Podcast

Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak Are Sneaking Improv into Mainstream Canadian Theatre

About This Episode:

What happens when three goblins discover the complete works of Shakespeare and decide to stage Macbeth? Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak, the creative minds behind Spontaneous Theatre and the Goblin Empire, join Phil to share the wild origin story of Goblin:Macbeth; from a rushed eight-day creation to becoming a phenomenon at major Canadian theatre festivals. They discuss the challenges of performing in Hollywood-grade silicone masks, the art of caring for audiences while embodying creatures, and how they’ve managed to sneak improvisation into prestigious Canadian theatre companies like the Stratford and Shaw Festivals.

This episode explores:

  • The serendipitous eight-day creation of Goblin Macbeth and performing in expensive silicone masks
  • How mask work, clown technique, and bouffon influence the goblins’ relationship with audiences
  • Sneaking improvisation into mainstream Canadian theatre at Stratford and Shaw Festivals
  • The legacy of Keith Johnstone and Loose Moose Theatre Company in shaping Canadian improv
  • Why live theatre is the antidote to artificial intelligence and isolation
  • And much more!

Guests: 🎭 Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak

Rebecca Northan is a “Jill-of-all-trades”: actor, director, playwright, improviser,producer, and sometimes-prop-maker. She is the Artistic Producer of Spontaneous Theatre, known for its audience-centered creations that almost always break the fourth wall. Rebecca has worked across Canada as an actor and director. Most recently she co-created Murder-on-the-Lake for the Shaw Festival, which played to 87% houses in the 2025 season. In 2026, Rebecca will travel to Bard on the Beach, in Vancouver, to direct the Merry Wives of Windsor, and will then remain perform in Goblin:Oedipus. Rebecca, and co-creators Bruce Horak & Ellis Lalonde continue to expand the “Goblin Empire”, with several future Goblin projects in the hopper. Rebecca is a Canadian Comedy Award Winner, and has also starred in two Canadian TV series (“Alice, I Think”, and “The Foundation”). She also teaches improvisation occasionally, and hopes to someday launch a training facility. Rebecca’s hit show, Blind Date, has toured across Canada, parts the US, off-Broadway, and in London & Oslo.

Bruce Horak is originally from Calgary, Alberta where he trained in Theatre and Improvisation at the prestigious Loose Moose Theatre. He has worked professionally in Canada and abroad for over 25 years. He can be seen onscreen in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for Paramount Plus as the Chief Engineer, Hemmer. When not creating new works and performing onstage, Bruce devotes his time to painting, composing, and writing.

Connect with Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak:

🌐 Spontaneous Theatre: spontaneoustheatre.com

📸 Instagram: @spontaneoustheatre

📸 Instagram: @rebeccanorthan

📸 Instagram: @brucehorak

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Transcript

[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast and on Stageworthy I talk to people who are involved in Canadian theatre from actors to directors to playwrights to stage managers to producers and more.

If they’re involved in Canadian theatre, I’m going to be talking to them. Some of the people I talk to are household names and the rest are people I really think you should get to know. Before I talk about this week’s guests, I do want to remind you about my Patreon.

I can’t do this show without the people who’ve chosen to back this show on Patreon. I give this show, this show, you’re listening to this show for free without ads. But even though the show is released for free, and you can listen to it for free, it still costs money to make the show.

It costs money to to have a website to host the audio files and distribute them to all the podcast platforms. Editing software costs money. Image editing software costs money.

And transcripts, which I know I haven’t, I didn’t have for a while, and now I’ve added them back. Transcripts cost money and quality transcripts cost money. I’m currently involved in adding transcripts to as many of the back episodes as I can.

So make sure that you’re checking that if you missed those. All of these things add up. And for most of the history of this show, for nine years of the history of this show, I put all of my money into doing all of these things.

And now I have a Patreon. And there are some wonderful people who who care enough about this show who want to help me make it who have backed this podcast on Patreon. And I can’t do this show without them.

But we’re just scratching the surface because we’re only just covering the cost of all the things I just mentioned. And we’re not even talking about covering the cost of my time for doing all of this for booking artists doing the interviews, booking the artists, researching the artists, talking to them and editing and all of the work that goes into preparing this podcast. That is all unpaid labor at this point.

So if you want to help me to make this show, please go to patreon.com/ stageworthy and become a patron. Patrons get early access to episodes, we’ll have some robust conversations about issues that are facing some robust conversations about issues in the theater about theater in general. And so if you want to be part of that, and you want to help me to make this podcast, go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a patron, I would be forever grateful to you. My guests this week are Rebecca Northern, and Bruce Horak from Spontaneous Theatre, also essentially the leaders of I guess two of the leaders of the Goblin Empire from Goblin Macbeth, which is currently at Centaur Theatre in Montreal. If you’re in Montreal, from now until March 22, you want to see Goblin Macbeth. I don’t want to wait any longer.

Here is my conversation with Rebecca Northern and Bruce Horak. Rebecca Bruce, thank you so much for coming on this program. Goblin Macbeth, you are preparing to do that at Centaur in Montreal.

And this is a play in which three goblins have discovered the complete works of Shakespeare and have decided to put on a production of Macbeth. How did this idea come to you?

