Assembly Theatre's Circlesnake Production To Present 13 PLAYS ABOUT ADHD ALL AT THE SAME TIME

After winning the Dora for Best Ensemble in the Independent Theatre Division with Sex T-Rex's Swordplay, I, Alec Toller, am bringing a new work to the stage as a challenge: can I create a play so dumb that they take my Dora away? 13 Plays About ADHD All At The Same Time runs Oct 4th - Oct 13th at The Assembly Theatre.

13 Plays About ADHD All At The Same Time is, a 75-minute comedy of, well, thirteen plays, about ADHD, that happen, yeah, you get it: it's exactly what it says on the tin. It's basically if The Muppets were trying to put on a seminar about ADHD, but the rest of the cast have their own ideas about what should be on stage. The Hosts of the seminar wrestle with the other performers for control of the play, only further unraveling the show. The play features a dazzling array of genres, styles, and formats that, as one of the Hosts puts it “simulates the experience of ADHD, guaranteed that if you don't have ADHD before the show you'll have it by the end”. The show includes segments for audience participation, such as “The Shame Pit” in which we read out an email I received verbatim calling me out for repeatedly failing to meet a deadline, and the audience is invited to share their own moments of skin-crawling embarrassment. The intention of the show is to entertain while creating space for audiences to genuinely share and confront the complexities (and absurdities) of living with ADHD. The show is part of a larger discourse about ADHD, and mental health more broadly, arising over social media.

The cast features a combination of Second City Mainstage veterans (Sharjil Rasool, Jillian Welsh, and Jon Blair) and collaborators with Sex T-Rex (self-dubbed Sex Re-Jects). The Hosts leading the show are Sharjill Rasool (JFL42's New Faces, CBC's Run The Burbs, FX's What We Do In The Shadows; Dora Award for Best Ensemble for Swordplay) and Danny Pagett (Frequent collaborator with Kat Sandler's Theatre Brouhaha, Sex T-Rex, and Circlesnake Productions). Supporting cast are Jillian Welsh (Apple TV's Jane, CBC's Working Moms and Baroness Von Sketch Show; Canadian Comedy Award for Best Writer and Best Comedian, Dora-nominated for outstanding actor), Jon Blair (CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Canadian-US tours of solo sketch shows I'm Only One Man, I Hope Nothing Bad Happens; Dora Award for Best Ensemble for Swordplay), and Chloe Sullivan (Unit 102, Fresh Mint's Much Ado About Nothing, The Harvester at the Toronto Fringe). Written and directed by me, Alec Toller (Circlesnake Productions's Slip & Special Constables, Sex T-Rex's Wasteland, Swordplay, and Wildkat, and director of several award-winning feature films and TV series including Play The Film, Akela, aand BellFibe's The Supers). I both have ADHD myself and work as a psychological associate in supervised practice, providing cognitive behavioural therapy for a variety of disorders including ADHD (fun fact: I realized I had ADHD when I was reading through a treatment manual for a client with ADHD and kept thinking, “oh that would be really helpful for me... oh that too... wait a minute....”). Many of the cast also have ADHD, so the show speaks from lived experience and is a living hell to schedule. 

Circlesnake Productions is a small-venue independent theatre company known for their adaptation of genres rarely seen on stage. Previous productions include Slip (My Entertainment World's Best of the Decade), Dark Matter (My Entertainment World's Best Production), Special Constables, and The Queen's Conjuror. Their collaborative creation process draws heavily on improv to create shows with hard-hitting comedy and grounded emotional resonance. They are a part of a trend in the local independent scene of theatre creators looking to the narrative structures and dialogue of film and television to create theatre that appeals to audiences whether they're more into Stratford or streaming. 

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