Maev Beaty and Liisa Repo-Martell in You, Always | Photo by Dahlia Katz
While I appreciated these characters throughout, believed their world and truly adored the structure and attentiveness of playwright Erin Shields’ writing, You, Always, presented by Canadian Stage, took a rather long time to really work its magic on me. When it finally hit, though, the impact had quietly astonishing emotive force. These sisters’ idiosyncrasies and bond, developing naturalistically over time, are authentic and purposeful. Through stream-of-consciousness vignettes that jump back and forth across five decades of a sibling relationship, fragments of memory gradually form a portrait of enduring sisterhood.
For a large chuck of its runtime, however, I found myself a bit detached and underwhelmed. There is a sequence quite late in the game, though—as we are pulled into one of the sisters’ childhood fantasy scenarios, complete with playfully dramatic props and costumes—when everything suddenly clicked into place for me, including the abstract set (more on that later). From here to the end, the cumulative effect ramped up significantly and pulled me through to its perfectly bittersweet ending. In retrospect, the build-up should not have been anything other than so intimately mundane, understated and honest.
From their earliest moments, Liz (Maev Beaty) and Delia (Liisa Repo-Martell) have an affectionate alliance, though they must contend with contrasting approaches to life. Pragmatic Liz strives to anticipate the future and set her ducks in a row. Craving structure and maintaining it, she asserts herself as a lawyer, wife and mother. Despite the solid fabric of her life, it’s a struggle to keep the threads tight and Beaty, with warmth and humour, conveys the strain of sustaining that consistency.
From her youthful demand to always be a mermaid in every game they play, Delia’s persistent flights of fancy are her trademark. Creative and whimsical, she becomes a musician, but struggles with success there as well as in her intimate partnership with a collaborator and lover. Repo-Martell is so giddy and endearing, even Delia’s frustrating self-indulgence is rather lovable. It is undeniably painful, though, to witness her flighty maneuvering around Liz’s attempts to engage her in some sobering, urgent discussion—her poignant, final bit of self-defining and empowering practicality.
As Shields’ text launches these women from vignette to vignette, director Andrea Donaldson supports this lyrical vocabulary of snapshots by punctuating each leap with echoing gestures and body language. This gives the whole a continuity that makes it feel like an unbroken dynamic, a fraught conversation that exists across time. A very specific exchange that gets repeated again and again is a unifying device here, each time progressing a little further along, with a darkening tone and more fully understood context.
The buoyant narrative fleshes out their childhood, teenage years, early adulthood and middle age with naturalism and fluidity while also landing on some specific cultural moments whose resonance still feels fresh—the me too movement, the pandemic. It also touches on a variety of traumatic life circumstances—romantic infidelity, eating disorders, and, the big disturbance in their silly, heartfelt and combative trajectory: cancer. There is a limited timeline for them, making their relationship achingly precious.
I was initially bemused by Ting-Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart’s abstracted, plushy set: an expanse of dark grey fabric punctuated by distinctive forms—a bulbous mound and a repeated pill-shape occurring as a sunken outline and a raised platform. During that goofy and beautiful fantasy sequence that immerses us in their childhood role-play, the topography suddenly made sense to me as a versatile, suggestive landscape of familiar formations, echoing across their lives in a variety of functions. We experience this space, like children, as a set of prompts for imagination.
This was a slow burn yet consistently sincere and veracious, featuring fully embodied characters. Liz and Delia are lovingly rendered here and their journey is a reminder to acknowledge and appreciate the time you have with people you love. It’s a well-worn theme, but important enough to withstand steady repetition.
You, Always
January 31 to February 22, 2026
Berkeley Street Theatre
(26 Berkeley Street)
90 minutes (no intermission)
Maev Beaty and Liisa Repo-Martell in You, Always | Photo by Dahlia Katz