Tannahill - Concord Floral

As a teen growing up in the suburbs, my friends and I found refuges for ourselves in the abandoned or underused spaces of our neighbourhood: the oversized parking lots, the vacant bus shelters, the unlit parks and walking paths beyond our backyards. In the summer of 2011 I went to a party at Concord Floral, a million-square foot abandoned greenhouse in Vaughan. Judging from the piles of old cigarette butts, broken beer bottles, underwear, used condoms, and graffiti, I realized that the greenhouse was, and had likely been for several generations, a haven for youthful transgressionmuch like the ones my friends and I had claimed for ourselves as teens. Around the same time I was reading Giovanni Boccaccios The Decameron,a thirteenth century allegory in which ten youth flee plague-ridden Florence to an abandoned villa in the countryside for ten days. There was such a tangible connection in my mind between this medieval villa and Concord Floral: both were secret hideaways reclaimed by youth as shelters for their stories and coming of age.

I began writing Concord Floral as a kind of fantastical portrait of my own neighbourhood, and specifically those liminal spaces adolescents claim for themselves. The suburb I grew up in was both new and quiet, and yet it always carried for me the possibility of myth and magic, of danger and desire. But then perhaps thats just adolescence anywhere. Concord Floral was written by Jordan Tannahill over a three-year development process with Erin Brubacher, Cara Spooner, and a group of teenagers from across the Greater Toronto Area. The premiere production of Concord Floral was created and directed by Erin Brubacher, Cara Spooner, and Jordan Tannahill. Concord Floral was first produced by Suburban Beast and presented by Why Not Theatre at the Theatre Centre, Toronto, from October 12 to 26, 2014, with the following creative team: Liam Sullivan as 1 (Just Joey) Troy Sarju as 2 (Bobolink) Theo Gallaro as 3 (John Cabot) Melisa Sofi as 4 (Forever Irene) Jessica Munk as 5 (Rosa Mundi) Erum Khan as 6 (Nearly Wild) Sahra Del as 7 (Couch) Eartha Masek-Kelly as 8 (Fox) Rashida Shaw as 9 (Greenhouse) Jovana Miladinovic as 10 (Bobbie James) Music composition and sound design by Christopher Willes Lighting design by Kimberly Purtell Stage management by Laura Hendrickson Dramaturgy by Erin Brubacher