There are people who don’t wait for a space to be created for them — they create it themselves. Lilia Skliar — a poet, director, and the founder of the theater project “The Wonderful Cat”— is one of them. She was born in Birobidzhan, a place where “Yiddish flowed like birdsong in the mornings,” where names like Binyamin, Golda, and Itzik were heard in cramped communal apartments, and where childhood was both a small world and an entire universe.
Her journey is one of multiple migrations, changes of countries, professions, and languages: journalism, Israel, Canada. And each time — an attempt to begin again. But what she truly creates is not just performances, but an environment — a place where people who have lost their footing come: new immigrants, artists, poets, those who never planned this life — and suddenly find themselves there. “When that opportunity doesn’t exist — I don’t wait. I create it myself.”
“The Wonderful Cat” began in a small café, with 20 tickets at $10 each and the idea of staging a performance. Thirty people showed up — some stood outside in the rain, watching through the windows. That’s how something real begins. Today, it is a theater, a laboratory, a meeting space where poetry, dramaturgy, and human lives intersect — where performances are born, and sometimes… love is born too.
But this conversation is not only about theater. It is about memory, about a language that is fading, about a childhood that never quite lets go: “There is no escaping this… the voice of childhood follows close behind me.” It is also about the time we live in — about a war that cannot be ignored, and about the attempt to transform pain into art. Lilia Skliar was among the first in Toronto to stage a charity performance about the war in Ukraine, with proceeds going to support those in need — because for her, theater is not an escape from reality, but a way of confronting it.
Watch the new episode of Hour of Interview with Gregory Antimony — a conversation about theater, freedom, memory, and about how a person can create meaning even when everything around them is falling apart.
Part 1:
Part 2:
