George F. Walker has long held a singular, unruly perch in Canadian theatre. Prodigiously prolific, he is the poet of urban panic, the satirist of systems that grind ordinary people down, and the playwright whose rapid‑fire dialogue ricochets between bleakness and belly laughs.
With Syndrome, commissioned by Theatre Direct as his first work explicitly for young audiences, he points that whiplash gift at adolescence’s collision with adult chaos. “What’s going on in our world? Try to figure that out. Then try to explain it to our youth,” Walker has said of the project. And this is exactly what he does—with bracing candour and empathy.
The experience is visceral and raw. The storefront Assembly Theatre is by nature one of Toronto’s snugger venues. Add two extra rows of Dream in High Park‑style floor cushions at the lip, fill the darkened playing area with debris, and blast near‑deafening rock music from the house open, and you’ve got a claustrophobia special. And when the show begins, the play’s premise only intensifies this feeling. Student Kyle has trashed a high school art classroom. Ami, a social worker, has been sent in (effectively locked in) to get to the bottom of things and make him clean it up.
It feels like we’ve been locked in — made complicit in the excavation.
Tony Perpuse’s twitchy, angry Kyle is electric: a pinball of oppositional energy hurling himself off walls, weaponizing words, and letting flickers of shame and need leak through. Sarah McVie’s Ami is the counterweight: pragmatic and insistent, but also empathetic and exhausted. She is trying to understand what he’s done and why. Madeleine Brown as Kyle’s friend Jenny is the third force: sharp, self-protecting and increasingly frayed — and crucially, she and Kyle talk past one another as much as they connect.
Under Lisa Marie DiLiberto’s taut direction, these characters’ movements map the classroom’s fraught geography. The show’s “cold open” punches hard, and the staging makes maximal use of minimal confines, with Kyle’s wall‑work especially evocative. Amanda Wong’s set and prop design is a triumph of dramaturgical mess. The trashed classroom looks and feels lived‑in and violated. Its chaos is smartly distributed to enable the labor (and the meaning) of incremental restoration.
The “syndrome” of the play’s title is discussed explicitly during the show. It’s a diagnosis attached to Kyle that may or may not be a real thing, and may or may not explain his rampage. But it’s also clear that the larger syndrome at play is societal, and is not limited to Kyle or to “our youth”. It is formed from two related and exponentially compounding challenges: the paralytic difficulty of accessing truth in a fog of misinformation, and our inability to engage with one another on human terms about the big things that really matter, like family trauma, poverty, the environment, sex, and pornography. The pandemic’s aftershocks mingle with older forces here, and the room feels haunted by both.
Walker notably sidesteps the omnipresence of phones and their feeds, which are perhaps the greatest contributors to these twin challenges. But he nails the linguistic “gotcha” games we play instead of connecting: about verboten words like “crazy,” about concepts like “objectification”, about labels and swearing — and about catching one another in apparent lies. He shows how if we can listen just for a moment — be curious, rather than quibble — we will often discover that the substance beneath is not a lie. It’s need, and need is prime opportunity to connect.
Syndrome is a tough game of verbal pinball and physical ricochets that doesn’t solve its big questions. But by the end, in the transformation of the setting and the way these three bodies share space, a hardscrabble Breakfast Club‑like optimism peeks through. It feels like a win—not because anything is fixed, but because the crucible has forced the characters (and us) to begin the hard work of seeking out truth and engaging one another, human to human, in the slow, communal medicine of picking up what’s been smashed—together.
Syndrome runs at The Assembly Theatre through March 15, 2026. Tickets are available at theatredirect.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
