Do You Mind If I Sit Here?

A bold new work from award-winning playwrights James Long and Marcus Youssef

Thirty years from now, three social planners visit Vancouver's Russian Hall, long abandoned due to earthquakes and flooding, with a seemingly straightforward task: repurpose the hall for common use. But the trio soon discover the project won't be an easy fix. An eccentric squatter, armed with a trove of Soviet industrial films on 16 mm stock, has made the damaged hall their home ... and they're not leaving.

James Long and Marcus Youssef's multimedia play Do you mind if I sit here? dares us seriously to consider the possibilities of radical transformation and to imagine a future born from our most important beliefs, fears, and hopes.

Cast of 3 actors of any gender

Marcus Youssef is based on unceded Coast Salish Territory, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada. His fifteen or so plays have been produced in multiple languages in scores of theatres in twenty countries across North America, Europe, and Asia, from Seattle to New York to Reykjavik, London, Venice, Hong Kong, Vienna, Athens, Frankfurt, and Berlin. Talon has published his Adrift, Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, Ali and Ali, Jabber, King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties, Winners and Losers, and the forthcoming The In-Between.

James Long is a director, actor, writer, and teacher whose creative practice occurs in a wide variety of interdisciplinary and collaborative contexts, including as a founding artistic director of Theatre Replacement (2003-2022) and as an independent artist working in live performance, community-engaged practice, and public art. He was co-awarded with Maiko Yamamoto the 2019 Siminovitch Prize, and nominated with Marcus Youssef for a Governor General's Award for Theatre for Winners and Losers (published by Talonbooks).