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“And it’s just time that as we’re approaching our 20th year, our company opens up its trade routes.”

Founded in 1998, Soulpepper is billed as North America’s only year-round repertory company. Soulpepper has made a concerted effort to develop and devise original works while also bringing adaptations of classic stories to its stages.

Soulpepper will have a full season of programming at its home base in Toronto this summer, including a pair of homegrown productions centred around the First World War: “Vimy” and the Governor General Award-winning “Billy Bishop Goes to War.”

Schultz said bringing some of the company’s works to New York will provide welcome exposure to individuals who haven’t been able to see their shows in Canada.

“The hope is indeed that these individual productions … or any of our artists or the company as a whole do open up the opportunity to work on a more geographically diverse portfolio than we now have,” he said.

“We’ve taken Soulpepper shows to every part of the country — including our television series (‘Kim’s Convenience’) — but this just opens up that many more possibilities in terms of audiences and in terms of collaborations.”

Soulpepper is establishing an ambassador program pairing its artists with those in New York-based theatre companies, working towards creating relationships that will “hopefully bear creative and collaborative fruit in the future.”

“At the end of the day, that’s going to be where the legacy piece is: is being invited to make work with other artists or other companies or being invited to play to new audiences through other producers. It’s best that we get that going so that we hit the ground running.”