[Rebecca Northan]
I think it was about maybe 12 or 13 years ago, we were in Calgary working on a completely different show, a spontaneous theater show called Legend Has It, which is a fantasy adventure. And it’s tough to do fantasy unless you have masks.

[Bruce Horak]
And we had goblin characters in that show. So we had goblin masks.

[Rebecca Northan]
But at the time, all of our masks were sort of papier-mâché. Beautiful. Yeah, papier-mâché, hand-painted.

But one of the actors that we were working with at the time, this fantastic actor, improviser from Edmonton named Mark Mear, who some people may know as the voice of Commander Shepard, said, listen, if you guys really are serious about doing mask stuff, you need to look at this company Composite Effects in the States. And Composite Effects makes these amazing Hollywood-grade, camera-ready silicone character masks. Beautiful.

They did all of the background White Walkers for Game of Thrones. These are very serious pieces of equipment. They’re the most expensive things we’ve ever purchased, ever.

And so we looked at this website and were blown away by the artistry of the artists at Composite Effects. And I had it on my phone and I turned to Bruce and I showed him a picture. I said, don’t you think this mask wants to do Shakespeare?

[Bruce Horak]
I said, absolutely.

[Rebecca Northan]
And that is where the idea came. It was literally saw the picture, said, don’t you think that does Shakespeare? Bruce said, obviously, something like that.

And then from that point, it probably took us another nine years to be able to afford to buy three masks. And even then, we only were able to do it because we have a fantastic patron and super fan that stepped up and said, why don’t I buy you those three masks? Yeah.

[Bruce Horak]
And it was a lot of serendipity. Little pieces that came together. Oddly enough, we kind of owe part of it to the pandemic.

So thanks, COVID-19. There was a company from Montreal that was scheduled to go and do a two-person production of Macbeth in Calgary. They got sick.

And so the Goblins kind of stepped up and did a replacement in a very short order. And we got the masks off the rack and they flew those in very last minute and we jammed this whole thing together. So it was very serendipitous moments that all came together to give birth to Goblin Macbeth.

[Rebecca Northan]
The whole universe conspired to have Goblin Macbeth come together.

[Bruce Horak]
Because it was time.

[Rebecca Northan]
It was time. Why hadn’t there been a Goblin Macbeth previous to that? This is a really important question.

[Phil Rickaby]
The fact that it has not is actually a disservice to the Goblin community. Yeah, it’s true. The Goblin empire.

Absolutely. Now that first production, how much had you been working? It sounds like you came in and had ideas, but how improvised was that first Calgary production?

Should we tell the truth? We should tell you the truth. Yeah.

[Rebecca Northan]
Okay. I don’t think we’ve ever actually shared the truth before. And that is that because we were this emergency replacement, at the time that the phone call came in saying from our friend that runs the Shakespeare Company saying, I’ve lost Macbeth Muet, what am I going to do?

When the pieces came together of, okay, we can get the masks. At the time that we knew that I was in Montreal teaching at the National Theatre School, Ellis was in Calgary.

[Bruce Horak]
I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

[Rebecca Northan]
Yeah. So we had this emergency Zoom meeting.

[Bruce Horak]
This was in February of 2022 when this was all happening.

[Rebecca Northan]
Yeah. And we said, okay, we’re doing this. We already had, Bruce and I already had a very cut down version of Macbeth because we had worked on the play before, both as a comedy and also as artists and residents in elementary and junior high schools.

We really knew this play very, very well. So we cut it down, cut it down. Bruce and I finished our various bookings, flew back to Stratford where we live.

And we had six days together in the rehearsal hall to throw these things together. Then we flew to Calgary and had a day and a half with Ellis, who’s the musician, to add music to everything we did. And then on the evening of the eighth day, and also it was that the very first public performance was also the first time that we managed to wear the masks from beginning to end.

Because trying them in rehearsal, we kept taking them off like, this is so hot and uncomfortable. How can we do this? And so we put the whole thing together in eight days, eight very panicked days.

And right before we went to step out on stage, we’re in our masks and I’m standing with Bruce and I said, are we about to go out there and humiliate ourselves?

[Bruce Horak]
And I said, only one way to find out.

[Phil Rickaby]
Obviously you didn’t humiliate yourself, but you’ve been doing this show now for a while, on and off at various locations for years now. There is a spontaneous improvised aspect to the show, but how much has it changed in your understanding of it from that first production to now?

[Bruce Horak]
I think probably 40% of it has changed and that’s because we have learned a lot along the way. After that first production, we kind of went back into rehearsal and when we took it, I think especially when the show went to Bard on the Beach in Vancouver and Rebecca sat out as director and Colleen Wheeler stepped in. So there was a lot of changes in there and we worked with Dean Paul Gibson and the text work, his proficiency with the Shakespearean text, especially making it really clear.

To me, that’s where it felt like the show took a huge leap forward. And then in every production since, we make adjustments not only for the space that we’re in, so the staging will change, but little bits and pieces that might be a contemporary reference here or there or whatever. And then on the night, because the Goblins don’t really understand the idea of a fourth wall, so they’ll interact and play with the audience that happens to be there on the night.

Not that it’s, not that I would call this an improvisational show, but the room is very alive.

[Rebecca Northan]
The Goblins are responsive.

