TFS Acting Students Bring ‘The Weight of Small Things’ to the Stage
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Toronto Film School’s fifth-term Acting for Film, TV and Theatre students will take the stage at the TFS Studio Theatre next week in The Weight of Small Things, an original production devised and directed by Rosanna Saracino.
Set over the course of several nights – or perhaps even years – in a New York diner, the 75-minute play follows strangers whose lives briefly intersect as they come and go, each carrying a life no one else can see. Their stories briefly intersect in moments of loneliness, connection, humour, hope and loss – ordinary encounters that might otherwise go unnoticed.
As time blurs, the question becomes not what these people will become, but whether we can slow down long enough to see who they are right now. The Weight of Small Things is a quiet portrait of the lives happening just outside the frame, and the small moments that remind us that an ordinary life is never an unimportant one.
That idea was at the heart of the production from its earliest stages. In her director’s note, Saracino writes that she has “always been interested in the lives that happen just outside the frame” – the people we pass without knowing, the person sitting alone at the next table, or the person carrying something we will never see.
The Weight of Small Things began with a simple question: “What if we slowed down enough to really see them?”
As the cast developed the production, Saracino says she watched the students “listen to one another, take risks, make discoveries, and find humanity in people who could easily be reduced to a stereotype.”
“We have built this world together – not to explain these people, but to see them,” she writes.
For the cast, the production has also become an opportunity to remember their classmate and fellow cast member, Alphonse Henderson, who passed away during rehearsals.
Henderson came to TFS after a full career in the military to pursue a long-held dream of becoming an actor. Saracino remembered him as one of the kindest people at the school, describing him as “dedicated, curious, generous and deeply passionate about the work.”
He approached acting with “an extraordinary combination of discipline and wonder,” she wrote, and brought that same commitment to rehearsals. In The Weight of Small Things, she said, he was doing some of the loveliest work she had seen from him.
“There was a depth and ease to his presence, and his work was so charming – it moved the whole room in every rehearsal,” she wrote. “He was fully there. He was exactly where he wanted to be.”
Alphonse’s passing has been deeply felt by his classmates and colleagues. In her tribute, Saracino said that one way to honour him is to remember “how he was here: with purpose, with curiosity, with kindness, and with the courage to begin again.”
“He reminded us that it is never too late to pursue the thing that calls you,” she said. “And he reminded us, without ever needing to say it, that what we bring to one another along the way may be just as important as the dream itself.”
The production will be dedicated to Alphonse’s memory as his classmates take the stage next week.
The Weight of Small Things, which is stage managed by Kaitlyn Doucher and associate produced by Emery Nguyen, will take to the stage at the TFS Studio Theatre, 120 Bloor St. E., for a four-performance run as follows:
- Wednesday, September 16 at 7:30 p.m.
- Thursday, September 17 at 7:30 p.m.
- Friday, September 18 at 2 p.m.
- Friday, September 18 at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets are free and available to reserve on Eventbrite HERE!
The Creative Team Behind The Weight of Small Things
Kiera Arasim as Athena
Arman Bhutta as Tim
Cody Cassell as the Cop
Tristan Cullihall as Fick
Lily Cyr as Darlene
Tatianna Durdle as Ann
Malcolm Enefe as Daniel
Zachary Gauthier as Frank
Emilio Velasco as Ernesto
Isaiah Jobin as Tig
Jax Kortis Perkins as Franny
Keenan McKenna as John
Frank McMahan as Joe
Thao Thach as Bonnie
Kayla Wiggins as Judy
