“Let’s talk about SEX, baby .“
Ever eavesdropped on a therapy session where sex, trauma, and childhood wounds crack open like bones?
Welcome, Jaysuits, to an immersive, fly-on-the-wall, ITSAZOO production where the chairs maybe cheap but the stories aren’t, and YOU get to play a part in it…..
Us vancouverites seem to treat emotional vulnerability like an unmarked bike lane: theoretically good, but someone else’s problem. We’re the city that invented ‘quiet quitting’ our relationships while optimizing our sleep scores. Meeting IS the interrupt() function your emotional stack overflow needs (gotta let my DevOps side slip in once in awhile), and we know the script by now:
“I’m working on myself“
“Childhood was complicated”
“I have attachment issues”
“I’m in a season of healing”
Clinical, distant, like reading someone else’s file. We’ve mastered the art of folding our darkest hours into tidy metaphors. Well..none of that in here. No more safe distances. Just five bodies in a circle of folding chairs, breathing the same thick air. A confession cracks open. Someone flinches. And suddenly, you’re not just an observer anymore, you’re implicated.
This is Meeting‘s radical proposition; theatre as an involuntary mirror. Emerging playwright Katherine Gauthier – drawing on her psychology background and advocacy work (deets below) – has crafted what director Chelsea Haberlin calls “an exercise in extreme vulnerability.”, bringing five strangers into your personal space, quite literally;
‘Meeting’ will be performed in an actual community centre meeting room at the Chalmers Heritage Building (Pacific Theatre’s home), which regularly hosts events like Alcoholics Anonymous. Set, costumes and props will be hyperrealistic, with no theatrical sound or lighting design. Intimately-sized audiences of 45 people per performance will envelop the room as the action takes place mere inches away from them, creating a fly-on-the-wall experience. Seating will be in-the-round.
This connection builds a deeper empathy for the characters, forcing the audience beyond a passive, voyeuristic role into an experiential one; provoking them to consider their own moral response to the complex issues in front of them.
(Courtesy of Pacific Theatre)
The PACIFIC THEATRE’S’s intimate setting guarantees it (Chalmers activity room, will seat an audience of just about 40 people each night) for 75 real-time minutes of Co-Dependents and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.
Now let me give you a taste, right HERE, right NOW, of what this show will make you feel……ready?
Pedophilia
Notice how your body reacts when you read this. Did your shoulders tense? Did your breath stall? Did your fingers just hover over the back button?
When the lights come up in that activity room, notice what’ll happen: the way your breath changes when the space feels too small. The involuntary lean forward when confessions whisper. The moment your shoulders tense because someone just said the thing you weren’t ready to hear.
Your body knows before your mind does.
Pacific Theatre’s Kaitlin Williams notes, this is about “exposing and healing cycles of trauma” – and that fellow Jaysuits, starts with our physical responses to it. This isn’t speculative. It’s structural. The production has consulted psychologists Dr. James Cantor and Dr. Marla Buchanan to ensure the script’s accuracy. The space as we saw above, has been designed to remove theatrical distance.
It also uses a technique called “imaginative empathy“, which is when a person temporarily visualizes themselves in another’s shoes in order to gain insight into their lived experience.
Gauthier’s mission is clear: “Theatre can approach taboos through back doors.” Here, those doors open onto restorative justice, imaginative empathy, and the uncomfortable truth that banishing offenders might satisfy our anger but rarely heals our wounds. As Vancouverites who’ll drop $200 on a “trauma-informed” yoga retreat but bolt when vunerability starts breathing down our necks in real time, Meeting is our reckoning.
The Therapist of Discomfort
At the center sits playwright Katherine Gauthier, drawing on her psychology background and experience as a sexual abuse survivor advocate to craft what director Chelsea Haberlin calls
“A visceral, unflinching examination of group therapy.”
The Shaw Festival actor turned provocateur brings a rare trifecta to this production:
- Clinical Chops
Her UBC psychology studies under cognitive neuroscientist Todd Handy armed her with the language of neural pathways—how trauma etches itself into biology. Those late nights in Koerner Library poring over case studies is guaranteed to surface in the play’s merciless accuracy. - Frontline Advocacy
Volunteering as a drama therapist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), she witnessed what most Vancouver wellness gurus won’t admit: Healing isn’t Instagrammable. Her students taught her that recovery sounds like awkward silences, not affirmation cards. - Survivor’s Lens
As a sexual abuse survivor, she rejects cheap catharsis. “Restorative justice isn’t about forgiveness,” she insists. “It’s about staring at the wound until it stops flinching.” This fuels the play’s most radical proposition: What if the monster deserves oxygen too?
Her research was forensic; attending ACTUAL Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings, consulting with paraphilia experts like Dr. Cantor, and even wrestling with Chatelaine articles about “flexible” sexual health. The result? A script that treats addiction not as a morality play but as a series of neurological traps.
The Therapy Session Vancouver Didn’t Know It Needed
The play drops us into a raw group therapy session with five addicts: a sex addict, a love addict, a porn addict, a codependent, and a sexual anorexic. There’s the civil lawyer who can’t stop chasing emotional validation, the liquor store clerk who recoils from intimacy; characters so vividly drawn they’ll make you shift in your seat. When one member’s confession fractures the group’s fragile trust, Gauthier forces the central question:
“Can healing include those who’ve caused harm?“
“Theatre doesn’t need answers,” she says. “It needs the courage to live in the question.” In Meeting, that question is: How much humanity can we stomach seeing in the people who repulse us?