[Bruce Horak]
The beauty of Love Live! Theatre and coming to a live event is like, it’s there and it’s only going to be there now.

[Phil Rickaby]
It sounds a little bit like the interaction with the audience is sort of like a production that a clown might do, where there’s freedom to the audience reacted to that. Now I’m going, I react to the audience’s reaction and we go from there. How close is the work of the Goblins to the work of a clown?

[Rebecca Northan]
That’s a wonderful question. I would say pretty close. Bruce and I have both studied with John Turner and Mike Gennard, who are also known in the world as Mump and Smoot, Canada’s greatest horror clowns.

And we’ve also studied with Karen Hines, who is based in Calgary now and works with One Yellow Rabbit, but she also has a wonderful bouffant character named Poxy, who’s been around forever. And so I’d say that the Goblins kind of straddle the world of clown and bouffant. Do you think that’s fair?

I would say. Bouffants are a little bit dark and edgy and dangerous, and the Goblins splash around in that pool.

[Phil Rickaby]
A little bit, yeah. A little bit. The masks are obviously not like one-wear masks.

They have to be reused because they’re so expensive. It’s not like you can like tear it off and it’s gone. How quickly do you get in and out of the masks these days?

[Bruce Horak]
They’re very fast to put on. It’s a single piece and so it’s a bit like putting on a balaclava, you know. But yeah, they’re very warm, they don’t breathe.

[Rebecca Northan]
It’s like being in a sauna.

[Bruce Horak]
They slide off.

[Rebecca Northan]
They slide off at the end. It’s a little bit sticky to put on and they line off at the end. They’re incredible pieces of wearable art.

[Phil Rickaby]
Bruce, which is more difficult to put on, a Goblin mask or a mask, the mask they put on you in Star Trek?

[Bruce Horak]
Oh, Star Trek, hands down. Three and a half to four hours. With a team doing it for you.

And they’re spray painting it on and yeah, there’s so much work on those.

[Phil Rickaby]
I remember hearing that Nanaa Visitor had to play a Cardassian in one of the Deep Face Nine episodes and only did it once because she was so claustrophobic. Was that one of the issues that you had when you were first like trying on the masks? You mentioned how you’d never done a performance of the mask on.

Was it claustrophobia or was it they were just too hot?

[Bruce Horak]
They’re really, really hot. And also I think our initial masks were a bit large because the ones that we’re wearing now are a little bit tighter and so it’s easier to speak through them. But we really had to get used to this in a way actually helps with the text.

But you really have to push your words out through the masks. Annunciation. Yeah, they do have some articulation, but you really have to use your face yoga.

[Rebecca Northan]
I’m not a claustrophobic person, but the first couple of times I put the mask on, I started to creep up on that for sure because initially I had not the eyes of the mask for just in terms of how they fit the shape of my own face were really like I felt like the mask was trying to pop my eyeballs out of my head. So that was tough. But then I figured out like we could just trim them a little bit and that made everything better.

[Phil Rickaby]
I can imagine. Rebecca, you have spoken about, you know, with your show Blind Date, you’ve spoken about how the red nose acts as a, it’s the smallest mask, it acts as a mask on the stage and lets the audience know that even though this is a date, this is all fiction and all this sort of thing. How, I mean, that’s mask work, but this is like mask work to the extreme.

What did you learn from Mimi that has allowed you to more embody a goblin through mask?

[Rebecca Northan]
I think that probably the biggest influence in terms of how Mimi, my experience with Mimi tracks into the goblins is around just direct close up interaction with audience members because the goblins arrive through the front door of the theater and walk into the looking for a venue and talking with audience members. You know, that’s not a typical relationship between performer and audience to be that close and to be really side by side in the same liminal space as a lobby space and then discovering the theater. So, yeah, I think that that’s probably the biggest one.

[Phil Rickaby]
Bruce, you’ve worked with at least a little bit, you’ve worked with mask. What was your experience with mask like before you came to Goblin with Beth?

[Bruce Horak]
Oh, going like way back to college and working in mask stuff, which I just, I adore it. I love the transformative nature of the mask and how it takes over the whole body. Yeah.

And just disappearing. Like I, we’ve said this before, I don’t ever want to be, have my real face on.

[Rebecca Northan]
Oh no, it was so much fun. It’s so much fun.

[Bruce Horak]
And the permission to play and yeah, and also creature friends and family.

[Rebecca Northan]
Well, there’s some friends and family that won’t come at all because they’re so creeped out by masks and then other really good friends who’ve come and said, don’t, don’t talk to me because they can’t tell that it’s us and they can’t tell us apart either, which is a great thing.

[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, there’s certainly a lot of freedom to that. I certainly also understand deep audience, you know, sometimes your friends, family, they they’ve come to see the show. They don’t want to be harassed.

[Rebecca Northan]
We never harass people. We take great care of our audience. We couldn’t do what we do without an audience.

So we were trained to treat the audience as our very best house guests.

[Phil Rickaby]
Well, care for the audience is something that you’ve been, you’ve done from Mimi, right? You learned how to take care of your audience members doing that. The Goblins have a darker event than perhaps Mimi does on the surface.

How, what, like when you’re being the, the Goblin creature, how are you caring for the audience?

