Award-winning theatre artist helps people share their deepest secrets

As a Jewish kid growing up in Toronto, the award-winning theatre artist Tracey Erin Smith longed to be a rabbi. Or maybe an archeologist. Or a triple threat on the Broadway stage who can not only act, but also sing and dance.

The rabbi dream faded when a friend in rabbinical school warned her that teachers told first-year students: you can come in with whatever ideas you want, but you leave with ours.

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“As a creative person who prizes self-expression, it sounded a little wrong for me,” she says on a recent Sunday afternoon over Zoom from Yarmouth, N.S. She’s sipping what she calls her “crack,” an oat milk latte sprinkled with cinnamon that her partner, theatre director Sarah Garton Stanley, has just made for her. Well, maybe not sipping so much as savouring, as if she is noticing and appreciating every individual molecule. As if doing so is a sacred rite.

She does that with life, too. She notices what’s hidden. Smith cherishes every moment, even the hard ones. In publicity photographs, her open-mouthed smile radiates an infectious energy, as if, against all odds, she believes that the world can be a better place.

She’s done her part to make it so. Her life’s work is to encourage people to heal themselves by telling their untellable secrets on stage. Mainly, she does that through SOULO Theatre, a workshop process she created in 2002 when she was teaching at Toronto Metropolitan University and has since taken around the world. She calls her technique the place where exorcism and confession meet.

“Those are very old religious words, but the reason they’re still around is that sometimes for healing, the first step is up and out,” she says.

Faith runs like a river through her work. In her own first full length solo show, The Burning Bush, mounted in 2009, she plays the aspiring rabbi Barbara Baumawitz. The character is torn between, as Smith puts it, two seemingly antithetical temples: the pulpit and the strip joint.

Baumawitz is a terrific scholar with an awful bedside manner who flunks her rabbinical practicum at a seniors’ home after she delivers a workshop called “Death. Deal with It.” She winds up working at a strip club where she tells her fellow dancers the story of the Jews leaving slavery in Egypt and how it took many attempts. One of the dancers deadpans: “Oh yeah. I left Egypt, too. His name was Frank.”

“They get it,” Smith tells me. “One of the things these historic stories can teach us is, ‘How does it relate to your own experience? When have you been in bondage, either by your own mind or by someone else’s hand, and…what was it like for you to walk in the desert until you found the next Promised Land?”

Through her SOULO workshops, she helps participants find the narrative threads that weave through their lives. “Instead of studying the Bible, we learn from each other,” she says. “These are the stories that unlock different things in us when we listen to them.” Over the years, she’s encouraged hundreds of people to excavate their experiences and put them on stage.

Her success with SOULO led to the four-season hit Canadian television documentary series Drag Heals, which ran from 2018 to 2024 on Prime, Apple+ and OUTtv. As creator, host and dramaturg, she coached drag performers to turn their personal journeys into a stage show — on a deadline. She’s in talks with a producer in Greece about doing a version of the production there.

Smith also released her how to book, Flying SOULO: Your Story on Stage, in 2024.

But she never fully abandoned the idea of being a rabbi. Or her other professional dreams. She considers herself an archeologist of the soul or the psyche. She still writes and performs her own shows, complete with music and dance. And she gets to be the teacher — which is what “rabbi” means in Hebrew — who helps people grow.

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Alex Lean, an arts administrator in Toronto who is also a podcast host and writer, did two SOULO workshops with Smith in 2024. The experience helped free her from both shame and pain. “For so long, I have cut myself off from my creativity,” she says. “Tracey and her workshops have really helped me rekindle my joy for writing and performing and just being creative.”

All of which invites the question: what is Smith’s story? She pauses. Nurses the latte. “Wow. It’s rare that the tables are turned on me. And I appreciate it.”

Her story starts when she was six. Her father, a lawyer, was charged with fraud, to the tune of what today would be several million dollars. He ended up in jail. The RCMP arrived at the family home in Toronto’s wealthy Forest Hill neighbourhood and seized everything. Her mother was distraught.

“It felt like everyone in my family was floating on different icebergs — me, my sister, my mother, my father — and it was about survival, but survival alone.”

That feeling led to her need to create intimate spaces where people can tell the truth, be heard and commune with each other. She views the stories as a bridge from one soul to another. “I think my childhood has put me on an unchosen mission of helping people feel less alone,” she says.

In 2010, her father drowned by suicide in the Credit River in Ontario. Smith turned the experience into the solo show Snug Harbor and performed it at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2012. She structured it explicitly as a heroic quest, teaching each of the journey’s 13 phases as it was happening in the tale, from her early closeness with her father, through the ordeal of his suicide and how it transformed her. And then she stayed with the audience after every performance to answer questions. “I, God forbid, would never want to leave an audience worse off than when they arrived,” she says.

In fact, her real aim is to create theatre that will help heal not just the storyteller, but the audience, too. Each solo piece is its own hero’s quest. The second- last stage is to return home with hard-won wisdom to lift up your community. “So this whole schlep through your journey is not just for you. You heal so you can come back and help others.”

The final stage is the freedom to live. And then, purged and renewed, you find the courage to go off on another adventure.

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This article first appeared in Broadview’s Jan/Feb 2026 issue, titled ’A Bridge Between Souls.’

Alanna Mitchell is a journalist and author, and the creator of the solo show Sea Sick. She lives in Toronto.