Tarragon to Stage New Kat Sandler Play MUSTARD

Tarragon Theatre presents the world premiere of Mustard, a darkly comic fairytale by one of Toronto's hottest and most prolific young playwrights and directors, Kat Sandler, in her debut work for the company. This whimsical production about a mother and daughter navigating life after divorce is directed byAshlie Corcoran, who now helms her second work for Tarragon (the first was the Tarragon-Theatre Smash co-production of The Ugly One two seasons ago). Mustardpreviews from February 2, opens February 10 and runs to March 13 in Tarragon's Extraspace.

Teenage Thai still has an imaginary friend named Mustard who lives under her bed. How can her mother, recently divorced and looking for solace at the bottom of a wine glass, persuade her that this is not normal at her age, when she just started seeing him too? And as for Mustard? Well, he seems to have has his own peculiar problems. A pitch-black fairytale about love, loss, family, belonging, growing up... and magic.

A super-talented cast of:

Sarah Dodd (the mother Sadie: Tarragon's The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, Humble Boy, Communion; Company Theatre's Marion Bridge - Dora Award; Nightwood's The Penelopiad - Ensemble Dora Award),

Rebecca Liddiard (the daughter Thai: Tarragon debut, 2015 Dora nomination for Cue6 Theatre's Kate and Sam Are Not Breaking Up, lead in hit webseriesMslabelled with Shaftsbury/Smoke Bomb Productions),

Anand Rajaram (Mustard: Tarragon's Much Ado About Nothing; numerous VideoCabaret productions; performer, playwright, director, musician and/or teacher with CORPUS, Second City, Stratford Festival, Canadian Stage),

Tony Nappo (Bug: Tarragon's A God in Need of Help, The Golden Dragon, The Real World?; Mirvish's God of Carnage; Soulpepper's Twelve Angry Men; Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God at Canadian Stage; numerous film and tv roles),

Julian Richings (Leslie: Tarragon's Lion In The Streets, Moliere, The Misanthrope; Art of Time Ensemble's I Send You This Cadmium Red, Canadian Stage'sPalace of the End; acted in theatre, tv and film for 40 years) and

Paulo Santalucia (Jay: Tarragon debut; Soulpepper's The Dybbuk, Of Human Bondage - Ensemble Dora Award, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Ensemble Dora Award, The Crucible; Canadian Rep's Armstrong's War),

bring this fanciful story to life as it blurs the line between the real and the fantastical.

Indie sensation Kat Sandler is a writer, director and Artistic Director of Theatre Brouhaha where she has staged ten original plays in the last four years including Punch Up(2014 Best of Fringe), Delicacy (2013 Summerworks Spotlight Award) and Help Yourself (2012 Best of Fringe, Fringe New Play Contest winner) as well as Liver, Cockfightand Retreat at the Storefront Theatre. She was a member of the 2014 Tarragon Playwrights Unit where she developed Mustard and is the 2015 recipient of NOW Magazine's Audience Choice Award for Best Director and Best Playwright. Kat is a graduate of the Queen's University Drama Program.

Says Sandler, "I had several imaginary friends growing up. One was a unicorn. One was her husband, Boy Unicorn. One was an elf from the North Pole named Bozo, who my father would conjure by doing a funny voice. But when he realized that I was so caught up in the fantasy that I only wanted to talk to him as Bozo, Bozo had to go away, unexpectedly, forever. I missed him terribly.

"Now, as a writer, I spend a lot of my adult life making things up - so when I sat down to write something new, I wondered why these friends had to leave. What would happen if the beautiful remnants from a time when we appreciated magic, and whimsy, and didn't care about the practical rules of the world, just stayed with us into our teens, into our twenties, into our eighties. Why did we create them in the first place, only to throw them away when we got distracted by puberty? And where, exactly, did they go when we were done with them, and what if they didn't want to go?"

Director Ashlie Corcoran is the co-founder and Artistic Producer of Theatre Smash, for which she has produced Norway.Today and directed A Boy Called Newfoundland, Tijuana Cure, Tiny Dynamite, Durango (with fu-GEN/Buddies) and The Ugly One which won a Dora Award for Outstanding Production and was remounted with Tarragon in 2014. Corcoran directs both theatre and opera, working in Canada (Canadian Opera Company: The Bear, Operation Superpower, Brothers Grimm) and internationally (Opera Philadelphia: The Magic Flute), and has been the Artistic Director of the Thousand Islands Playhouse since 2012 where she has directed The Pirates of Penzance, The Ugly One and Salt-Water Moon, among others. She will direct Das Ding (The Thing) for Theatre Smash in association with Canadian Stage in the spring. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab and was the 2010/11 Urjo Kareda Emerging Artist at Tarragon Theatre.

The lighting designers are Graeme S. Thomson and Nick Andison, set and costume design is by Michael Gianfrancesco and the sound design by Christopher Stanton. The stage manager is Nicola Benidickson.

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