[Bruce Horak]
Well, I think there’s a great deal of appreciation that, that, that the Goblins come to, come to in having an audience because this, this notion that they don’t really understand why one human would get up on a stage and pretend to be somebody else in front of other humans. And so the, the attempt to do Shakespeare is to figure out why we do this. And yeah, it’s that realization that we need an audience.

And so that appreciation and that care for the audiences is, is, is fundamental to it. Although you might cross a line there.

[Rebecca Northan]
Well, I think also we, we take care of them by being honest with them in every interaction and being curious about them. The Goblins arrive very curious about humans and open to discover what these creatures are all about.

[Phil Rickaby]
Are there things that you’ve discovered about the, the relationship between audience and, and actor as you’ve been interacting with audiences as Goblins over the four years of producing the, and doing this, this show?

[Rebecca Northan]
Yeah, I, I think we have absolutely been witness to and felt a really strong desire from the audience that people arrive wanting to be seen by the Goblins and they want to play. Is that a fair assessment that folks that you can feel if they want to play with you, you know, people will approach in the lobby and, and they want their pictures taken with us or they ask permission, like, may I touch your ears?

[Bruce Horak]
Yeah. And the moments in the show where we, where we directly address the audience, like they’re very, they’re very open to it. And in a way that, you know, having done a lot of audience interaction in previous shows, they’re receptive to these creatures and, and just the willingness to like drop the, drop the cynicism.

It’s, it’s quite delightful. And it seems like, we were mentioning this before, it’s like, yeah, it is time. Like, it just seems so obvious that Goblins play this, this niche somehow.

And maybe it is, you know, maybe it’s a culture of cosplay that’s become more predominant.

[Rebecca Northan]
Maybe it’s the rise of AI.

[Bruce Horak]
Yeah.

[Rebecca Northan]
And that you, when you go on the internet, you don’t know anymore what is real and what is not real and what’s fabricated and what, what’s an image spit out by an algorithm. Well, there is not a moment’s hesitation or doubt when a Goblin is standing in front of you like that, this is really happening right now in real time. This is, this is not artificial intelligence.

This is authentic intelligence standing right in front of me.

[Phil Rickaby]
I think there’s also the aspect of, of, you know, one of the things that I’ve noticed since the pandemic is audiences are hungry for experiences, something that they can say that they saw, they had an experience. It wasn’t like anything else. People will go and see projections of artists on giant walls and things like that.

And they’ll, they enjoy that, but they are hungry for experiences where it’s something new and strange in a room. You have, and Goblins are obviously that. I think so.

[Bruce Horak]
Yeah. It’s very unique. It’s a very unique show.

[Phil Rickaby]
I also wanted to talk a little bit about, about the fact, because when I started to hear about AI being used in television and film and that sort of thing, I immediately said, well, then theater is the only thing that audiences will be able to trust is real.

[Rebecca Northan]
I agree with you like completely separate from the Goblins. Bruce and I do a lot of work that’s based in improvisation. We, outside of our theater practice, we also teach corporate workshops and at some point we’ll write a book.

Like I’m really obsessed with taking improvisation and, and kind of spinning it into, just as I said earlier, authentic intelligence. And so what does authentic intelligence require or demand of you? And we say that like, like the best life you want spice, you want spice in your life.

And what does that mean? Spontaneity, play, intuition, curiosity, and empathy. And, and here’s the thing about those, is that five, those five ingredients, those five spices, as it were.

Spontaneity, play, intuition, curiosity, and empathy are uniquely human. No algorithm can do that. They can simulate something that seems like it, but it’s not going to be genuine.

So someday we’ll launch a school and we’ll teach people how to get more spice in their life and how to really celebrate authentic intelligence and come to live performance because it’s the only thing you’re going to be able to trust. You want to sit in the front row where you can smell the actors, where spit lands on you, or where you can put their, your arm around that person or that character and have your picture taken with them as a memento at the end. The important thing is that we gather in spaces together and you hear strangers laugh at the same thing as you, or you hear a room full of strangers gasp at the same thing as you.

That is the thing that makes us feel less alone. Artificial intelligence, when you’re stuck behind your monitor. And I realized the irony of that is that here we are doing this over the internet.

There are little moments and pockets of magic in technology, but I think that we really do understand that technology and the rise of artificial intelligence is dividing and isolating us, which is really a great way to make you a consumer.

[Phil Rickaby]
That is a massive topic and one that we probably don’t… I would happily discuss that, but we probably don’t have time to get into that. We don’t have time.

[Rebecca Northan]
We don’t have time for that, but I can say that the antidote to artificial intelligence is authentic intelligence. And you’re going to experience that sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers, that by the end of it, you’ve come together on something. That’s thrilling.

[Phil Rickaby]
That’s life. I’ve always said, I think that audiences, even if they’re not in the front row, they still can feel the reality of the people in front of them. I’ve always said, I had a friend at work and they’re not a, my day job, they’re not a theater person.

And they were, they couldn’t understand why somebody would choose theater over film. And I said, because let me give you an example. It’s immediate.

If you’re watching a movie and somebody gets hit, okay, fine. If you’re in a theater and somebody gets hit, the entire audience will gasp. It is a complete different reaction because everybody feels the other beams in the room, both on stage and off.

