EUREKA DAY and More Set for Coal Mine Theatre 2025-26 Season

Toronto's COAL MINE THEATRE has unveiled its 2025/26 season.  The season gets underway in September with Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece, WAITING FOR GODOT.  One of the most enduring and essential plays of modern theatre, exploring the fundamental questions of the human experience, this production welcomes back acclaimed director Kelli Fox who led COAL MINE's award-winning production of BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY in 2019.  From that same production, actor Alexander Thomas – who won a Dora Award for Best Performance for his role – will play Vladimir alongside Ted Dykstra's Estragon, joined by Jim Mezon (The Inheritance) as Pozzo, Simon Bracken (The Antipodes) as Lucky, and Kole Parks as The Boy.  It has been over six years since Dykstra last performed at the COAL MINE, in 2019's HAND OF GOD.

 “As an actor I have had a few chances to explore the classics over my many years in this business, but it has been a while now, and I am itching to tackle something huge, and well, Godot is huge.” shares Dykstra. “The play is unknowable in any quantifiable way, and I love that challenge and the fear it brings up in me. Jackie Maxwell suggested I act in this, and I thank her for the idea. As for casting Alexander Thomas as Vladimir, well I couldn't be luckier or more excited that he said yes. The amazing Kelli Fox and Alex have already collaborated to bring BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY to Toronto audiences with incredible success, and Jim and Simon and Kole are icing on this classical cake.”
 
In November, Dykstra steps off stage to direct the Canadian Premiere of the 2018 Obie Award-recipient for playwriting, Abe Koogler's FULFILLMENT CENTRE. A New York Times Critic's Pick that their critic called “quietly shattering”, Koogler's drama is set against the backdrop of an online retailer's shipping fulfillment centre in the New Mexico desert as four lonely lives are brought together but struggle to connect. Dykstra directs the prestigious ensemble of Kristen Thomson (Pipeline, The Wedding Party), Evan Buliung (Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812), Emilio Vieira (Twelfth Night), and Gita Miller (The Sticky), all making their COAL MINE debuts in this raw, surprising, and funny play about the search for intimacy and meaning.
 
Next up, longtime COAL MINE collaborator Mitchell Cushman returns to the Danforth to direct the English language Canadian Premiere of playwright Jonathan Spector's 2025 Tony Award winner, EUREKA DAY. An all-too-prescient story about a progressive day school in Berkeley, California faced with an outbreak of the mumps, Spector's satire first premiered in California in 2018, then had its east coast premiere off-Broadway at Walkerspace in 2019. The played was revived on Broadway in the 2024-2025 Manhattan Theatre Club season, receiving Drama Desk and Tony Awards for Best Revival. The Toronto production is set with another all-star cast making their COAL MINE debuts, including Kevin Bundy (Cock), Jake Epstein (Life, After), and Sophia Walker (Flex).

To wrap up the season, the Dora-nominated team behind COAL MINE's recent production of PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS, director Diana Bentley and movement director Alyssa Martin, are teaming up with acclaimed immersive company Outside the March and Associate Director Lucy Coren for the Toronto Professional Premiere of Clare Barron's 2017 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winner – also a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama – DANCE NATION. A groundbreaking play about an army of pre-teen competitive dancers, DANCE NATION is a ferocious and darkly hilarious exploration of ambition and friendship.  Starring Amy Keating (The Flick), Katherine Cullen (A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney), Annie Lujan (Monks), Zorana Sadiq(Comfort Food), and Salvatore Antonio (The Lion King), the production will be an immersive experience, taking over both floors of the building – a first for the COAL MINE. The show is a co-production with Outside the March in association with Rock Bottom Movement.

Tickets for the 25.26 season are available now, including a limited number of $25 tickets for folks twenty-five years and under, preview and arts worker tickets for $40 and general admission tickets ranging from $65 - $75. Season passes, offering tickets to all four productions at a discounted price of $57.50 per ticket, will be available until September 22. For more information visit