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by Erin Shields, directed by Andrea Donaldson

Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley Street, Toronto

February 4–22, 2026

Liz: “You always do this. You always make me feel responsible”.

The adverb always is a temporal paradox. It insists on duration while quietly undoing chronology, holding time in suspension. As director Andrea Donaldson observes in her Director’s Note, “In the sentient world, there is no always”. The closest approximation is continuous accumulation. Erin Shields’s You Always unfolds inside this contradiction.

Produced by Canadian Stage and directed by Donaldson, the play, now receiving its world premiere, turns to one of the most complex forms of intimacy, one shaped by forced proximity and the accumulation of unrequested coexistence: the sibling bond. A sibling is an almost-self and, at the same time, a profound other, someone encountered by accident of birth, whose presence is involuntary, who may share the same formative wounds while extracting radically different meanings from them.

To navigate this terrain, Shields composes the script as a mosaic of memory. The play moves back and forth through time, following two sisters — Liz (Maev Beaty), the older,  and Delia (Liisa Repo-Martell), the younger — across childhood, adulthood, and moments of crisis. Time resists chronology, taking shape instead through the juxtaposition of shared moments. As scenes recur and overlap, the relationship comes into sharper focus. Non-linear structures of this kind are familiar within postmodern theatre.

What distinguishes Shields’s writing, however, is the violence of its shifts in register. Unforgiving, near-cinematic cuts place emotional opposites side by side with calibrated exactness. Moments of exposure are abruptly curtailed, yielding to irony, play, or recollection. In one moment, the sisters are young adults attending their mother’s funeral; in the next, they are five years old, inventing a game to keep an imaginary wolf at bay. Emotional climaxes are never allowed to settle but are repeatedly blocked, producing an overloading of emotional peaks.

Such a deliberately chaotic, though never arbitrary, structure places significant demands on the performers. It requires constant and abrupt shifts in age, voice, physicality, and emotional temperature. Beaty and Repo-Martell meet these demands with remarkable precision. Both commit fully to each emotional register, without cushioning its impact. At moments of sharp transition, when grief or anger must abruptly give way to a lighter or even silly new frame, you can see them actively fighting themselves out of the previous moment, holding back tears as they step into a new tone. As a result, no scene stands alone: each carries the residue of what came before, reshaping its emotional charge from within.

This logic of accumulation extends into Donaldson’s direction, which operates along two temporal vectors: accumulation and annulment. On one hand, objects and spaces are continuously reassigned meaning as performers move through recollection. The central, altar-like table becomes a bed, a bench, a case; nothing settles into a single role. Space comes to function as an emotional archive, a sediment of overlapping use and meaning.

At the same time, the stage picture withdraws from chronology altogether. Wrapped in deep blue velvet that absorbs light and flecked with simple geometric forms such as ovals, rectangles and spheres, Ting-Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart’s design infuses the space with an ancestral, almost cosmic quality. This gives material form to the script’s insistence on suspended time, where death hovers as a structuring motif. The sisters’ mother dies suddenly of a heart attack; their father slips into cognitive decline; the elder sister faces cancer. Even childhood games are marked by imagined death, as the younger sister insists on incorporating it into play. Mortality is treated as a steady, inescapable pressure.

For the complexity of its writing, the poetic precision of its direction, and the emotional bareness of its performers, You Always is a deeply contemporary work that resists narrative comfort and clear readings. It leaves the audience uneasy, vulnerable, exposed — overwhelmed with accumulated emotion.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Liisa Repo-Martell as Delia and Maev Beaty as Liz; Maev Beaty as Liz and Liisa Repo-Martell as Delia; Maev Beaty as Liz and Liisa Repo-Martell as Delia. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.