And it is, there’s nothing else like it. Yeah. The end.

The goblins are moving to other, the goblin empire is expanding its knowledge, its experiment into Greek tragedy with goblin Oedipus. How did that come about? And how did, how did, how do, why Oedipus?

[Rebecca Northan]
Well, you want the, again, I always want the real answer. Well, this is an exposing that we’re doing here. So when we did the very first run of, of Goblin Macbeth in Calgary at the end of the show, I didn’t want to give too much away, but at the end of the show, the goblins do say to the audience, like, maybe we should try theater again.

And they throw out a couple of possible titles that they might want to attempt. And initially I think we were doing it to find a way to end the show and then jokes and just like, what did people respond to? And we would try different titles every night.

And then based on I got an email from a friend at one yellow rabbit, which is a great theater company in Calgary. And they do a winter festival every year called the high performance rodeo. So the programmer of the high performance rodeo reached out to me and he said, I haven’t been able to get over there to see Goblin Macbeth yet, but is it true that you’re going to do goblin streetcar named desire?

Right. Because if it’s true, we want it. And so I of course immediately did a quick Google search to say like, could we do it?

Could we possibly get the rights to do a streetcar named desire? There’s no way. There’s absolutely no way, no way, no way.

So I wrote back and said, well, we can’t get the rights, but we are talking about doing goblin Oedipus, which was not like it was, we just sort of was an off the cuff joke. And so he wrote back and said, great, we want to buy it. And so because we had a buyer, we had to create the show.

And so in the goblin universe, the logic is that after trying Macbeth, the goblins who have now become a little bit enthralled with theater decides, well, we should go back to the roots of Western theater and see what there is to be discovered there. And so that’s how they end up doing a bit of a goblin deep dive on Greek theater. And so we wrote it and we did it.

We did a workshop run, I guess you could call it. We did six performances at the High Performance Rodeo. And based on that, the Stratford Festival and Barn on the Beach said, well, we’d really like to buy goblin Oedipus as well now.

And so, well, then we just really had to commit to doing it and making it even better.

[Phil Rickaby]
Careful what you joke about.

[Rebecca Northan]
Yeah, careful what you joke about.

[Phil Rickaby]
In terms of the creation of this show, how did I mean, we talked about the creation of Goblin Macbeth and how that went. What was different or similar about the creation and putting together Goblin Oedipus?

[Rebecca Northan]
Well, we started with an excellent text. So with Oedipus, we were able to get permission to use John Murrell’s adaptation of Sophocles, because Bruce and I knew John when we were young artists. He taught you when you were at Mount Royal University and he directed us both at Shakespeare in the Park as very young artists.

So we were able to go to his family and say, do you think we could have permission to do a goblin treatment on John’s Oedipus? And his daughter wrote back and said, I think Dad would have loved for the goblins to do something with his Oedipus. And so starting with a really amazing text and really applying ourselves to speaking heightened text and and bringing truth and gravitas to it.

Same as Shakespeare.

[Bruce Horak]
And then researching Greek theatre and how they would have done it and why they would have done it, you know, putting the context around it, but also just like the basic practices of having a chorus on stage and what that was about. And how can the goblins do that in there? And then just the notion of these festivals and what theatre was all about, why you would, you know, really digging into all of that.

It was was a lot of fun. I mean, it’s got to utilize some of that theatre history class that I took at Mount Royal College. And then, yeah, just getting some scholars on board to talk about, you know, what elements of the Greeks can we can we throw into here.

[Rebecca Northan]
The goblins arrive at the theatre, very excited to do Greek theatre because they know that it’s a celebration of Dionysus. And they’re and they think, OK, well, we know that, you know, the best way to start Greek theatre is with a public orgy. So like, let’s get going, guys.

Not how that’s how you start.

[Bruce Horak]
This is what you guys do, right?

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Actually, I want to take a second because Bruce, I haven’t had the opportunity to talk to you. I mentioned that I talked to Rebecca a few years ago and we went into her history.

And I want to talk about the Loosemoose Theatre a little bit more and Keith Johnstone, the late Keith Johnstone a little bit. But I don’t know your theatre origin story, Bruce. How did you get into theatre?

[Bruce Horak]
How did I get into theatre? Well, my dad was a high school English teacher and he also taught drama. So we, my brothers and I am the youngest of four boys.

And so we would often be doing shows and dad taught us improv. And I just, yeah, I got the bug pretty early on. I initially wanted to be a playwright.

And I ended up working at Alberta Theatre Projects for a year, reading scripts and running around backstage and kind of learning all the nuts and bolts of doing theatre. And when I kind of seeking a career in becoming a playwright, I got accepted to McGill University to go into their playwriting program. And one of my mentors said, well, why don’t you just think about going to Mount Royal?

Because A, it’s a shorter program. It’s two years and you’ll get to do everything. And this conservatory program.

So I really got the acting bug pretty early on. And then they also had a theatre program into Shakespeare in the Park in Calgary, which was the summertime Shakespeare festival.

[Rebecca Northan]
Which is where we met.

[Bruce Horak]
Which is where I met Rebecca. She was coming out of University of Calgary and I was coming out of Mount Royal College. And we worked with John Murrell, who directed Romeo and Juliet that first year.

