In How to Feel, writer-director Solomon Goudsward turns his gaze toward a generation fluent in therapy language, yet still struggling to live well inside their own hearts. The result is a dramatic comedy that is ambitious in structure and sincere in its inquiry into contemporary emotional life. Goudsward directs his own script: a dual role that he acknowledges as precarious, but also generative.
Sam (Liam Armstrong) is a melancholic twenty-something whose world orbits around his best friends: his roommate Jamie (Cole Munden) and cousin Phoebe (Hope Goudsward); plus with his therapist Johnathan (Salman Akhtar). Together, they navigate the aftershocks of childhood trauma, romantic misfires, late capitalism, and the low-grade anxiety of an uncertain future. The play traces their attempts not simply to understand their feelings, but to act on them in ways that might lead to healthier relationships. The script grew out of Goudsward’s own attempts to make sense of fluctuating perception and feeling, something which lends the work a noticeably autobiographical undercurrent.
Goudsward structures the piece through short scenes with intervening time jumps that give the play the episodic feel of television. Scenes in succession comment on and refract one another – underscoring how memory, interpretation, and self-narration shape the stories we tell about ourselves and one another … and also how we’re not as unique or alone as we believe. Among the most compelling sequences is Phoebe’s therapy session, where her attempts at radical honesty are interspersed with scenes of Sam and Jamie talking and throwing a frisbee. Another memorable scene unfolds on the backstairs of the set, where Armstrong and Wiseman animate the TV show that a channel-surfing Phoebe is watching to escape.
Feelings are everywhere, all the time in How to Feel. So this is serious (and sometimes borderline precious) stuff, but it is gratifyingly leavened with substantial character-driven humour. And the winning ensemble rises to the play’s tonal shifts with assurance. Armstrong renders Sam’s introspection with earnest tenderness, while a natural Munden and more brittle Goudsward give Jamie and Phoebe distinct emotional textures. Miranda Wiseman rounds out the cast as Sam’s eventual girlfriend Vanessa, and Akhtar’s Johnathan stands out for resisting easy caricature and grounding the therapist role in warmth, steadiness, and subtle humour. His presence provides both structure and important emotional ballast.
In his program note, Goudsward suggests that art finds meaning only in relationship — an idea that echoes the play’s thesis. How to Feel proposes that millennials’ preoccupation with self-awareness can become either paralysis or possibility. Getting out of one’s head, or at least out of one’s own way, is the critical and necessary prerequisite for connection.
The play ends on an optimistic note, which offers a deserved moment to exhale. And with some trimming and tightening to help its many ideas cohere, this enterprising new Canadian work may find it is able to connect more broadly.
Sawdust Theatre Productions’ How to Feel runs until March 1, 2026 at the Annex Theatre. Tickets are available here. Keep up to date with Sawdust Theatre through their Instagram page.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
