Julius Chapple, Janet Hurley & Kris Law, Cassidy Sadler in Circle Mirror Transformation | Photos by Marco Novaes
First off, Douglas Tiller’s impressive set is the most convincing I’ve seen in Alumnae Theatre’s Studio space. The institutional white walls with that dismally faux-quirky maroon strip, parquet flooring, cube shelves and bulletin board—it all serves up such mundane, quintessential community centre realness. It’s thrilling when companies with relatively modest resources succeed so thoroughly at ambitious realism.
The tactile authenticity of the space is key in that it provides a sturdy platform for the people inhabiting it to be as thoroughly convincing. I really did love these characters! Annie Baker’s comedic drama about an adult acting class at a community centre in small-town Vermont is an understated, hilarious and heartfelt piece about vulnerability and the messy beauty of human connection. Alumnae Theatre Company’s production of Circle Mirror Transformation is a solid rendering, teeming with nuance and emotional truth.
The title refers to an acting game where participants stand in a circle to collectively imitate and transform a theatrical gesture of sound and movement. It’s one of many rather goofy exercises that Marty (Janet Hurley), an acting teacher, leads her ragtag students through. Are they ridiculous? Yes. Absolutely. But Baker isn’t poking fun at theatre games or the people playing them. Foolish as they seem, this is just what they’re like. And here’s the thing: taken as a whole, in this story, ultimately, they work!
Baker has given this an episodic, elliptical structure. Over the six weeks of this acting class, broken up into sweet, funny and tense vignettes, we learn about these characters as they, in turn, discover each other. There is awkwardness and camaraderie and romance and heartbreak and introspection. We piece these people together through an array of brief interactions, in the margins of their dialogue, filtered through the performative barrier of these acting games.
For instance, each participant is required to deliver an auto-biographical monologue as someone else in the group. As they process the information they’ve been given, and imagine what their subject’s internal life might be, their own attitudes towards them rise to the surface. It’s genuinely beautiful, as are the many human truths and interpersonal dynamics that emerge as these games evolve.
And who are these people? There’s the aforementioned Marty, a new-age hipster sort, whom Hurley portrays with steadfast warmth and maternal charisma; her haphazardly dutiful and willing husband, James (Kris Law in an adorably clumsy, aw shucks mode); Shultz (Julius Chapple, with an endearingly self-conscious masculine energy), a recently divorced and still aching carpenter; Theresa, a former actress with an exuberant and infectious enthusiasm, played by Cassidy Sadler with a palpable, radiant gusto; and finally, there’s Lauren, the youngest here, and the hardest to get to know because she’s so aloof. Violet Brown conveys such hilarious, unspoken opinions about this whole situation, we get her even before we fully understand her deal.
Director Lori Delorme doesn’t impose upon the text any contrived artiness. She knows the characters are interesting enough on their own terms and that the story demands an earnest theatrical vernacular. There are two exceptions. In a series of interstitial sequences, the characters engage in a counting exercise meant to ground them as group. Though these scenes are quite real, Delorme and lighting designer, Connor Price-Kelleher, place them in a sort of liminal space that intensifies their meditative quality. The final moment too, a whimsical and bittersweet bit of shared imaginative invention, gets some heightened theatrical punctuation.
Shout out to Andrew Honor’s sound design which, during scene transitions, creates a vivid atmosphere for this community centre with an ambient soundscape of other classes. And Fabiana Mercurio’s subtly evocative costumes, which capture each characters’s distinct aura. I was especially fond of the looks she’s devised for Marty and James, giving us a sense of their shared eccentricity, ideology and the earthy, spiritualist aesthetic that bonds them.
This is fine production which centres our emotional connection to these people—a carefully fostered, cumulative investment.
Circle Mirror Transformation
March 11 to 22, 2026
Alumnae Theatre, Studio
(70 Berkeley Street)
2 hours, 30 minutes (including intermission)
Violet Brown, Cassidy Sadler & Janet Hurley in Circle Mirror Transformation | Photos by Marco Novaes