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by Erin Shields, directed by Ellen McDougall

Crow’s Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

April 15–May 3, 2026

The Virgin Mary: “Jerusalem, a city with a complicated past, which will surely lead to a complicated future”

There is a distinct density to Erin Shields’s writing. Its erratic, nonlinear movement constantly destabilizes meaning, infusing each line with an intellectually stimulating tension. Her characters often break into long, febrile asides in an attempt to analyze reality and wrest sense from words. Her new play, currently receiving its world premiere at Crow’s Theatre, is no exception. Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary continues a thread in Shields’s career devoted to feminist re-readings of classics and foundational texts from Paradise Lost (2018) to Ransacking Troy (2025).

Now turning to the New Testament, Shields retells the life of Jesus Christ through figures often relegated to the background in that text, namely, the women in his orbit. The tone is solemn and the rhythm almost liturgical. Four actresses, each named Mary (Belinda Corpuz, Michelle Monteith, Nancy Palk and Sabryn Rock), occupy an unstable space between character and chorus.

Shield’s play may be the first to gather these four Marys together, but it’s not the first to give the Virgin Mary a voice. In 2014 Irish author Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (staged by Soulpepper in 2016) gave us this Mary’s fully secular account of Jesus’s life and death.

In her Playwright’s Notes, Shields points to the curious profusion of Marys in the biblical text: “[S]o many that it’s difficult to distinguish one Mary from another”. Yet the production risks reproducing that very indistinction. At several points, the women echo one another in ways that blur their individuality. In the opening sequence, for instance, they collectively enact the birth of a child, recalling it through an asynchronous chorus that merges them into a shared condition of motherhood. A fifth presence disrupts this arrangement — Not-A-Mary (Amaka Umeh), a meta-theatrical figure, who shifts between outside commentator and supporting roles within the story. As both director-like provocateur and onstage participant, Umeh is magnetic, infusing each appearance (as the Archangel Gabriel, the Three Wise Men, Salome, and so on) with humour and wit.

As the play progresses, identities begin to settle into more defined figures: Mary the Virgin (Monteith); Mary Magdalene (Rock); Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus (Corpuz); and “the Other Mary”, mother of James and Joseph (Palk). Nevertheless, even in this retelling of the story, the characters are granted limited agency. This is evident in the scene in which Mary Magdalene is interviewed by Not-A-Mary and accused of being a prostitute. Even as Mary Magdalene attempts to reclaim her story, she is given little space in which to do so.

The production marks a significant transatlantic collaboration. London-based director Ellen McDougall proves adept at navigating the theatre-in-the-round configuration, shaping a space that fosters direct exchange with the audience. The actors frequently seek out spectators’ gaze, as if looking for confidants with whom to share their testimony. 

McDougall also introduces a number of effective devices that sharpen the play’s rhythm and immediacy, as when she equips Not-A-Mary with a handheld microphone or studio headphones, reflecting the mediated ways in which the stories of the Marys have been passed down through the centuries. A particularly striking image emerges in the kitchen scene. The women are ostensibly cooking for the men upstairs, Jesus and his followers, yet what they assemble is a puzzle. Passing pieces from hand to hand, they gradually reconstruct Leonardo’s Last Supper on the table.

If one interpretative lens does come into focus, it is the contemporary struggle of enforced passivity in the face of violence. This surfaces most clearly when Not-A-Mary, staging a film about Jesus’s life, directs the women to perform despair as they witness the flagellation.

Moi Tran’s set design is saturated with red, evoking blood. The floor and a series of steps of varying heights, faintly reminiscent of church pews and kneelers, are painted in the same hue. Similarly, the four Marys wear red prison-style jumpsuits, suggesting a shared condition of entrapment.

The Crow’s website claims that the four Marys “stood at the gates of revolution – only to be sidelined by history”. This hardly applies to the Virgin Mary. Has Shields never heard of Mariolatry? She certainly never mentions it in the play. If she had, she could have shown that, while Marian tradition and Mariolatry may have elevated the Virgin Mary to extraordinary prominence, they also confined her within an ideal she did not choose. Ironically, this imprisonment within someone else’s narrative is embodied in Not-A-Mary’s blue suit — the traditional colour of the Virgin is reassigned to the very custodian of the Madonna myth and the figure who determines how the other characters are framed.

For all its strengths in writing and performance, the play ultimately lacks a fresh, decisive perspective. It reopens biblical narratives through secondary figures in the Gospels but fails to pursue that premise in a genuinely transformative way.

But in a contemporary moment marked by widespread powerlessness in the face of injustice, theatre has the capacity to reframe reality and imagine alternatives. Here, that potential remains only partially realized. The play may give voice to women, but those voices still lack the agency to reframe the patriarchal narratives that have long confined them.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Belinda Corpuz as Mary of Bathany and Nancy Palk as the “Other Mary”; Nancy Palk as the “Other Mary”, Michelle Monteith as the Virgin Mary, Belinda Corpuz as Mary of Bethany and Sabryn Rock as Mary Magdalene; Amaka Umeh as Not-A-Mary. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.