Toronto Fringe Festival is a trove of incredible theatre. We’ve chosen some of the best playwrights and directors from this year’s festival to find out what makes them tick, and what you can expect to see this year. 

For this installment, we spoke with choreographer of WasteLand and member of Sex T-Rex theatre company, Kaitlin Morrow.

SDTC: What’s your play about?

KM: WasteLand is a post-apocalyptic romp about a man and his dog who must fight off hoards of mutants, survive a high-octane murder derby and outrun a maniacal warlord and his goons to find Graceland.

What led you to come up with the concept?

This is Sex T-Rex’s 5th scripted show. Every year we pick a new action movie genre and challenge ourselves to put it on stage using physical comedy, stage combat and no CGI. This year we chose post-apocalyptic because we saw Mad Max and damn… So good. Our focus on “man and his dog” came about because it is a common trope of the genre and because we wanted an opportunity to include more puppetry this year. (Spoiler: the puppet is the dog. Not the man.)

What was the most challenging aspect of this project? Most rewarding?

This year the most challenging aspect was time management. We had a busier than usual year, which was great except that it made giving our show the attention it needed tricky at times. We worked on it really hard through the Montreal Fringe and it’s come a long way. The most rewarding aspect is having a chance to continue to work with my best friends to create really fun, dumb, sweaty action movies on stage and then have the pleasure of seeing the shows take on lives of their own once we introduce them to audiences.

What do you want audiences to take away?

I hope audiences leave with their bellies hurting from laughing and I hope they take away that theatre is still a really exciting medium and, so long as you use a little imagination, car explosions are not just for the movies.

WasteLand is playing at Randolph Theatre from now until July 9. Get your tickets here.