OUR COMPANY MANDATE
Back Burner Productions is dedicated to enriching communities creatively and culturally through the presentation of shows which it personally develops.

OUR GOALS
Our goal is to develop and produce original Canadian plays and collective creations that will be presented locally and internationally. It is also our goal to run a program entitled the In House Theatre to help stimulate and develop other theatre practitioners and companies by providing a place for them to present their works.

HOW BACK BURNER COOKS
Any good recipe needs ingredients and instructions on how to make it. Our recipe at Back Burner Productions for great theatre is to take ideas, cook them over the flame of passion for theatre and serve it up hot and tasty for the public.
Our offices, rehearsal hall, and workshop theatre operate primarily out of our home and allow for us in our early stages of development to cut production costs, focus on the work at hand, and provide us with the time to thoroughly establish ourselves as a competent and serious theatre company.
A good chef uses the right blend of herbs and spices to get just the right taste, but always switches them up to keep the food he creates fresh and exciting. Here at Back Burner we feel the same way. The ideas for our shows, like spices, come in a wide variety. No idea is too small or strange, time is always the factor for creating a complete work. To date Back Burner has completed two professional workshops, KD and the Bomb and Let’s Talk About Beds, both widely diverse in subjects and thematically worlds apart. Yet each show carried with it Back Burner’s collective spirit, drive to craft and advance the material, and the distinct and rewarding taste of success. Communication and community are also essential to Back Burner’s recipe. These two elements provide us with the heat to bring our creations to life. Only through open waves of communication and the dedication of people both directly and indirectly involved in our projects are we able to operate and continue to operate as successfully as we do.

BACK BURNER’S HISTORY
Back Burner Productions originated in the winter of 2004, when four students in York University’s Creative Ensemble program created a short piece based on the futurism movement, dressed in garish clothing and showering in the contents of two dozen Kraft Dinner boxes. When this nugget of a production was selected for the Toronto Fringe Festival of 2005, a company name was needed, and Back Burner was born. The name Back Burner was chosen based on the reference to stovetop pasta, and also our philosophy of taking ideas that we usually keep on the back burner of our minds and bringing them into the limelight. From the beginning, low production costs were a necessity, as the company consisted of four university students with OSAP loans who still had another year before graduation. (Our logo was a photograph of a hot stove element in the dark.) In spite of financial constraints, Back Burner expanded the original ten minute spectacle into an hour-long fiesta of violence, fear and pasta called KD and the Bomb, hailed by Toronto Sun as a hidden gem of the fringe.
The experience of developing and launching this show was the Rosetta stone for what Back Burner’s In House Theatre would take as its purpose: creating an environment in which the artistic potential of original theatrical creations could be showcased to their fullest extent, without the use of coffer-draining production values.