Eight years, seventy children, and one unshakable belief in the brilliance of young minds later, writer-performer Sunny Drake brings his acclaimed intergenerational creation CHILD-ish home to Toronto. The Tarragon Theatre production marks his Tarragon debut and the latest chapter in a journey that has spanned playgrounds, screen, and stage — a continuing “experiment in listening,” as Drake once called it in our first conversation back in 2021 (read it here).
An award-winning, self-taught artist who began making theatre in his bedroom, Drake has always defied convention. His inventive, genre-bending work — seen in over 100 festivals and venues worldwide — blends humour, heart and political insight to explore transformation, identity, and community. His plays, including Men Express Their Feelings, Transgender Seeking, and Every Little Nookie (Stratford Festival), have cemented his reputation as a resourceful path-paver and one of the most original theatrical voices. Known for centring collaboration, social justice, and deep curiosity about how stories can bridge generations, Drake embodies the spirit that animates CHILD-ish: that creativity and listening can spark real change.
“A whacky idea that grew into an epic journey”
“CHILD-ish has been an epic journey!” Drake says with a grin. “What started as a whacky idea has turned into an eight-year project involving over 70 children, their families, and about that many professional theatre makers.” Each version, he explains, has taken on its own life: “The web series is very different from live production. And this final production is very different than earlier draft version at SummerWorks. The project has been a true experiment: embracing the unknown, the project has grown in ways that surprised, inspired and delighted me.”
Since its first development in 2018 and its sold-out showing at the 2019 SummerWorks Festival, CHILD-ish has evolved into a constellation of creative forms: a web series filmed in Toronto playgrounds during the pandemic, a 2024 stage premiere at Vancouver’s Pacific Theatre, and now its Toronto premiere in Tarragon’s Extraspace. Directed by Andrea Donaldson and featuring Karl Ang, Janelle Cooper, Monique Mojica, Jordan Pettle and Asher Rose, this new staging continues Drake’s exploration of how adults can speak children’s exact words without “pretending to be kids” — instead, listening and responding to them as equals.
“Kids making a show for adults”
“As much as CHILD-ish is its many creative outcomes, CHILD-ish is also an intergenerational process,” Drake explains. “Drawing inspiration from companies like Mammalian Diving Reflex and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, we have developed our own set of intergenerational working protocols. Usually, children are only involved in theatre as audience. This show flips the usual format of adults making a show for kids, and has kids participate in making a show for adults.”
That inversion, he adds, is “both about equity – challenging usual power dynamics – and it also about excellence. We hold the view that children are not just ‘future humans’, they are valuable, intelligent members of our community now. A lot becomes possible when we encourage and support their leadership. We need their smarts and perspectives not just in theatre, but in our communities, our world – things are not going all that well in the world right now and we need to do a lot of things differently.”
“This show is an Olympic sport!”
Working with adults to perform children’s words has proven both exhilarating and demanding. “Working with this incredible team I finally understand that this show is an Olympic sport!” Drake laughs. “After honing the script with an electrifying production in Vancouver, I somehow thought it would be an easier show to realize on the second production. But fine-tuning the rules of Pole Vaulting or Judo doesn’t make them any less difficult to excel at.”
Finding the right tone, he says, is deceptively complex. “Go too exuberant and it looks like they’re imitating kids which ruins the experiment. Go too deeply into adult ‘characters’ and it makes it harder for the audience to rapidly switch between the two frequencies: listening for the source (children) and the adult resonances and dissonances.” Drake credits the Tarragon ensemble for meeting that challenge “diligently and skilfully,” adding that he is “proud of the results.”
“Their playfulness is a technology for moving through the difficult”
This Toronto iteration incorporates themes of climate change and mental health — subjects that children themselves raised during Drake’s interviews. “These days, I expect teenagers to talk about these themes, but it was a deep shock to me in the interviews that children as young as five were talking about intense themes,” he says. “While these were hard conversations to have, I found kids less likely than I am to get stuck in either the hole of despair, nor retreat to fun simply as a cover for the difficult stuff. Their playfulness is a technology for moving through the difficult.”
That ability to move fluidly between seriousness and play shaped the piece’s rhythm. “Kids’ incredible fluidity with moving from tough emotions to fun and back again is reflected in the twists and turns to the form in the show,” he explains. “I was also deeply inspired by children’s relationship to hope.”
Drake contrasts that resilience with adults’ tendency to over-rationalize. “Grown-ups have a tendency to both rely on children to ignite our own sense of hope, while also writing kids off as naïve – that they’re only hopeful because they don’t understand how the world works. But I found children had surprising knowledge of and insights into big things. Yet they were still more likely to feel hopeful in the face of that.”
He attributes that hope to curiosity. “They are in a constant learning process all day every day. The reality is that there is a tonne that adults also don’t know about the universe. In fact, in the scheme of everything there is to know, we know very little. But many of us grown-ups are over-confident that we know a lot, and that makes us closed to possibility. Kids shape-shift more easily between ‘the world’s a mess’ and ‘we still have hope’ and that makes them able to lean into possibility and discovery.”
“The show grew up, left home, and came back to tell the tale”
Returning to Toronto, Drake says, “does indeed feel like a homecoming for the show! The show grew up, left home, went out into the world on various adventures to find itself, then came back home to tell the tale.”
That homecoming marks a full-circle moment for the young collaborators who helped shape CHILD-ish years ago. “The wild thing is that all the original Young Collaborators – children who were on the creative team during the development process – are now teenagers!” he notes. “It’s wild to measure the length of a creative process by literal transformation from children to teens. Our ethos is that no-one on the team ever ages out of the project.”
For this Tarragon production, six Teen Collaborators are contributing across lobby design, marketing, and creative mentorship — while guiding a new group of child collaborators who have shaped a fresh section of the script. “The Tarragon team has been very game with the experiment of working with children in these different ways!” Drake says. “In terms of what I hope Toronto audiences will take away from the show, there will be tangible take-aways, but I don’t want to spoil the surprises – you will just have to come and experience it for yourself!”
“Listening itself can be a creative act”
“Thanks so much for inviting me back for this conversation!” Drake says warmly at the close of our interview. That generosity of spirit — between child and adult, artist and audience — is the heartbeat of CHILD-ish. In his hands, listening becomes a creative act: a way of imagining a world where curiosity, dialogue, and hope are inseparable.
CHILD-ish (Toronto Premiere), presented by Tarragon Theatre, in Association with The CHILD-ish Collective, is on stage until November 16, 2025. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
