REVIEW: One-on-one play considers the hidden meanings behind ghost stories

iPhoto caption: Shira Leuchter in ‘The Haunting’ at Tarragon’s Greenhouse Festival in 2024. Photo by Matt Hertendy.

Shira Leuchter welcomes me into a Kensington Market storefront flush with objects: empty jars of jam, vintage lamps, a miniature wooden house. The theatre artist says the space, at 88 Nassau Street, used to host a consignment shop, and long ago a bakery; soon, it’ll be a community acupuncture studio. But for the month of April, it’s something beautifully improbable: the venue for a solo show with an audience capacity of one.

The Haunting — an UnSpun Theatre production, unsurprisingly sold out — begins with Leuchter’s memories of growing up during the 1990s, in a suburban Ontario house where her family often sensed a ghost’s presence. This autobiographical foundation serves as a jumping-off point for Leuchter’s broader reflections on haunting. Drawing on existing scholarship by Avery F. Gordon and Christina Sharpe, her just-under-an-hour script argues that ghost stories are manifestations of histories we’re scared to confront.

Leuchter navigates the one-on-one dynamic with great care. A pre-show email clarifies that audiences are welcome to speak as much as they’d like, and that she’s happy to accommodate a wide range of accessibility needs. Soon after I arrived, she quipped that performing the production was like hanging out with people all day — a fun notion, and accurate to the laid-back vibe that followed.

The show’s structure dials up the intimacy gradually. At first, Leuchter told me to sit at a desk, in front of an encyclopedia. Narration about her childhood played via voiceover while her physical self reenacted putting on makeup. Here, the show felt almost installation-like: it was up to me to consider how the book’s open entry on dogs related to the story, and then to pick up a toy phone, through which I listened to Leuchter interview her father about the house’s ghost. A mirror across the room reflected video design (by Chris Hanratty), offering a nostalgia-tinged rendering of Leuchter’s dreams and fading memories.

Leuchter then had me lay on a narrow bed. She monologued live, but a slideshow on the ceiling defused any pressure to return her gaze. Images of spiritualist paintings from the mid-to-late-1800s accompanied information about the movement, in which artists — usually women — based their brushstrokes on impulses from the beyond. She also discussed visiting the allegedly haunted former house of insulin co-creator Frederick Banting. Only in the piece’s final minutes, after Leuchter had built up trust and comfort, was there a scene I would qualify as unfolding between the two of us in a manner requiring genuine reciprocation.

Overall, I found The Haunting a gentle experience. Part of this stems from my own positioning as a viewer. Though it was my first one-on-one show, I’m acclimatized to audience participation, so the format didn’t inspire much awkwardness in me, as it might for less frequent theatre-goers. And because I’ve not yet gone through great personal loss, the invitation to engage with my own ghosts was interesting rather than emotional. These factors, combined with the production’s research-forward quality, resulted in The Haunting feeling less like attending a seance and more like flipping through the encyclopedia of a self. Which lines up with Leuchter’s fond memories of knowledge travelling at a more human speed: “The only way to find out about things you didn’t know was to find the right person to ask or to find the right book, so getting to know something was a slower, more linear event,” she says of growing up in the 1990s.

Yet even gentle pressure can leave an imprint. The script is in some ways straightforward, but it was highly memorable to have Leuchter deliver it directly to me, with generous warmth. And despite the often easygoing tone, Leuchter occasionally invokes high-stakes material, connecting her thesis — that ghosts are the residue of violent erasure — to colonial Canadian myth-making, as well as to Zionism.

What I keep returning to is the logistical unlikeliness of The Haunting in a city where the cost of making art continues to rise, in a neighbourhood home to the spirits of storefront theatres past. While Leuchter underlines that we’re often scared to look at our ghosts, the show’s unconventional form seems to expose another reason behind contemporary society’s aversion to spiritual confrontation: We’re short on space, time, and paint.

The Haunting runs at 88 Nassau Street until April 29. More information is available here.

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