And Rebecca, I think, did a couple of afternoons of improv classes. And I think I’d seen her up at Loose Moose Theatre. And yeah, the next summer we got together and did Shakespeare in Pubs.

And she dragged me kicking and screaming up to Loose Moose Theatre.

[Rebecca Northan]
You did not kick and scream in.

[Bruce Horak]
And got the bug for improv as well. So I got to work with Keith Johnstone there. And it was really at a time in Calgary where, prior to that, people would graduate from Mount Royal or U of C and would either move to Toronto or Vancouver.

And there was this wave of artists that were staying in Calgary and starting their own theatre companies. And that’s where we formed the Upstart Crows, where we would do abbreviated, abridged productions of Shakespeare in pubs and you know, on beaches or whatever it was. And yeah, that was kind of the beginning of a very long collaboration with Rebecca.

We did a truncated version of Macbeth and Twelfth Night and Tempest. And yeah, so it’s been a long, long road. And really, I can’t think of how many shows we’ve created together.

[Rebecca Northan]
That we’ve, yeah. And then also that other people have cast us in together.

[Phil Rickaby]
The term spontaneous theatre, I think, came out of probably, I guess, Blind Date. But it’s now sort of like the name of the theatre company. You’re doing Goblin Macbeth Under.

What does spontaneous theatre mean to each of you? Structure and play.

[Rebecca Northan]
Yeah, it is both our genre and our umbrella company name. Yeah, I can’t say anything better than structure and play. I mean, it’s rigor.

It’s the rigor of structure. It’s the repeatability of structure. And then the permission for total play and spontaneity that comes out of it.

So we really like try to sit at the intersection of structure and spontaneity.

[Phil Rickaby]
You’ve also kind of, I guess, the phrase that Rebecca, you’ve used is sneaking improv through the side door at some of the mainstream theatres. Because, I mean, not just doing Goblin Macbeth at Stratford, Goblin Oedipus at Stratford and other places, but also Murder on the Lake at Shaw. These are things that, first off, Murder on the Lake is not the kind of thing that I would have thought that the Shaw Festival would do.

[Rebecca Northan]
I agree with you 100%. We could not believe it when we got invited.

[Phil Rickaby]
So they came to you to create the show?

[Rebecca Northan]
Yeah. Tim Carroll, the artistic director, we had met him probably five or six years prior to that. And he had seen Blind Date.

But he also used to have a company in England that would mix theatre and improvisation together. So meeting Tim Carroll was like meeting a kindred spirit who’s about a thousand times smarter than us put together. Like the guy is a genius.

And so we were, I mean, Bruce and I went to a general audition just to try to get in the room with Tim Carroll. Do you like us? Would you pick us?

Are we weird enough for you? And I think then he saw Blind Date and he sort of went, oh, you guys are interesting. And then we were working on another ridiculously pitched show that we were workshopping at the Stratford Festival’s Undiscovered Shakespeare, where we take an audience member’s real life love story and turn it into an improvised play in iambic pentameter, fully improvised.

So Tim Carroll came to see that and was like, you guys are bananas. What do you think of coming to the Shaw and doing what you do with an audience member? Would you like to do a murder mystery?

And Bruce and I had previously done a murder mystery already called Undercover, where we get an audience member to be the detective. And so Tim Carroll came to us and said, you want to do this? And we said, well, actually, we have an idea for a film noir thing that we want to do.

And for whatever reason, it didn’t seem like that was going to be a good fit. And then he came back to us and said, what do you think of the title Murder on the Lake? So the title was his idea.

And it’s pretty great, you know, when it’s the artistic director is suggesting a title and opening the door to you. The really the only thing to say is ye? Yeah, absolutely.

[Phil Rickaby]
But then to take actors, because I talk with Virgilio Griffith last year. Oh, she was talking about how she didn’t have an improvisational background and she was kind of unsure how to approach this. And I’m sure she wasn’t the only one in the cast who who kind of needed a crash course in spontaneous theater.

How how did you how did you manage to teach that in order?

[Rebecca Northan]
Well, the great thing about the Shaw Festival Company under the direction of Tim Carroll is he has been introducing and incorporating elements of improvisation since he took over. He’d done all kinds of improv based projects. You know, Androcles and the Lion had audience participation and improvisation.

The Game of Love and Chance, which is a project he brought me in as an actor to do, had. Gosh, we didn’t even learn the lines, it was all completely improvised and we would have different parts every night. So the core company of the Game of Love and Chance, when Tim Carroll said, would you come and do your style of theater, do a murder mystery murder on the lake?

I said. Yes, if I can use as many as of the same actors from the Game of Love and Chance in Murder on the Lake. So everyone came with varying degrees of experience and facility and comfort.

And then we had this nice, long rehearsal period where we could say, look, here’s the structure, here’s the narrative, here are the characters, and then here are the kind of rules of engagement in how we surround, take care of and uplift the civilian that we invite on stage to be are detected. And then the added piece to that is the friends of the festival at the Shaw. So the volunteers who willingly signed up to let us try stuff with them and on them while we were in rehearsal.

We could not have built Murder on the Lake without the Shaw Festival volunteers allowing us to make mistakes in a safe space without an audience was how we all figured that show out together. You know, and the other thing is, this is the beauty of of structure and spontaneity is when you bring a professional actor in. So going back to someone like Virgilia, who is an unbelievably talented, like emotionally truthful, deep actor when it comes to text, is just saying to her, the work is no different.