She’s crafted a script that forces us to confront the messy, unspoken questions about sexual health we usually relegate to late-night Google searches.
“What constitutes a love addict?”
Gauthier asks, skewering our cultural obsession with romantic grand gestures. “We celebrate the hopeless romantic, but when does ‘Run through the airport for love’ become pathological?”
And here’s a twist :
You don’t get to leave when the stories stop…
Yup. The lights stay up. The chairs stay circled. Because Meeting isn’t done with you yet. The play is just the first wave. The “Talk Forward” that follows, ensures you’re the ones under scrutiny when the lights come up. It is the emotional equivalent of being handed a mop to clean up the mess your reactions just made. Guest experts (once again, deets below), the kind who usually charge $250/hour—will be there to watch you fumble through what we Vancouverites excel at avoiding: sitting in the discomfort of someone else’s truth without reaching for our phones.
No intermission *ahem*. No buffer. Just the cold hard fact that for all our therapy-speak and wellness rituals, most of us have never actually sat in a room where pedophilia gets discussed without looking for an exit. Now you’re in that room. Now the exit’s locked. And that nervous system of yours? It’s about to become the most honest critic in the house.
The Cast: Vancouver’s Finest Emotional Gladiators
Hold on, let’s not forget about the performers! The cast reads like a who’s who of Vancouver theatre warriors, vancouverites who know exactly how far to push this city’s boundaries:
Sebastien Archibald (ITSAZOO’s Co-Artistic Producer) as Rob, he’s literally architecting your discomfort.
Kaitlin Williams (Pacific Theatre’s Artistic Director) playing Dawn by night (heh). Translation: she knows exactly which nerves to tap.
Marcus Youssef (Neworld Theatre’s former AD), Carmela Sison (Lasa Ng Imperyo) who recently appeared in the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival we recently experienced and Chris Lam (The Nether) rounding out a ensemble that has been handpicked to embody what Gauthier’s script identifies as “wildly disparate experiences with love, sex, and desire.”
The Safety Net (Because This Isn’t a Game)
Gauthier and Haberlin didn’t assemble this cast without armor:
Aryn Mott, Canada’s first certified Mental Health Coordinator for theatre and Intimacy Director to boot (accredited by SAG-AFTRA and UBCP/ACTRA), they brings an unprecedented level of professional rigor to this explosive content, designing the “trauma-informed practices” governing every touch and confession.
(ARE’in)
Their credentials form a protective lattice around the production:
- 500+ hours of specialized intimacy training
- 3,600+ hours of on-set experience across projects like FX/Hulu’s Shōgun as well as the pilot to the follow up of one of my favourite shows of all time, Suits L.A
- 18-year career spanning film, TV and theatre
- Current Master’s candidate in Counselling Psychology
Mott’s role is clinical in its precision:
- Trauma Protocols – Implemented the production’s mental health safeguards, including on-site first aid attendants at every performance
- Consent Choreography – Designed movement patterns for the cast’s most vulnerable scenes using their signature embodied approach
- Industry Advocacy – Through their work with ACTRA’s Mental Health & Accessibility Committee and Vancouver Film School instruction, they’re reshaping how Canadian theatre handles extreme material
The production materials emphasize Mott’s unique qualifications to navigate Meeting‘s explicit discussions of sexual abuse and pedophilia. Their dual expertise in mental health support and intimacy coordination creates a rare safety net – one that allowed Gauthier’s script to probe darkest taboos without exploiting performers or us Jaysuits.
As I mentioned earlier, UBC researchers are documenting the process to “better equip the broader Vancouver theatre community in creating safe spaces”—because even the aftermath is part of the experiment
Furthermore, On-site mental health attendants (hired via public posting, as you can see below) will patrol performances like emotional EMTs.
This is no theoretical exercise. Furthermore, Gauthier’s script has been vetted by a dream team of psychological heavyweights:
- Dr. James Cantor, North America’s leading expert on paraphilias, who shaped the play’s clinical spine
- Dr. Hillary McBride, who ensured the group therapy dynamics ring terrifyingly true
- Dr. Marla Buchanan, trauma specialist, who guided the actors’ embodiment of lived experience
Healing isn’t always a bubble bath. Sometimes it’s sitting in a church basement with five strangers, realizing the monster in the room might be your own reflection.
The Schedule That Traps You
May 14-June 7, with Wednesday/Thursday shows at 7:30pm, Friday/Saturday at 8pm, and weekend matinees at 2pm (no show May 18).
The runtime: 2 hours including a 15 minute Intermission – (yes, I lied earlier about there being no break, heh) because Pacific Theatre knows Vancouverites will bolt given half a chance.
🚨Ticket buyers get fair warning🚨:
“Contains explicit discussions about sex, sexual behaviour, childhood sexual abuse and trauma, and pedophilia.”
What the disclaimer doesn’t say?
The most triggering content might be your own reaction.
The door’s open. The circle’s waiting. You’ve never been so safe…or so exposed.
See you there Jaysuits
© 2025. Pacific Theatre
ITSAZOO Productions is a non-profit incorporated society and registered charity.