciplinary artist Robert Lepage returns to Stratford to direct the tragedy, exploring the nature of kinship in subcultures. In his production, Shakespeare's antihero lives among rival biker gangs. The director was drawn to gangs as "factions [of society] that are patrolling, ambitious, at war constantly," like the Bard's storied royal courts. As he points out, these groups also share similar positive characteristics. "There are family values. The sense that you belong." In the director's perspective, this thread of belonging is crucial, as the play hinges on creating empathy for Macbeth. He is "a villainous, bloody assassin," says Lepage; this identity alone attests to his innate need to be part of a clan.

Macbeth's desire to belong is a trait shown to be both redeeming and dangerous. For Lepage, this feeds contemplation of "what drives a human being to become a monster?" Lepage considers the human first. "You cannot play Macbeth if you judge him, if you hate him, if you don't try to understand him. That's the big challenge."

Triggering mixed feelings about conniving story characters is the essence of Dangerous Liaisons. Under the direction of Festival veteran Esther Jun—in her sixth season with the Festival—the play delights in navigating the human psyche of both its characters and its audience. "Why do we love to watch rich, well-dressed people behave badly?" asks Jun. It's a timeless habit, really. Before The Real Housewives, there was Dangerous Liaisons and the Marquise de Merteuil, a French aristocrat plotting revenge against her ex in pre-Revolution Paris.

First an 18th-century French novel, then a play, followed by a 1988 film with Glenn Close, who earned a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards that year for her portrayal of the devilish Merteuil, Dangerous Liaisons—in all its variations—sees Venus, god of love and beauty, looming large while Mars introduces war as "a battle of the sexes," according to Jun. "The Marquise de Merteuil navigates her own power in a patriarchy."

Like love and war, harmony is a delicate matter, often contrived and sometimes superficial. Staging Dangerous Liaisons now offers a chance to address a growing resentment for false perfection in our virtual lives. "Vanity and happiness are incompatible," Jun muses, quoting the play. "I can't help but think in this world of social media that this is true. There's such a veneer that people have to behave a certain way on the outside." If dramatic allure rises in tandem with characters seen defying social conventions, as reality-TV ratings suggests, then here's predicting Dangerous Liaisons audiences fall head over heels for its story of prototypical veneer cracking.

"We might laugh. We might cry. We might be silent. Our energy is contagious."

Appearances are fragile by nature. In Sense and Sensibility, the Dashwood sisters, left destitute after their father's death, grip tight to a thin upper crust. "Everything is bubbling below the façade of a proper, mannered society," says director Daryl Cloran. "The stakes are so high in this world that love and war are almost interchangeable." A staple Jane Austen text, cinephiles will recall the domestic satire as the 1995 film directed by Ang Lee, starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet as the Dashwood sisters. Between them, there is war and harmony as they struggle to find love. "Love is at the heart of the story," says Cloran, "romantic love, familial love and lost love."

What forms of love we relate to most and lift learnings from is wholly the choice of the individual audience member. "Theatre is a state of communion," says Lepage of the art. It's a collective experience in which the audience has agency over the outcome. We might laugh. We might cry. We might be silent. Our energy is contagious.

Lepage, who directs for both the stage and film, notes the unique power that theatre transfers to its audience. "You have the power to change what you see," he says. "Film is a great form of art, but it doesn't change whether the room is full or empty. It's just light dancing on a screen."

The Festival often mounts plays and musicals with film adaptations in their past. This year, Annie, the iconic musical made famous among cinema audiences by Carol Burnett's turn as the story's [redeemable] villain, is the vision of acclaimed director/choreographer Donna Feore. Shakespeare's comedy, As You Like It, is directed by Chris Abraham, preceded by several film versions, like the one directed by Shakespeare superfan Sir Kenneth Branagh. Whatever films might precede it, though, no stage production can be compared to its cinematic cousin; live theatre simply hits different.

Theatre is a living thing to Lepage. Every night brings a new one-of-a-kind performance, as the actors connect with a new audience. Jun shares the Macbeth director's thinking. "That, to me, is what theatre is for," she says, "to find meaning in our humanity."

A harbinger of connection, theatre is a place to find community and deeper meaning, meaning discovered through the very act of being with others. Speaking about the connection recession, a neuroscientist told Psychology Today: "Without social networks, our brain doesn't work."

With this in mind, Cimolino's vision for the 2025 season rings clear and true: "All the plays should speak to our hearts first and our minds second." Theatre is here to evoke emotion and emotions are meant to be shared. Ticket please.