If you’ve read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” you’ll likely recall its narrator. A friend of the doomed protagonist Roderick Usher, he enters a crumbling mansion suspended in time. Its walls are cracked, and the inhabitants’ nerves are frayed to breaking.
For playwright Erin Shields, this narrative frame became “a portal into the audience relationship” in her newest play To a Flame, which receives its world premiere this month, staged jointly by four Toronto companies. The play transforms Poe’s Gothic classic into something he never contemplated: an analysis of the intersecting oppressions, refracted through patriarchy, performed in both American Sign Language (ASL) and English.
And the key that unlocked it for Shields was “thinking of the audience as this narrator coming in and viewing this house, that is very much like a character itself.”
The bones beneath the floorboards
Shields, of course, has built a career on reimagining canonical texts through a feminist lens. She memorably calls it “fan fiction”: a process of writing herself into something that she was excluded from. Her Governor General’s Award–winning If We Were Birds retold Ovid; Paradise Lost wrestled Milton to the ground; Queen Goneril talked back to Shakespeare; and Ransacking Troy excavated Homer and elaborated the interstices. And earlier this year, Toronto audiences encountered her deconstruction of the Bible’s New Testament in Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary and her radical reclamation of myth in Medusa.
Each of these works dismantles a different cornerstone of the Western canon. But To a Flame is “unique, in the sense that there had been one workshop with just actors and the director before I arrived,” Shields recalls. When she joined, the company was circling Poe’s story. As she participated in the first workshop, she had a surprising insight: though Madeline Usher, sister of protagonist Roderick, is spoken about and for, buried alive and never given a voice, “it’s not at all really about writing Madeline Usher’s story.”
It’s about the house.
“This house is archaic. It’s crumbling. It’s falling apart. And there’s a fissure. It’s a place on the brink of annihilation — and there is horror and terror in this house.” Within it, Shields has placed three daughters, each “collected” by a father figure from a different site of historical violence. One is a deaf woman taken from the asylum where 19th-century society disposed of those not able to hear. One is a Black woman plucked from a Southern plantation. The third is a girl rescued from a whorehouse, whose mother was a prostitute. Their supposed “deficiencies”—deafness, Blackness, sexuality—are precisely what the father seeks to correct.
“It’s really, in many ways, a metaphor for patriarchy,” Shields says. “We’re looking at these intersectionalities of oppression — of historic oppression — and all of the women that have gone before these women, and all the women that come after.” It’s a 19th-century story that also channels today’s dangerous “pendulum swing” from “a bit more justice and equity and understanding in the world” to a world of “strongmen who are willfully ignorant and hell bent on releasing prejudice back in the world, restoring and making it not shameful anymore to say and do awful things.”
Two languages: simultaneous understanding
Directed by Josette Bushell-Mingo, who spent 13 years as Artistic Director of the National Touring Swedish Deaf Theatre ensemble Tyst Teater, To a Flame stars Dawn Jani Birley, Nickeshia Garrick, and Juliana Monk, with cellist Beth Silver providing live music. The production is a co-creation between 1s1 Theatre (Birley’s company), Nightwood Theatre, Modern Times Stage Company, and Why Not Theatre.
It takes a village – with the collective resources and special skills associated with this kind of multi-company collaboration – to do such ambitious, accessible work. And it took 15 years to pull this one together.
The production’s most striking innovation is its bilingual staging. Birley, who is deaf, performs in ASL; her fellow actors sign extensively, as well. But this isn’t a play with interpretation simply tacked on. The goal, Shields explains, is “simultaneity of understanding. Because deaf people are often waiting for a translation, they’re often behind in a conversation.” To A Flame will rectify that imbalance: “if anything, deaf audiences will understand certain bits just a bit sooner than hearing people.”
The production deploys multiple strategies: scenes where one character signs while another speaks; projections showing signed translations on the upstage wall; and, crucially, a score that is designed to be felt, as much as heard. “There’s a lot of low bass sounds that vibrate, so people can feel it,” Shields explains. ” There’s cello as well, but the way we’re hearing it throughout the space is in a way that people are going to be able to feel the vibrations.”
Through the rehearsal process, the entire company, including Nightwood staff, has been taking daily ASL classes. During the first two hours of each rehearsal day, no one speaks. “It’s hard, and we’re not great at it,” Shields admits. “But you realize you can do more than you think you can.”
