A particular kind of vertigo arises from choosing between two different futures. I’m not talking about a simple choice between two jobs, two universities, or two cities to live in. I mean deciding between two unique and opposed visions of what a life is for.
That vertigo is at the centre of Walden, Amy Berryman’s 2021 drama about twin sisters who are torn between saving a dying Earth and abandoning it for the stars. It’s also uncannily close to the experience of Emily Anne Corcoran, who spent the lead up to this season refusing to make easy decisions. Corcoran plays Stella, one of the twins, in Icarus Theatre’s Canadian premiere of Walden. She is also the props and costume designer for the production, which opens the company’s 2026-27 season at The Theatre Centre’s BMO Incubator.
Icarus, founded in 2022, has built its reputation on ambitious programming that makes audiences debate in the lobby afterward. Walden fits the pattern perfectly. Berryman’s play had its world premiere at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre in 2021, went on to a New York Times Critic’s Pick run at TheaterWorks Hartford the same year, and arrived off-Broadway at Second Stage in 2024 starring Emmy Rossum — a pedigree that makes Icarus’s Canadian premiere, directed by Erik Richards, a genuine event. The play imagines a near future of climate collapse that is just “a couple of generations away”, rather than the distant sci-fi horizon audiences might expect. Cassie (Charlotte Dennis, a 2025 Dora nominee for her performance in Coal Mine Theatre’s Job) returns from a year-long solo moon mission to find her estranged sister Stella living on an environmental reserve with her fiancé Bryan (played by 2026 Dora nominee Oshen Aoun).
Finding Walden
Corcoran was surprised when she found the play. “I’d been reading a string of scripts I wasn’t a big fan of,” she notes. “Some felt outdated in their values: kind of sexist, just things I wasn’t interested in. I was almost bad-faith going into Walden. I was done reading for the day, and just wanted to be finished. I got maybe ten pages in, took a break, and texted Anthony [Goncharov] and Erik [Richards]: ‘I found it!’”
“From the jump, I could tell this show was extraordinarily special, that it had something really important and poignant to say, and that it felt like the right fit for us as a company, and as people.” What she found was a script that tackles enormous ideas like climate catastrophe, grief, and the future of the species into what plays as an intimate family drama. She frames the play’s central provocation thus: “It’s not a play that says, ‘is climate change real, and how do we feel about it, or should we care about it?’ Instead, Walden throws us into a world where that’s no longer the question. What it asks is ‘how do we move forward as people when the world is dying around us?’.”
This question runs on two tracks in Walden: the geopolitical argument over whether humanity should fight for Earth or create a new home among the stars, and the more private argument between two sisters. “I love the idea of these two girls who almost feel like they’re living each other’s life,” Corcoran enthuses. “After a year apart, they come back together and get to see how different their lives have become. I think, in some ways, that if they could just swap lives, they’d really thrive. But instead, we watch them each learn to find new purpose in the lives that came for them.” Corcoran, notably, self-declares a lack of neutrality on the first question: “The more I read the script, the more staunchly Earth Advocate I become,” she admits, adding that she has come to see the play’s language around off-world settlement — “moon habitat” versus “moon colony” — as something close to an indictment: “You can put the word ‘habitat’ on it, but in reality, it is colonization.” This sharp reading gives the production real political spine, though it never tips it into polemic because Berryman builds the play so that every character’s position is legible — even the ones Corcoran has come to resist.
Designing and inhabiting Walden
As a designer, Corcoran has translated the play’s ethics into practice. Icarus is holding itself to “a new standard of sustainability on this show, because the play demands it,” and because by its nature, “theatre can be a bit of a wasteful endeavor”. She has furnished the stage largely from her own life: for example, by including mugs from her grandmother’s house in rural Newfoundland and a childhood throw blanket, rather than buying new. Her approach is rooted in an actor’s instinct for specificity: she fills the stage the way she’d want it filled if she were the one standing in it — right down to hand-creating a candy prop with a fully printed nutrition label that nobody in the audience will ever notice, and constructing an animal prop by hand from repurposed household materials: a tiny act of transformation that enacts the play’s own arguments about waste and renewal.
Corcoran’s connection to her character Stella runs deep. Raised in Paradise, Newfoundland, in an Irish family that she describes as fluent in “grin and bear it,” Corcoran recognized immediately in Stella a specific, inherited stoicism. She is someone who masks when she’s uncomfortable, scared, or hurting. She never wants to put her pain on other people, nor does she want to feel it herself. This description could double as commentary on the Thoreau text the play borrows its title from — a book whose author, unlike Stella and the other characters in the play, “had a great deal of choice” to pursue his famous retreat to the woods, while his mother back home continued doing his laundry. Inside the play, Walden is the book that the sisters’ father, who is a NASA hero, reads often: ”There’s almost a spirituality I think in their approach to science and purpose that feels really similar to the spirituality that Thoreau might have found in Walden Pond.” There’s also a decided increase in urgency.
Asked about the play’s cast and creative team, Corcoran is quick to shine the spotlight. Of Dennis, who plays her onstage sister Cassie, she gushes: “She’s this magnetic, incredible person. She has such a capacity for vulnerability and tenderness, and every day I get to act with her is like a gift.” Of Aoun, cast as Bryan, she beams, “He’s an incredible actor, relatively new to the city, and I can’t wait for him to just take over every stage in Toronto.” And she’s similarly warm about Richards, who directs the production and designed its set and sound. He “grew up near the Rocky Mountains,” she notes, “and I think you feel the mountains and the prairies and the forest in the way he talks about this show.”
Beyond Walden
Corcoran trained at the University of Alberta after cutting her teeth in Newfoundland’s film scene from age fifteen, and has since built a career that resists tidy categorization — it includes television credits alongside costume design, and ensemble acting alongside directing film and music videos. Walden asks her to deploy all of these talents at once, in service of a script that she describes, unprompted, as an all-time favourite. Lighting designer Sruthi Suresan, stage manager Cooper Hiebert and producer Anthony Goncharov round out the small, close-knit team that Corcoran credits for holding one other, and this play, to the highest of standards.
And Corcoran’s near future is one that will extend her talents into new areas. This November, she directs Icarus’s Toronto premiere of Liliana Padilla’s How to Defend Yourself, the Yale Drama Series winner that reached Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop in 2023. It is set in a college gym where a self-defense class, convened after a sexual assault, becomes a channel for a group of students’ rage, desire, and grief. Padilla dedicates the play to her seventeen-year-old self, and when Corcoran read it for the first time, the dedication made immediate sense to her. “If I had read this at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, it just would have sung the song of what I was feeling and dealing with at the time,” she explains. “It’s healing and hilarious and touching — just a really brilliant story.”
But before she goes there, there is wandering and wondering aplenty ahead, in the form of Walden. And the question Corcoran relentlessly circles back to is even more foundational than that of habitats versus colonies. It’s what we become when we no longer feel the ground beneath us. “I just don’t know who humans are,” she says, “if you remove them from the earth.”
Ponder this and other urgent questions for yourself at Walden, which runs September 10–26, 2026, at The Theatre Centre’s BMO Incubator, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto. Tickets are available at theatrecentre.org.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