Like you’re going to create a character with all the emotional truth that you take to anything that you do that scripted and then you’re just going to respond. And you already know how to do that as an actor because you’re a wonderful listener. You’re so emotionally truthful.

And the other thing was so great about Virgilia is she takes huge risks. And so she would take big swings in rehearsal and it would allow us to go like, whoa, that was an amazing offer. Too big.

Pull it back or, you know, different world. And so it was incredible to watch her. So she freed was another one.

Actually, everybody in the cast of them kind of calibrating what they know from scripted were bringing it into the world of improv. And then I think it also the blending of the cast of people with improv experience with amazing Shaw Festival Ensemble actors was that it also requires that people with an improv background to step up as actors and not kind of like be lazy comedy club improvisers that sit on the outside of things, looking in and commenting and looking for jokes, but going like, no, no, I have to stay inside it and play the emotional truth of a moment with my fellow actors and an audience member. It was a thrilling process. I can’t believe that we do improv based work in mainstream theaters and in particular at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Festival.

If I could go back in time to the basement of the University of Calgary or to Bruce and I, you know, that first summer, 1996, fix me on the park and say, hey, hey, however many years from now, you guys are going to be doing improv based work of your own creation at these main festival, huge festivals. I wouldn’t have believed it.

[Bruce Horak]
Well, and I’ve been reading about them in my theater history class, you know, with the Shaw and the Stratford festivals, like foundations of Canadian hell, there’s no way it’s on. It’s on the other side of the country, but it’s like, it’s got this kind of kind of mystical reputation about it. Yeah.

We find ourselves on those spaces and we’ll just kind of look at each other every day and think, wow, you want to get the was it

[Rebecca Northan]
you want to get the badge for your actor sash, you know, like the fact that we don’t have those,

[Phil Rickaby]
we don’t get like a scout badge sash where you can put your badges on it, because if you were to walk up to somebody and say I did improv at the Shaw Festival, they would not believe you.

[Rebecca Northan]
No, no. The other thing that was amazing about being at Shaw is that a goodly chunk of their audience had never seen that kind of improv before. So it was they were really blown away.

They couldn’t make couldn’t believe it was improvised. It meant that the skeptics came back to three, four or five times. I mean, there was a woman that saw the show nine times.

[Phil Rickaby]
That’s pretty incredible. That’s incredible. Yeah, really.

I know that you guys, you did a run. You’re tired. I want to close in just a couple of minutes, but I do want to make sure that we touch on Keith Johnstone and Loose Moose Theatre Company, because we lost Keith in in 2023.

But he had a huge impact on improv in Canada. He’s called one of the pioneers of improv. What what was his impact on improv in general and on the two of you?

[Rebecca Northan]
Well, I mean, Keith, Keith has had a global impact. He started out at the Royal Court Theatre in London as a script reader. He was friends with Samuel Beckett, if she can believe it.

And his work. The sort of genesis of his work came from sitting in rehearsals at the Royal Court Theatre and getting curious about how could he help scripted actors be more present. So unlike the branch of improvisation that around the same time was was blossoming in the U.S., which turned into the Second City. Which was very comedy based and using improvisation as a tool to create sketch theatre, he was really looking for what is the nugget of spontaneity? How do you infuse text work with spontaneity? What can I do with that?

So he had started by running sort of public classes on dark nights on the sets of other theatres. It was the only way that he he had to call his performances public classes because it was the only way to get his work around the censor in England. So in the late 50s, early 60s, the public censor was still active.

So nothing legally was allowed to show up on a stage in London. We mean to count this way without permission and sign off from the censored. But he got away with it by saying, I’m holding public classes at some point in the 70s.

Seventy three, I think it was in 1973. He was invited to Canada to teach at a university, I think initially University of Victoria, and then he moved to the University of Calgary. And there was original group of students would meet at his place on the weekends in his basement.

Imagine today a professor saying, do you want to come to my basement and work on some stuff? And that that original group of students turned into the Loose Moose Theatre Company and pioneered his original format, theatre sports. Theatre sports is now played around the world in 47 different countries in 17 or 18 different languages.

And it’s one of the largest global networks of improvisation in the world. Probably on par with like the Applied Improvisation Network. So that that’s a little sort of history of of Keith Johnstone.

But I think it’s important to say that that the nugget of the work was never about generating comedy. It was about spontaneity and immediacy in the work, whether scripted or otherwise. And so I started at Loose Moose when I was 16.

I knew I wanted to be an actor. I had been in some plays. And then suddenly I met this very odd British man in a parka.

I thought he was the janitor. And I ended up at Loose Moose through the high school theatre sports tournament, and I just never stopped going. And I had three and a half years of Loose Moose under my belt before I went to university.

And so that’s absolutely foundational.

[Phil Rickaby]
What did what did that kind of experience with like that kind of spontaneous and improvisational theatre give you as you went into theatre school?

[Rebecca Northan]
A bad reputation. Because, you know, in the in the 90s, improvisation was at that time, like, really almost frowned upon by serious actors and thought of as quite separate. It’s not that way in Europe, you know, the Europeans.

