Playwright Kat Sandler
"It's like a theatre Christmas." Asked about the Toronto Fringe Festival, actor-playwright Kat Sandler is childlike with joy. "If you want to see a serious drama, great," she says. "If you want to see someone squat in a back alley playing a ukulele and waxing poetic about Trump, also great. It's all there." Sandler is there, too, as the director and writer of Bright Lights, a dark comedy from her Theatre Brouhaha company about alien experiences and the wish to be anything but alone. We asked her what was lighting up her trees these days.
What she's watching: "It's probably a cliché at this point to say Game of Thrones, but I was a fan of the books, too, and there's something deliciously thrilling about the showrunners having gone totally rogue. Anything can happen now that they've run out of book storylines. Everyone can have sex! Anyone can die! People can just be trees! There are no rules! It's actually kind of stressful."
What she saw: "I haven't seen a movie in theatres since Captain America: Civil War. I remember thinking, as I gleefully shoved handfuls of butter into my face, 'Wow, this movie is one big explosion peppered with pithy quips, and I could not be happier.' And the best things is, Marvel's going to keep making the same movie literally forever, so I'll get to see it again."
What she's reading: "Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. It's so beautiful and funny and heartbreaking. It's about an epidemic that almost wipes out the human race, and it begins with a production of King Lear in Toronto at the Elgin. It pretty much checks all my boxes: postapocalyptic, theatre nerdy and references to places I've actually been in in my life, which makes me think the book is kind of about me, which is selfish and I don't care."
Brights Lights runs at Toronto Fringe until July 9. $12. Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, 30 Bridgman Ave., fringetoronto.com
Brad Wheeler