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by Michael Ross Albert, directed by Cass Van Wyck

Leroy Street Theatre and One Four One Collective with The Assembly Theatre, The Assembly Theatre, 1479 Queen Street West, Toronto

March 22–April 2, 2026

Joy: “I wasn’t always poor, you know. I’ve not always rented my house to strangers”

There is a difference between running towards something and running away from something. The first is an act of insubordinate hope; the second, a symptom of diffuse and unanchored fear. Anywhere by Michael Ross Albert lingers on the latter, following two characters trapped in constrained lives and desperately searching for a way out.

This psychological thriller unfolds within a tightly controlled frame, governed by a strict unity of time and space: one hour, two characters, and an Airbnb apartment. The play follows Joy, the owner, and Liz, a guest on a work trip, as they circle each other after a night of heavy drinking, from which Liz woke up naked in her bed, with only fragmentary memories of what had happened. What begins as an uneasy confrontation about the previous night soon escalates into a head-to-head exchange that is by turns hysterical, sinister and unexpectedly philosophical.

Joy is an alcoholic single mother caring for a young son with cancer; Liz, marked by a past of excess, has tried to get her life back on track, only to find herself stuck in an unhappy marriage and an unfulfilling job. At first glance, it would seem obvious who would deserve our empathy most (or, “whose life sucks the most,” as Joy bluntly puts it), but Albert’s nuanced characterization produces a complicated reversal and an uneasy moral hierarchy. Joy is manipulative, even predatory; Liz, ostensibly the more privileged one, emerges as the victim. The play avoids didacticism, dwelling instead in ambiguity and layered perspectives. Sympathy shifts constantly, never settling.

First presented at the Toronto Fringe in 2018, the script confirms Albert – known for such plays as The Bidding War (2024), The Huns (2019) and Miss (2016) – as a playwright with a sharp instinct for tension. His characters are so densely constructed they can’t easily be understood, their motivations never entirely legible, keeping the audience in a state of pervasive, quietly unsettling anxiety reminiscent of a Black Mirror episode. Each moment of release is swiftly undercut by a new turn, making it impossible to predict where the play is heading.

In this production, director Cass Van Wyck employs the intriguing device of double-casting, with the two actors alternating roles across performances. On the night I attended, Kaitlin Race played Liz and Anne Van Leeuwen Joy. As Van Leeuwen noted in an informal post-show conversation, this choice stems from the idea that the two women share a similar background, diverging at a crucial moment in their lives: one pursued her descent into drug addiction, while the other attempted to get her life together.

It is difficult to imagine the roles reversed. Race renders Liz’s tightly controlled, anxious composure with remarkable precision, while Van Leeuwen moves with ease across Joy’s volatile emotional landscape. Their performances are both witty and sharply tuned, their rhythm almost impeccable. The intimate scale of the Assembly Theatre (less a conventional venue than a room temporarily configured for performance) intensifies a direct and almost confidential relationship with the audience.

At the centre of the set, on the dinner table, sits a chessboard, an ephemera of a game begun the previous night. It carries an obvious symbolic weight: a confrontation structured as strategy, a series of moves and countermoves, as Joy attempts to outmanoeuvre and ultimately blackmail Liz. But it also gestures towards something broader. Life, the play suggests, might appear as a sequence of choices. And, just like in chess, the decisive move may have been made long before you realize it. Across its psychological, social, and existential registers, Anywhere distils a more insidious form of displacement: the quiet obligation to endure a present already lost.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Kaitlin Race and Anne van Leeuwen; Anne van Leeuwen; Kaitlin Race. © 2026 Mark Kreder.

For tickets visit: www.theassemblytheatre.com.