Eva Barrie - Thought #1 - Lobbies

My name is Eva Barrie and this is my first thought.

I'm thinking a lot about Lobbies. Or more so... I'm thinking about the conditions we create for people to experience a play or an event.

So one of my favourite theatres is the Schaubuehne in Berlin and there's a bar in their lobby, with a table reserved for the artists of the production, so that afterward, the artists can drink or hang out at the theatre afterward, and therefore be accessible to the theatre goers. I think about how in Toronto our lobbies don't offer that opportunity readily. We don't think about lobbies as part of the artistic experience. They're more a passage to the place where we will sit quietly and listen to the performance. But... if we want a vibrant theatre culture, if we want people to talk about plays, if we want to create nuanced and challenging plays that require a bit of discourse - maybe even between strangers - we need to set those spaces to have those conversations.