Some complicated and long-unfolding relationships can only be understood in retrospect. Others must actually be lived through again, moment by moment. In You, Always, the world-premiere play by Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Erin Shields now on stage at Canadian Stage, audiences are presented with such a relationship – a sisterhood – and challenged not to observe it from a distance, but to inhabit it.
Directed by Nightwood Theatre’s Artistic Director Andrea Donaldson, You, Always stars Maev Beaty and Liisa Repo-Martell as sisters Liz and Delia. When the two women receive life-altering news, they are propelled into a shared reckoning that spans their five decades of connection, moving across space and time to trace the emotional architecture of their relationship.
“The way I’ve been describing the play to people, without giving stuff away, is to say it’s 50 years of sisterhood in 85 minutes,” offers Repo-Martell. It’s “the experience of the lifetime of a relationship in a really short period of time, and I think Erin’s done a miraculous job essentializing that incredible, primary, fierce relationship.”
Theatrical “time travel”
Beaty emphasizes that the play is not structured as reflection, but as immersion. “As opposed to this being two people looking back on their relationship, we undergo the relationship,” she says. “There are 47 scenes in those 85 minutes, so it’s a very theatrical offering… a storyteller-driven piece that is dependent on the design team, the creative team, our director, and our playwright – but it’s squarely on our shoulders to move us through space to ‘time-travel’ us.”
Time, in You, Always, is both subject and structure. Scenes are arranged according to the associative logic of memory rather than strict chronology. “It uses a timeline, but not in a linear way,” Beaty explains. “Time is a crucial, essential part of the values of the piece. One of the things it’s looking at is the nature of time: how time expresses itself in lives lived, and how we think about how time moves through relationships.” Repo-Martell describes the crisis the sisters face as “the inciting incident, or the catapult for these different memories… different times in their lives that they are processing and figuring out how to make sense of the moment that they’re in.”
What makes You, Always “unique” within the playwright’s body of work is its intimacy. Shields is known primarily for radical adaptations that centre neglected female figures within classical texts, but ”this is more personal”, notes Beaty, before adding that “ Erin herself is one of four sisters.” This biographical truth runs unmistakably through the play. “There’s lots of Maev and Liisa in there, but there’s also Erin and her three beautiful sisters in there, too — and her daughters,” Beaty adds.
A decade-long shorthand
For Beaty and Repo-Martell, the emotional and temporal elasticity the play demands is grounded in a personal relationship they have forged over more than a decade, while watching one other age, change, and deepen as artists and as women.
“We first played sisters ten years ago in a very different context,” Beaty says, recalling their joint Stratford debuts as sisters Goneril and Regan in King Lear, while each was navigating early motherhood. “When we text each other and see each other, we are always calling each other ‘sister’. From the outset, she recalls, “there was such profound immediate trust between the two of us that we were able to help each other on stage and off… and that sealed the deal for good.”
They returned to that intimacy in Daniel MacIvor’s A Beautiful View, a two-hander requiring similar precision and vulnerability. “That was directed by Andrea Donaldson, who’s directing us in this,” Beaty notes. The continuum of shared artistic language and the rhythm of such returns matters: Beaty observes that their collaborations seem to arrive at roughly five-year intervals, and so each reflects a new stage of life and artistic maturity. What accumulates across that span is familiarity within the new, and trust sharpened by experience.
You, Always was developed through Canadian Stage’s New Work Development Program and shaped over several years. As Beaty recalls, “we had the privilege of workshopping the play twice before we started rehearsal,” and adds that from an early conversation, Shields made clear that “Liisa would play your sister.”
Their shared history allowed the actors to bypass the usual period of negotiation. “You don’t spend a week finding out who the other actor animal is,” Beaty smiles. “It means you can really go deep fast… you can build and build and build – right away.” Repo-Martell describes a near-symbiosis the two have evolved. “We’ve found out that we are even more alike than we thought we were,” she notes. “We are very, very similar actor creatures… sensitive to the same things and needing the same type of way of working it out.”
The result is a freedom rooted in long-earned trust. “It’s such a luxury to hit the ground running with somebody that you don’t have to censor yourself with, or tiptoe around…. It’s such an emotional and vulnerable journey, so to be able to do it with somebody that you really can fall into – and know that you’ll be caught – is really nice.”
Brutality, tenderness, and permission
If their shared history has deepened the work for this production, Beaty is clear that the play itself reaches beyond it. Beaty notes how sibling relationships allow for an emotional extremity that is rare elsewhere: “I think I can be harsher than I might be brave enough to be with another actress. And I can also be just bleeding and leaking in the more loving moments – because I don’t have to worry that she thinks I’m hurting her feelings.” It feels to both like they have “that permission siblings have to be so brutal with each other.”
Repo-Martell stresses that a parallel artistic trust underpins that abandon. “I am such a fan of Maev’s acting and her level of mastery,” she explains. “You’re always just receiving riches and riches. There’s this emotional trust, but there’s also this trust of being with an artist at the absolute top of their game.”
And together, these sister-actors understand the responsibility they owe to their audience. “We understand what it means to put an audience in faith,” nods Beaty. “To take them gently by the hand and lead them…. People sometimes say, ‘when I’m watching a show that Liisa’s in, I know I’m in good hands.’” Here, they’re in “mutual good hands.”
Humanity and humour, at scale
Unlike the mythic stakes of their first team-up in King Lear, You, Always is profoundly and recognizably human. “The events of the play are everyday … relatable, universal, quotidian events,” Beaty affirms. “They are things that anybody in our audience is going to recognize, or have experienced, or will experience.”
And that means the play is funny. “It’s Erin Shields, so there’s a lot of humour, which I love,” Beaty notes. The comedy arrives not as punchlines or release valves, but as part of the texture of lived experience…moments of absurdity embedded within intimacy, grief, and care. “I think part of maturing is those moments when you’re in the middle of something really hard — maybe you’re having an enormous fight with your spouse — and then something stupid and absurd happens, or someone says the wrong thing, or you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna need coffee if we’re gonna keep going at this rate.’ That absolutely relatable humour is so excellently carved in and carefully done – but hopefully should not even be noticed. The audience will just be rolling!”
Repo-Martell describes the end result as emotionally expansive. “Even though there are some brutal situations in the play, it is a loving and a warm bath – as well as bracing and harrowing at some times,” she says. “It’s also hilarious and cuddly, and also wrestling.” Stopping on the edge of a spoiler, she winks. “The other things are secret.”
A work of service
Late in our conversation, Beaty reflects on what it means to be performing this play in 2026. “I’m so grateful to be doing this play right now… this play created for, by, and with brilliant women who are also navigating the political reality, the world reality, the future for our kids,” she avows. “It feels like an important service. And it feels like medicine.”
And peering into the future, Beaty anticipates a long life for You, Always. “I have a good feeling that this play is going to be done a lot all over the world.”
You, Always is on stage at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre until February 22, 2026. Tickets are available at canadianstage.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
