What does it mean to launch a new theatre company in 2025 … while you’re already busy performing in two Stratford Festival productions and continuing to carve out space for bold, experimental work?
郝邦宇 Steven Hao considers it an exercise in resilience and curiosity … powered by the complex and decidedly tart taste of the puckery. For the rest of us? We can find our own answers October 8-12, when Pucker’s – the new theatre company which Hao has co-founded with Allison MacKenzie – debuts with a multidisciplinary reimagining of Jordan Tannehill’s Concord Floral at The Theatre Centre BMO Incubator.
For Hao, who appears at Stratford this season in Anne of Green Gables and Forgiveness, the production is more than a staging. It’s a statement about how young artists can — and must — reshape the Canadian canon – and it’s an idea that was born in the university dorm where Hao and MacKenzie first met. Bonding over a shared passion for the arts, they “wanted to put art out there in the world: to make a space that was for artists and by artists, and to experiment with how live performance can interact with audiences, and then from there on, how to create a community around it.” Hao’s impulse to step into artistic leadership early was reinforced by his mentor Ray Hogg, former artistic director of The Musical Stage Company. Hogg told him that “in order to become an arts leader, you have to start calling yourself an arts leader” – which means start putting the practice of being an artistic director.
Founding Pucker’s is a way of enacting that advice. But why the name “Pucker’s”? Is it because Pucker’s is just one syllable away from Puck—Shakespeare’s mischievous sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a role Hao embodied in a Canadian Stage production (read the Sesaya Arts interview with him about the experience here)? The coincidence feels apt, as the company aims to be impish, nimble, audacious, and transformative. But no: the name’s origins lie in citrus, not Shakespeare. Hao initially imagined “a company called Lemonade Stand… because when we think of lemonade stands, you usually see a kid behind a cardboard sign, and I liked the scrappiness of that.” But the team wanted a name that captured the physicality of their artistic goals. “We really enjoyed the idea of creating art that made people feel – where there was a reaction to the art right away,” he explains. “When you eat lemons, your face does this thing where it feels sour; it’s puckered.” So the company name is the simple promise of “an experience that evokes something in you, physically.”
For the company’s inaugural production, Hao wanted to begin with a Canadian work. “It just felt necessary to be doing Canadian work right now,” he says. “I have a deep love for Canadian works… We’re quite new to the game, and I love this notion [that] we’re still trying to find our voices.” Concord Floral, a haunting suburban allegory about secrets, guilt, and reckoning, “has been a favourite play of [Hao’s] for a long time.”. It has been frequently staged – but Hao sees that as an opportunity. Each production, he notes, “comes with pressure to keep it a certain way. And as a young artist, I feel like it is our responsibility to look at the text and understand why it works – but then to bring it into this modern context, and then to elevate it with the vision that we place on top of the play.”
Set in an abandoned suburban greenhouse, Concord Floral follows ten teenagers bound together by secrets they cannot outrun. As rumours intensify and shadows lengthen, an uncanny plague seeps into their world, forcing them to face both the choices they’ve made and the ghosts they’ve left behind. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, the play intertwines the ordinary and the surreal: late-night walks and text messages collide with startling visions, while the bonds of friendship splinter into fear, betrayal, and a reckoning they must confront.
After COVID-19, “that incoming plague – or the feeling of something looming – is read so differently now,” Hao reflects. In Hao and Carry’s staging, Concord Floral unfolds in the round. The choice to surround the audience is deliberate: the configuration collapses distance, creating an atmosphere of being inside the greenhouse with the performers. The show integrates dance, music, and video alongside text – conjuring a surreal effect. “Looking back at the pandemic, it was such a fever dream of an experience,” Hao recalls. “You’re in your own living space, yet you feel like your world is in your computer… that image really spoke to me in relooking at this play in a post-pandemic context. And for me, there was no better form to physicalize that than dance, because dance does this wonderful thing where it’s about the emotions of the movement.”
More than just a new staging, the production refracts Tannahill’s play through a multidisciplinary lens. “We’re still paying a lot of homage to the text,” notes Hao, “but that text is not the only thing that can tell that story. The dance element should stir something in the audience in a way that’s larger than just the text.” It takes a puckery village to go big like this, and the show is co-directed with rising choreographer Alli Curry and supported by Assistant Director Naomi Kaplan, with a creative team that includes composer Ben Yoganathan, sound designer Kai Korven, lighting designer Mathilda Kane, and scenic designer Irene Ly.
At its heart, Concord Floral remains a play about youth, guilt, and the spaces we abandon. And for Hao, its themes feel chillingly current. “We live in a superbly bleak time right now,” he concedes. “I think we’re all experiencing collective grief, no matter which side you’re on. And in order to reconcile with it, we must first see it for what it is.” That hard truth feels deeply “relevant in this current time” – particularly when we “look at these young people who feel so lost.”
This is why Hao and the team sought – and found – ten talented young performers to bring these roles to life: Arjun Kalra, Rachel Cucheron, Kole Durnford, Gillian Bennet, Micaela Janse van Rensburg, Chrystal Tam, Mya Wong, Trinity Lloyd, Meg Gibson, and Clara Isgro. “There’s nothing better than doing a show about young people, and actually having young people be at the helm of it,” he notes. “They bring an automatic sense of energy and youth and innocence to the characters that you simply cannot direct in a more grown adult actor… .So much of the time, their impulses are better than anything I could have pre-planned.”– particularly because most of them lived through pandemic schooling. “To actually talk about what it was like, and then to have that inform the work has been very helpful.”
For Hao, Concord Floral is both beloved and dangerous as a Canadian “cult favourite” whose meaning must be discovered (or created) anew in 2025. So he asks audiences to arrive with open minds and hearts, and to “assess it and receive it like they’re receiving it for the first time. We might be doing ourselves a disservice if we are entering into a space as sacred as the theatre with a preconceived notion of how every beat is supposed to go. So I would ask our audience to leave behind the version of Concord Floral they know, and come in with a fresh set of eyes.”
A Pucker’s Production of Concord Floral by Jordan Tannehill runs at The Theatre Centre BMO Incubator October 8–12, 2025. Tickets are available at theatrecentre.org.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
