Director's Notes

from Roy Surrette
Original Director

The Way We Were…

The Number 14 has pulled into school gymnasiums and community halls from the Gulf Islands to the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. From an acclaimed run in Jerusalem to a Drama Desk nominated Broadway run in New York, The Number 14 proves that travelling by bus can be prestigious, adventuresome and filled with surprises.

The goal when we started: to recognize the chaos of living in the city…to capture the absurdity, diversity and eccentricities we witness and participate in as we go about our daily business.

The inspiration: commedia dell'arte, Monty Python, silent movies, Mr. Bean, vaudeville and ritual.

The creative team: an amazing collective chock full of expertise and imagination. Their powers of observation and sense of the satirical is exhilarating, exhausting and at times baffling.

The process: after weeks of playing, exploring and creating characters together, we decided to put them all on a moving bus on a route that covers the whole city. Public transit is one of the few places where diverse elements of the population cross paths. Melody Anderson's masks have infused a life of their own - transforming the actors.

Like commedia dell'arte in 16th century Italy, we use masks to create larger-than-life characters who are instantly recognizable as the people we see every day - the wealthy and the destitute, the aggressive and the apathetic, strangers and lovers, the kind and the cruel.

Overall, this is a piece that celebrates the theatrical. Sitting in a seat becomes a dance, silence becomes music. Six actors transform into sixty characters, and like those characters, the audience is transported - taken for a ride on THE NUMBER 14.

Roy Surette
Original Director

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