The advertising for Andrew Moodie’s Toronto the Good asks, “Can theatre create change in a community?” Yet the idea of theatre as social therapy makes director Phil Akin bristle.

“I hate that question,” says Akin, who first directed Toronto the Good last year in a workshop production at Factory’s CrossCurrents Festival. “I don’t look at it that way myself. As director, if I lay that on [the play] with the actors and the artists, then it becomes dialectic. It can really slip into preaching-to-the-converted moralistic bullshit.”

With situations and locales inspired by the city’s recent real-life encounters with gun violence, Toronto the Good examines the racial politics that emerge when a female police officer pulls over a black man and finds him in possession of a gun. A white lawyer defends the man; a black Crown Attorney is in charge of clearing the officer.

Colour-blind casting is a non-starter — each character’s ethnicity plays a part in his or her motivations and outlook. Akin is more interested in drama and character than “smouldering social issues,” so he was relieved when he saw that, in this version, Moodie had replaced most of the original script’s proscriptions with questions and nuance.

“That was where the script got into trouble, when it gave solutions,” says Akin. “You have to constantly remind everybody that these are human beings. These are not mouthpieces talking. That’s the trick.”

So when the actors start yelling, Akin yells back.

“I yell a lot. I say things like, ‘We lost the actual intellectual understanding in this scene underneath a lot of shouting,’” he says. “Discussion is great. Argument is not great because in argument, nobody listens. It’s so easy to go for the stridency but you don’t want to rely on that.”

Despite Akin’s qualms about preaching to the converted, he embraces the use of other media to draw in audiences and create context. Moodie’s own website for the play (torontothegood.wordpress.com) includes a discussion board, descriptions of the characters and even a full early-draft version of the script. On the blog Akin writes for Obsidian Theatre (obsidiantheatre.blogspot.com), where he’s artistic director, he’s more than happy to talk about his directorial process. Recounting his “state of artistic frenzy” during rehearsals is aimed at opening things up, rather than driving them to a pre-ordained conclusion.

“I want to provide information that’s relevant but not tedious,” says Akin. “Because if theatre’s not about passion, what is it about?”