The experience of working on To a Flame has been continuously educational and deeply impactful: “My whole time working on this play, I have been learning a lot about audism, which is prejudice against deaf people, and deaf culture: what it means to be deaf, how much pride there is around that, how it’s not seen as a disability, and how when there are interpreters in the room, the interpreters are for the hearing people, not the deaf person – because if the hearing people would learn sign language, then we’d all be great.”
She’s excited – and confident about the work: “I think it’s going to be an eye-opening, illuminating experience for hearing audience members who have not had very much interaction with the deaf community.”
Shields’ modest “artistic proposal”
Working so consistently with canonical texts raises an obvious question. Shields takes pleasure in seeding “Easter Eggs” for those with “an intimate knowledge of the source texts.” She likens it to people who “are really into the Marvel Universe: it’s the same kind of experience that they might have when they see a film, and can say ‘Oh, that’s referencing the comic book.’”
So what about audiences who haven’t read Poe or Homer or Shakespeare? In 2026, aren’t they likely to outnumber the cognoscenti? Can they engage fully with her work? She’s thought about the question, and believes that unfamiliarity should not be a barrier. “First of all, I think everyone’s a little familiar with all of these things I’m working with, because they are in the communal subconscious, right? Everyone kind of knows a bit about Adam and Eve. Everyone knows a bit about the Christian God. You might know a couple of Marys” from the New Testament.”
If you assume only rudimentary familiarity, “you have to focus on story, and you have to focus on character” – with the goal of making the story and the experience accessible. Which leads to a related subject: some critics question the accessibility of some of her work, arguing that it prioritizes concepts over characters. Shields doesn’t read reviews, but she has heard the note. And she wonders if they are judging by the wrong measures: “I find it compelling and interesting when … a play is all about real stakes: people in the real world, with real characters, who you would recognize passing them on the street. But those plays are not what I am interested in creating.”
She eschews naturalism because “I honestly think other forms do it better than theatre does. For example, television and film do it way better. So I’d much rather play around with how we tell the story. That’s just as important as what the story is.” This may mean that “the language is really heightened. That Medusa is more like Greek theatre, where there’s a chorus in the back. … and that Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary offers a swirling collective argument when “some people were really insistent on tying it to – or had this desire that it would somehow – fulfil a promise of teaching everybody who each Mary was. That was never the goal.” With To a Flame, it means the bilingual staging, the three women (not one), and a theatrical experience without precedent.
Informing her approach is eight years that Shields spent in Quebec, immersed in a Francophone theatre that prioritized poetry and image over plot mechanics. She smiles broadly, “I really want to stretch what Toronto audiences can enter into as an artistic proposal because I do find, as a theatre culture, we are grounded in this proposition that the merit of a piece is on how clearly you understand who, what, where.”
She pauses. “To me, the things that happen are much less interesting than how these people are interacting with one another, with the cracks in their souls that you’re seeing—and how the movement makes you feel as an audience.”
What’s next: new rooms in new houses
Though it is Shields’ fourth premiere of a new play in 2026, To a Flame is not the last. Next, she heads to Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre for her re-envisioning of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, directed by Daryl Cloran.
Then in late November, Crow’s Theatre and Soulpepper present All’s Well, her stage adaptation of Mona Awad’s darkly comic novel about a Shakespeare scholar whose chronic pain becomes something stranger. Directed by Jackie Maxwell and starring Maev Beaty, the production marks “new and exciting” territory for her: adapting a contemporary woman writer. “There were different challenges, and different things I could bring to it,” Shields reflects, then smiles, “And I wasn’t looking for female characters that weren’t there!”
After All’s Well moves to Theatre Aquarius for a brief run in January, Shields finally gets “a lot more clear space” – which, if she’s honest, probably means “some more writing”. Another house whose floorboards need pulling up … or perhaps a new build.
But for now, the invitation to Toronto audiences stands. Welcome to the “horror and terror” of To A Flame’s crumbling house, built at the nexus of our omnipresent oppressions.
Please enter.
To a Flame runs September 22–October 4, 2026 at the Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre in Toronto. Previews September 22–23; opening night September 24. Tickets and information at nightwoodtheatre.net.
All’s Well runs November 24–December 27, 2026 at Crow’s Theatre (Guloien Theatre), then January 27–February 13, 2027 at Theatre Aquarius. Information at crowstheatre.com and theatreaquarius.org.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
