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by Amy Berryman, directed by Erik Richards

Icarus Theatre, The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto

September 10–26, 2026

Bryan: “It’s not about living in the past. It’s about working towards the future”

Wine flows throughout Icarus Theatre’s Walden. Corks are popped and bottles emptied, the glug of liquid joining Erik Richards’s soundscape of distant birds and crickets. In the not-too-distant future imagined by American playwright Amy Berryman, humans are already living and working on the moon while Earth is buckling under dwindling resources and tsunamis. Yet in the isolated mountain cabin where the play unfolds, the air is still clean enough to breathe.

Here, wine can be an anaesthetic. The show opens with Stella (Emily Anne Corcoran) getting drunk while scrolling through apocalyptic news on her phone. But it can also signal conviviality: a prized bottle is uncorked for the arrival of Cassie (Charlotte Dennis), Stella’s twin sister, who has returned to Earth to visit Stella and her fiancé, Bryan (Oshen Aoun). Friction arrives with her.

Bryan is an Earth Advocate committed to tending a dying planet. Cassie embodies much of what he opposes. She is a scientist who has devoted her career to finding somewhere else for humanity to live, even coaxing vegetables from barren lunar soil rather than trying to mitigate Earth’s degradation. For roughly an hour, the Theatre Centre’s BMO Incubator becomes a battleground for competing visions of the future: Bryan wants to save the planet; Cassie wants to save humanity; Stella mostly wants to keep drinking.

The script conjures an intriguing just-around-the-corner dystopia of printed food, cloning, lunar travel and plans to settle Mars. But its three central characters can shift so abruptly in their convictions and desires that their ambiguity sometimes feels like a lack of dramatic grounding.

It is never quite clear what animates Stella’s choices. Does she embrace Bryan’s environmentalism out of conviction or as a way of filling the void left by the scientific career she abandoned? Or is it simply out of a need for something to believe in? Whenever tensions thicken, her whole body recoils, she shuts down, pulls away or simply walks out. Corcoran’s shoulders creep towards her ears as anxiety overtakes her, but we never quite understand what Stella is afraid of.

Dennis, on the other hand, gives Cassie the stiff bearing of someone accustomed to almost military discipline — fitting, perhaps, for a NASA astronaut. She speaks bluntly about Earth having crossed its PNR (Point of No Return) and repeatedly clashes with Bryan. Yet, her allegiances can pivot brusquely, including towards the very man whose worldview she has spent much of the play attacking. So much for sisterly solidarity.

Bryan has an almost self-righteous ease of conviction. Aoun plays him loose-shouldered, smile at the ready. In practice, however, his environmentalism seems to amount mostly to modest, piecemeal gestures — avoiding screens and tending plants around the cabin.

Beyond its near-future frame, Berryman’s script from 2021, nominated for the John Gassner Award for an Outstanding New Play, offers a compelling depiction of the sibling bond. Cassie and Stella’s long-awaited reunion begins in a wonderfully frenetic clip. Their rapid-fire banter turns the exchange into a verbal ping-pong match with Bryan caught in the middle swivelling his head from sister to sister as he tries to keep up.

But beneath that easy rhythm lies the weight of years spent apart. The twins once shared a fascination with science and space, encouraged by a father who read them Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), an account of living at one with nature. Stella has since left science behind, turned her back on her old life and retreated to a cabin in the middle of nowhere. “Who have you become?” Cassie eventually asks, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. Still, Berryman’s characters too often spell out their thoughts, fears and objections, leaving little room for implication or subtext.

Richards’s direction sometimes compounds that tendency. The cast is talented, and all three performers navigate the script’s sharp emotional shifts with commitment. But emotions flow almost as freely as the wine. Corcoran, for example, is entirely credible in conveying Stella’s anxiety, but in the first half pushes some passages into such a breathless rush that she can seem to be racing towards the end of her lines. Too often, feeling is pushed so insistently to the surface that the underlying tension has little room to develop. Greater restraint might have made the production more affecting.

This inclination to push emotion rather than trust it to accumulate also recalls something I noticed in Icarus’s Julie last season. Still, the indie company is worth keeping an eye on. Founded in 2022, Icarus Theatre is now embarking on its second consecutive three-show season, with Walden followed by Liliana Padilla’s How to Defend Yourself (November at the Theatre Centre) and Catherine-Anne Toupin’s Mob (February at VideoCabaret). Perhaps, like the wine poured throughout the evening, the company’s work simply needs a little more room to breathe before it fully mellows.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photo: Emily Anne Corcoran as Stella and Charlotte Dennis as Cassie; Emily Anne Corcoran as Stella and Oshen Aoun as Bryan; Charlotte Dennis as Cassie. © 2026 Sandro Pehar. 

For tickets visit: theatrecentre.org.