Chelsea Dickie, Jake Planinc, and Alex Mills with their 2024 Robert Merritt Awards for Outstanding Production (and Outstanding Direction for Planinc)
Matchstick Theatre is bringing their 2024 hit production of David French’s Leaving Home to Ted Dykstra’s Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto. It runs there from tonight, June 10th, to the 22nd, 2025 and they are Coal Mine’s first ever guest production.
Jake Planinc came to Mount Allison University from Ontario initially to play basketball. He had grown up attending theatre shows at Soulpepper, Stratford, and the Shaw Festival, saying that he was “very spoiled as a kid theatre-wise.” At first, though, he didn’t like the large-scale Shakespeare plays he was seeing, but when he was eleven he saw a production of Uncle Vanya at Soulpepper that ‘totally blew [his] socks off.’ “From that point on, from the age of twelve, I was like, ‘yeah, I like theatre. But I like Chekhov.’”
All through High School his interest in Chekhov remained, and he found works by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller that he liked too. He brought these interests to the theatre classes that he was taking at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, where he was able to do some short Chekhov plays and delve into a bit of Ibsen. In Glen Nichols’ Modern Canadian Drama class the first play he had to read was David French’s Leaving Home. “I was sort of a shitty student,” admits Planinc, “I’m twenty years old and I think I have it all figured out. I was like, ‘I don’t care about this stuff, I want to do Chekhov, I want to do Ibsen. Just get this stuff out of my way.’” Nichols took Planinc into his office and convinced him to give David French a chance. Planinc says that Nichols told him, “This is the same thing [as the] plays that you love. This is the Canadian version of that, and you’re not paying attention to it enough.” After Planinc finally took his advice he realized he was “absolutely right. I was immediately enamoured.” He started to do some research on the play and found the 2007 Soulpepper production directed by Ted Dykstra, which ran to critical acclaim in Toronto. Since his favourite theatre company had produced the play he thought, “maybe I should pay more attention to this.”
Planinc had the opportunity to direct Salt Water Moon with some friends from university, and the production played both at the Halifax Fringe in 2015 and at the Motyer-Fancy Theatre in Sackville, New Brunswick. But the idea of mounting Leaving Home still seemed a bit too ambitious until March of 2024 when Planinc’s Halifax-based theatre company, Matchstick Theatre, was finally able to realize his dreams when the play opened to great excitement and acclaim at Breaking Circus starring Shelley Thompson as Mary Mercer and Hugh Thompson as Jacob Mercer. Andrew Musselman will be playing Jacob in the Toronto production.
“It’s honestly a dream come true,” said Planinc during the run of the show, “I’m just trying to soak it up and not have it go away too quickly. It’s something that I’m really wanting to relish while I have the chance.”
He credits Glen Nichols with sharing his passion for Canadian Theatre and says that Matchstick Theatre was born out of that passion. Chelsea Dickie, the Managing Director of the Company, was in that same Modern Canadian Drama class and when they both found themselves in Halifax after graduation they connected here. Dickie brought Alex Mills into the mix. He is the company’s Financial Director. Their first show as Matchstick Theatre Company was Daniel MacIvor’s In on It in 2017. When they did Catherine Banks’ play Bone Cage in October of that same year it became apparent that the company could handle larger plays.
Planinc cites the Introduction to the published version of Leaving Home by Urjo Kareda, who worked as a theatre critic for the Toronto Star in the 1970s, who said that David French’s “style of realism is much more impressionistic than it is highly detailed because what he is really good at is careful selection of particular moments and objects, rather than overly detailing everything… We used that as a guiding principle for the designs. It’s like Chekhov’s gun rule, right? If it’s onstage it’s got to get used.”
They also used Christopher Pratt’s art as an inspiration, since like French, Pratt was also a Newfoundlander. He spent his early years as an artist travelling between Mount Allison University and the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. He was encouraged to paint by Lawren P. Harris and Alex Colville. As in Leaving Home, David French was born in Coley’s Point, Newfoundland, but his family relocated to Toronto when he was six where they lived amongst a community of Newfoundland ex-pats. Planinc mentions that even though the play is set in Toronto, and is a Torontonian play, having premiered at the Tarragon Theatre in 1972, for audiences in Halifax they tend to relate more to the concept of the unseen home left behind. Jacob and Mary have brought as much of their life in Newfoundland as they could to their new life in Toronto, whereas their young sons, played by Lou Campbell and Sam Vigneault, are more of a mixture of the two disparate cultures. Thus, it is apt that the play will be seen by audiences in Toronto as well.
Authenticity was important to Planinc for the play, especially in regards to the elements from Newfoundland. Sherry Smith worked with the actors on their Newfoundland accents, the recipe for the meal that the actors eat on stage is an authentic Newfoundland fish and potatoes recipe, and they sourced the real vinyls that are mentioned in the play. “Getting those things right was really important because I think they would have been important to David,” says Planinc, “It was one of those non-negotiable design elements: I want the real fish dish and I want the real records.”
Matchstick Theatre’s production of Leaving Home by David French plays at Coal Mine Theatre (2076 Danforth Avenue, Toronto) until June 22nd, 2025. For tickets please visit this website.