It’s very much a partnership. When does where does one end the other begin? But very separate.

So I was that improv chick. All the way to university, even in my first several years out of school, you know, mainstream actors would say, like, improv chick, like, how are you going to be able to handle? Are you going to memorize your lines?

And I would say, I don’t know, this is a spontaneous conversation we’re having. Can you handle it or do I need to script it for you? Yeah.

But I think that, you know. My time at the University of Calgary, I had Keith was a professor there, even though I was not allowed to take his classes because I’d had enough exposure to him. His office was right next door to my Shakespeare professor’s office.

And on her door, she had a Hamlet quote, The readiness is all. And in response, Keith put the only thing on his door was don’t be prepared. And I think I’ve spent my entire career trying to, like, fit between the two doors and and marry those two ideas of.

Shakespeare, improvisation. Readiness, unpreparedness.

[Phil Rickaby]
Bruce, you mentioned being dragged kicking and screaming to the loose moves, though, Rebecca just maybe you weren’t taking it. I mean, what was your experience at the loose moves and with Keith Johnstone?

[Bruce Horak]
Well, I do remember going when I was fairly young. I mean, it was on the other side of Calgary, way up in the northeast, and I was a southwest. So it was difficult to get up there.

And my dad being an English teacher, he actually took a sabbatical at the U of C, which is probably where he met Keith. I would I would reckon. But yeah, loose moves had it just had the reputation as like the place to go on a Sunday night to go and see theaters.

So I was pretty young the first time I went up, saw it.

[Rebecca Northan]
Those moves always had like the audience everybody else wanted because 18 to 30 year olds were lining up to go to loose moves.

[Bruce Horak]
The lobby had a popcorn machine and it didn’t feel like going to theater. It was an event when I was something else. And you know, the drive home was like 40 minutes down Deerfoot or whatever.

And you would just talk through the whole show afterwards and talk about all the scenes. Oh, my God. And then when they did this and then for days afterwards, just, you know, talk about what had happened.

And so improv really got into my blood pretty early on. And and it was my grade 10 drama teacher, Diana Zarech, was it was a student of Keith’s and she taught improv classes when I was in grade 10. And we had like a lunch hour improv team and the Calgary High School Improv Festival and all that.

So it was it was really very early on that I got into it. And and honestly, when Rebecca brought the Upstart Crows up there to take some classes like it was it was really thrilling because, hey, I had a ride to get up there. Oh, my God.

But also the classes were free, like you’d show up like two hours before the show and you get an hour long free class and then you could potentially be on stage that night. There’s no other place in the country that does that.

[Rebecca Northan]
Well, the other thing that was like really like in the air at Loose Moose, you know, in the early 90s, was that the kids in the hall came out of Loose Moose. Right. So Bruce McCullough and Mark McKinney, we just missed them.

You know, they had just like in the sort of like back into the 80s, have left to go to Toronto and got kids in the hall going and were like Norm Hiscock, who left and went on to be the head writer on Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Vina Sood, who moved out to Vancouver and has an incredible film and television career. But these people started at Loose Moose. Yeah.

So that was. There was like you could almost get drunk. That sort of the vibe of the vibe of the electricity of young audiences were coming and the kids in the hall came out of this and if they came out of this, what might happen for us?

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, absolutely. And just in closing, I wanted to return to the Goblins for a moment. Goblin Macbeth at Centaur Theatre in Montreal, Goblin Oedipus in future productions.

Do you see the expansion of the Goblin Empire? Do you see the Goblin cinematic universe for it, so to speak? Like how far do you see the Goblins going and do you see any end to your fascination with Goblin, their Goblin’s fascination with theatre?

[Bruce Horak]
Well, they definitely have more ideas, more projects in the shoots. I don’t know what we can talk about.

[Rebecca Northan]
We have a few more lined up. One is we can’t tell you what it is, but what we can say is that after Goblin Oedipus goes to Bard on the Beach this summer, summer 26, summer 26, it’s going to play from July till the middle of September. And then the Goblins are going to be very busy creating a show that may or may not be linked to a certain very popular winter holiday.

[Phil Rickaby]
And that’s all I can say. Fascinating. Fascinating.

Exciting. That’s amazing. And then after that in 2027, I’m knocking wood.

[Rebecca Northan]
If a particular board of directors can be convinced by a particular artistic director, there may be a fourth chapter in the Goblin universe.

[Phil Rickaby]
That’s incredible. Rebecca, Bruce, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

And hearing about Goblin Macbeth and seeing how it’s gone and seeing the expansion, as a fantasy nerd, somebody who grew up with role-playing games and that kind of thing, it’s amazing stuff. Thank you so much for this. Thank you for listening to this episode of Stageworthy.

A little housekeeping before I get to who my guest is next week. If you’re watching on YouTube, make sure that you like the episode, give a little comment to let me know that you were here. And if you’ve been enjoying the episodes that I post on YouTube, make sure that you subscribe and hit that bell icon so that whenever a new episode is released, you will get a notification the new episode is available.

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My guest next week is Alexis Eastman. Alexis is a Toronto based creative producer. And I had a fascinating time getting to know Alexis and the work of a creative producer.

And so I can’t wait for you to hear that conversation next week on Stageworthy.