Anita La Selva in 12 Litres 8800 Steps | Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh
I’ve been an aficionado of Anita La Selva’s work for over a decade now, am always curious to witness the artful devices she employs to pull new insights from text. And this directorial collaboration with Beatriz Pizano has an abundance of intriguing, emotive elements. 12 Litres 8800 Steps, presented by The Unbridled Theatre Collective and Aluna Theatre, however, falters in its persuasiveness. Assessing it critically feels somewhat discomfiting, though, since La Selva, who created and performs in it, is sharing her own traumatic story here.
The title is deceptively prosaic, suggesting precision and observational detachment. When the references are finally revealed, those measurements are psychically loaded, a representation of methodical tension release—through medical procedure and curative motion, respectively.
Enough with the cryptic preamble, let’s get straight to the crux of this heartfelt story.
La Selva has devised a lyrical meditation on her deteriorating mental health while caring for a partner suffering from alcohol addiction and the resulting hospitalization. The piece negotiates a tense space between the sobering, unfiltered realities of the situation and a fanciful, poetic expression of her state of mind. There is a lot of mundane repetition early on as she runs through an average day, minute-by-minute, seeing to the myriad tasks that define her existence.
There are auditions and directorial responsibilities and phone calls and TTC trips and food prep and visiting the hospital and touching base with doctors and nurses and then her partner and—don’t-forget-to pee (a biological imperative, now a point on the daily checklist). We go through this cycle, with minor changes, several times, the dose of sleeping pills she needs increasing with each passing day, and the psychological toll swelling.
This harrowing ordeal is broken up by flashbacks to her childhood and happier times with her partner, but the pivotal escape for her is a series of interactions with a horse. These fantastical episodes are, for the most part, wordless and whimsical. Brad Cook doesn’t go on all fours or anything quite so silly, he maintains an upright, expressive body language (shout out to Victoria Mata’s choreography) and some rather convincing equine noises. Especially astonishing is the intimate, sensual way her hair gets caught in his sudden, forceful exhalations. The headpiece designed by Monica Viani does some heavy lifting here too.
Later on, fantasy and reality blur a bit as we realize that this horse is sometimes a surreal manifestation of her partner. This device resonates, our imaginations mapping her partner’s dire situation onto this horse-man’s affectionate yet rambunctious, stubborn and defiant persona.
Though some of the more protracted moments fell a little flat, I can appreciate La Selva and Pizano’s commitment to a contemplative theatrical language. The textured soundscape built by Thomas Ryder Payne and Daniel Tessy adds significantly to specific moods and the overall emotive potency of the piece.
There are some very dreamy, evocative visuals projected onto the expanse of scrim at the back—one of the most psychedelic is a overhead close-up of La Selva’s face, morphed and filtered, which corresponds to the moments she lies down at the end of each taxing day, there on-stage, desperate for sleep. The perspective split is disorienting and quite vividly expresses a sense of delirious dissociation.
A prominent fixture of Trevor Schwellnus’ minimal scenic design is a suspended stretch of overhead plastic which catches the light in such a way that it spills onto the stage in eerie patterns, giving us the impression of being submerged in water.
Liquid and its receptacles are a distinctive motif here. The full extent of her partner’s addiction is conveyed through a clever sequence that involves glass bottles coming at her from all directions. These eventually feature in a drawn out, pensive scene in which La Selva slowly fills them—a lyrical re-enactment of a crucial medical procedure she takes upon herself in a moment of desperation.
All of this sounds very effective and it is… up to a certain point. While the thoughtful craft is consistently beautiful and the emotional weight of the situation is undeniable, my investment ebbed and flowed and sometimes dissipated entirely. Something about the execution falls short, though no single aspect is particularly responsible—a clunky bit of writing here, a stilted quality in the delivery there, an accumulation of minor theatrical blemishes that prevent this deeply personal account from fully captivating me.
12 Litres 8800 Steps
May 1 to 17, 2026
Factory Theatre, Mainspace
(125 Bathurst Street)
80 minutes
Anita La Selva & Brad Cook in 12 Litres 8800 Steps | Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh