✭✭✭✩✩

by Julia Lederer, directed by Allison Plamondon

Here For Now Theatre Company, Here For Now Theatre, Stratford

May 29–June 7, 2026

Grandma: “When you were born you were fated to sink”

Here For Now Theatre Company continues its 2026 season with the world premiere of I Am An Island by Julia Lederer. This is the second play by Lederer HFN has presented after With Love and a Major Organ (2013) in 2024. Like the earlier play I Am An Island is a quirky surrealist comedy. The cast and direction are excellent, but it is hard to escape the feeling that the play is simply a variation on Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961) except with a happy ending.

The central character of I Am An Island is May, who from her first line “We have to move” to the ending tries to convince everyone she knows that the time has come to leave the island where they were born for another island or for the mainland. The trouble is that the island is sinking. It is currently 12 miles in diameter. Everyone had agreed to leave when the size has shrunk to 15 miles. But now somehow no one cares and everyone, except May, goes about their business as if nothing were wrong.

To make people realize how precarious their situation has become, May stages a one-person protest against the blasé attitude of the islanders by standing in a hole into which she gradually sinks. May is particularly distressed that those closest to her pay no attention. Her twin sister Sandra buzzes with optimism and May’s fiancé still wants to marry her and sees no need to leave the island. May has to struggle to maintain her resolve because she is haunted by the ghost of her Grandma, who has only negative things to say. It’s also a challenge when April, a pregnant tourist, arrives after reading an article about “Places You Didn’t Know Existed”.

One aspect of the play troubled me from the beginning. Lederer’s concept is that the island is sinking, not that the ocean is rising. One might think that an inspiration for Lederer’s tale was the island nation of Tuvalu, which in an average of 6’7” above sea level. By 2050 half the atoll is predicted to be submerged by rising seas. The island has already negotiated a treaty with Australia to allow “climate refugees” from the island to move to Australia. Other island nations like the Maldives are still seeking a place for their populations to move.

Yet, despite real-world examples like this, Lederer’s nameless island is sinking and its residents are concerned not about rising water but a growing population whose weight will press the island lower. Lederer also views the island not as a mountain top, but as some sort of huge floating raft because at one point someone suggest that half the population could swim underneath the island and push it upwards for the benefit of the other half. The play is obviously a surrealist fantasy, but I do wonder why it has to be so fantastic when the situation in Tuvalu and the Maldives is real.

The likely reason Lederer wants to detach her story from real events is that the play is not a fable about global warming. Rather, it is the story of a ordinary, once happy islander who won’t sacrifice her reason for pleasure and thus becomes the local Cassandra of the island. A major problem with the play is that once May takes up her protest, the dialogue consists entirely of May saying, “We have to move” and Sandra and Ben saying, “We don’t want to move. Everything is fine”.

There are many absurdist plays in which a situation becomes progressively worse and where the protagonist’s warnings about the situation go unheeded. The best-known one is Rhinocéros (1959) by Eugène Ionesco where the people of a town one by one inexplicably turn into rhinoceroses. Another is Les Bâtisseurs d’empire (1959) by Boris Vian in which a family is chased by an unknown being up into smaller and smaller rooms in the tower they live in.

Visually, I Am An Island will remind frequently playgoers most of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961) in which Winnie, a voluble middle-aged woman, is buried sand up to her waist in Act 1 and up to her neck in Act 2. There is no need for an Act 3. In staging Lederer’s play, director Allison Plamondon does not have a trap door available, so to signify May progressive sinking, she has ingeniously placed May inside a series of hoops connected by blue-coloured cloth that May can raise every time she sinks a little more. This rising of the water around May is just like the rising of the sand around Winnie, except that May experiences the rising more gradually.

A key difference between May and Winnie is that Winnie remains positive despite her bizarre situation, whereas May becomes increasingly desperate. Also, May is in constant conversation with other people, while Winnie speaks nonstop to her unseen, and unresponsive husband Willie. While we think that May’s end will be similar to what we presume will be Winnie’s, Lederer steps in at the last minute to provide a completely improbable happy ending which does not deal in any serious way with the ordeal May has been coping with for the past 90 minutes. The unhappy ending we were expecting might not be as much fun as Lederer’s ending, but at least would critique the “Don’t worry, be happy” attitude of the frivolous islanders.

The primary source of pleasure in I Am An Island is the truly delightful performance of Siobhan O’Malley as May. O’Malley has a gift for portraying a young woman so innocent that she is continually amazed at the nonchalance of her own sister and the man she loves toward her and toward the reality she is trying to make them aware of. Few actors could portray this sense of continual surprise with so much conviction over so long a period.

As Sandra and Ben, Kelly Van der Burg and Nick Dolan are very funny in their gleefully wilful ignorance despite May’s recitation of facts to the contrary. It’s no surprise that the two eventually tire of May’s predictions which are so inconvenient for their rosy world view. It’s also no surprise that Ben’s favourite animal should be an ostrich.

Grandma and April are more problematic characters since it’s not entirely clear why they are in the play. Surely May has to cope with enough bad things without being haunted by her Grandma. Lederer uses the figure to provide background for May and Sandra and to give some explanation of why Grandma committed suicide. Barbara Gordon makes Grandma such a mordantly humorous character I wouldn’t want to lose her, but I’m not sure the character fits in well with the overall action.

Brianna Rodrigues is quite amusing as the defiantly superficial tourist April. I am not certain what the character contributes to the play except to give May, Sandra and Ben something to discuss other than May’s protest. What April’s presence seems to indicate is that mainlanders can be as wilfully ignorant as islanders.

Plamondon directs the play with so much élan that it helps displace any doubts about the repetitive nature of the dialogue and the unnecessariness of certain characters until the show is over. I would not have wanted to miss O’Malley’s wonderfully appealing performance, but I do hope that Here For How finds a more substantial platform for her talents as it did in 2020 with A Hundred Words for Snow.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Kelly Van der Burg as Sandra and Siobhan O’Malley as May; Siobhan O’Malley as May; Nick Dolan as Ben; Barbara Gordon as Grandma. © 2026 Ann Baggley.

For tickets visit: www.herefornowtheatre.com.