Erin Shields has built a career on finding silenced voices in canonical texts, and moving them to centre stage. From the left-behind queens of Ransacking Troy to the brutalized women of If We Were Birds to the stifled daughters of Queen Goneril, the Governor General’s Award-winning playwright locates the gaps in foundational stories—the figures reduced to footnotes, the perspectives history has chosen not to record—and pries them wide open. With Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, now receiving its world premiere at Crow’s Theatre, she turns her incisive gaze toward one of the most foundational texts of all: the Bible.
The genesis for this play was a textual oddity: the disproportionate number of women in the New Testament who share the same name. Four different Marys appear at crucial moments—at the manger, at the cross, at the tomb—yet their individual identities blur and merge across the four Gospels. It’s as if scribes Matthew, Mark, Luke and John couldn’t quite be bothered to distinguish them.
Shields saw this as an opportunity. “These were women who were the backbone of a movement,” she notes. They “witnessed executions, defied authority, and stayed when others fled.” The result of her excavation and elaboration of their stories is nothing less than a fifth Gospel. Call it the Gospel of Mary(s), and under Ellen McDougall’s formally adventurous direction, it’s lyrical, mesmerizing, revelatory—and demanding.
The Gospels already tell Christ’s story four different ways, and scholars have spent centuries parsing the differences. So disentangling the four different Marys who appear in them makes a kind of structural, as well as feminist, sense. As the show begins, we meet them, clad in designer Moi Tran’s tongue-in-cheek wardrobe of bright red tracksuits emblazoned with the name “Mary”.
Here is the wounded, wistful and devoted Mary, Mother of Jesus (a moving Michelle Monteith). Here are the fierce, self-sacrificing Mary Magdalene (a galvanizing Sabryn Rock) and the mature, resourceful Mary Salome, who is the mother of Apostles James and John (a wonderfully plaintive and assertive Nancy Palk). And finally, here is the worshipful, watchful Mary of Bethany (a wide-eyed Belinda Corpuz). The performances are uniformly strong and mutually reinforcing. The four are at once one—completing each other’s sentences, speaking like a kind of chorus—and distinct individuals, with each articulating her particular pain and fear, and giving voice to her specific place in this new Gospel.
The fifth figure is Amaka Umeh’s blue-tracksuited “Not Mary” (yes, that’s the label on the suit). A scene-stealing chameleonic whirlwind, they cover every male role (shepherds, wise men, Herod, and so on) with gusto and razor-sharp comic timing. But the binary isn’t as clean as the colour scheme suggests: Umeh also plays Salome, a figure who herself seems to conflate two different biblical women, one of whom is Nancy Palk’s Mary Salome. The boundaries between Mary and Not Mary are perhaps as porous as the boundaries between the four Marys themselves…
Moi Tran’s four-sided set—consisting of seemingly random steps and stone blocks, interspersed with small piles of rocks —allows the Marys to climb and circle continuously, addressing the audience members on all four sides. They pull out puzzle pieces from drawers beneath the steps, to represent domestic tasks like meal preparation for the disciples. Christian Horoszczak’s lighting shifts to mark the prosaic, the intimate, and the sacred. Olivia Wheeler’s sound design and Esie Mensah’s choreography pulse beneath this hyper-lyrical text.
It’s a wild and wondrous experience, but also a demanding one—and those unfamiliar with the New Testament will find themselves at sea. Mary, Mary Mary, Mary organizes itself around scripture’s greatest hits of the manger, the temple, the loaves and fishes, Lazarus, Gethsemane, and Golgotha. And it shows us how the formative, substantive and largely unknown contributions of these Marys shaped these events. It’s rooted in scripture, but embodied—-physically, psychically, and even sexually—-in these figures who are normally little more than wallpaper.
Even the biblically literate have their hands full here, but the rewards are substantial. Shields’ Marys rebuke original sin and “feminine guiles.” They assert themselves as “consequential beings—not just facilitators of change”— and they show us why. Palm Sunday happens only because they provide the palms. Lazarus rises through their touch. They are the engine, the source, the fuel for the movement.
“This isn’t a story about him,” one Mary ultimately states, shifting the focus from Christ and his simple teachings to the mass of humanity struggling to reconcile their complex realities. And that feels to me like the radical argument of this new gospel: Christ’s redemption of humanity is ultimately female and other-focused: shaped by and with these Marys, who each undergo their own unmaking and re-making at the crucifixion—not into saviors, but into their individual characters as mourner, preserver, gardener, or advocate.
Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary is demanding, dense and—if you can stay with it—deeply rewarding theatre. And it’s an event that does what Shields does best: give voice to those history quieted—and in doing so, make us hear a foundational story anew.
The Gospels have been retold for more than two thousand years. It’s remarkable that it took this long for someone to notice all those Marys waiting to speak.
Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary runs at Crows Theatre through May 3, 2026. Tickets are available at crowstheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
