The act of starting over can be a raw, revelatory process of peeling back layers — of identity, self-doubt, and disconnection — to find something truer underneath.
We see — and feel, viscerally — this affirming transcendence in Amanda Wilkin’s award-winning play, Shedding a Skin, currently enjoying its Canadian premiere at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in association with Nightwood Theatre.
This one-woman show starring Vanessa Sears and directed by Cherissa Richards is an exquisitely acted, beautifully calibrated and highly affecting production. It is a stirring, funny meditation on the healing potential found in unexpected friendships. And in our digital world of disconnection and self-isolation, it is a powerful and poetic paean to the idea that connection is not just comfort, but necessity.
Sears is Myah, a young Black woman navigating the fallout of simultaneous personal and professional breakups. After calling out a tokenistic diversity photoshoot at her corporate job, she quits, breaks up with her boyfriend, and loses her flat. Untethered and alone, she finds herself renting a room from Mildred, a no-nonsense elderly Jamaican woman who is generationally and attitudinally the most improbable roommate. Through their burgeoning odd-couple relationship, Shedding a Skin deftly explores themes of identity, connection, resistance, and prejudice, while raising important questions about societal injustice.
That all might sound a bit heavy, but don’t get the wrong idea. Shedding a Skin is frequently hilarious, thanks to the relatability of Myah’s constantly running inner monologue, which externalizes and exaggerates her various foibles, fears and missteps. In this non-stop stream of candid personal vignettes, we come to understand how layered her struggles are . . . and while we frequently laugh, we also ache for her. Myah’s challenges are partly rooted in her mixed-race heritage: she feels hyper-aware of how few Black people she sees in her workplace or even across the street. They are also universal: feelings of precarity, of falling short of the expectations of others, of being alone in a city teeming with people, and of being so self-conscious in her skin that she wants only to disappear.
As Myah peels back the layers of her loneliness, she begins to discover that Mildred is more than the taciturn landlady Myah had believed her to be. Subtle moments during a slow walk through their neighbourhood — for example, seeing a neighbour’s son refer to Mildred as “Mum,” or hearing Mildred ask passersby after their children — reveal how deeply Mildred has woven her life into the fabric of the area. Through Myah finds a way back to herself, re-learning the value of community not as a vague and antiquated ideal, but as a vital and dynamic network of care and solidarity.
From the moment she takes the stage, Sears simply captivates. In her magnetic and deeply layered performance, she effortlessly embodies Myah’s raw vulnerability and her fierce but bruised independence, her apologetic awkwardness and self-doubt – and her tentative, difficult growth and eventual joy. And just as impressively, Sears brings Mildred to life continuously, as Myah narrates their many encounters and conversations. She slips effortlessly into Mildred’s Jamaican patois, body language and vocal inflections. And although we never see Mildred, Sears makes her a larger-than-life presence who stays with you after the show: with her welcome mat, laminated card of house rules, and her purse-lipped, squinty-eyed, arms-crossing, teeth-kissing omniscience.
Separating Myah’s personal vignettes are micro-interludes with other individuals or families in other locations. Each is anchored in visuals projected on screens across the top of the set, while a voiceover recounts different moments of attempted or actual connection among strangers miles away. These moments expand the play’s scope, posing alternate versions of Myah’s central question: whether to keep safely to oneself, or to take the risk to connect.
This is an extremely clever production, and its many elements perfectly reinforce these thematic currents. While maintaining the focus on Sears, Shawn Henry’s colorful lighting design and Cosette “Ettie” Pin’s subtle soundscape conjure Myah’s inner world, in order to amplify the private – for instance, the range of Myah’s emotional states – and the public, such as the bustle of her workplace, Mildred’s functional flat, or the din of the city.
Jung-Hye Kim’s dynamic set is like another character in the way that it evolves over the course of the play. As Myah begins to shed her protective layers and make an expanded place for herself in the world, Sears literally expands the representational space in which she is spinning her stories. Meanwhile, Laura Warren’s projections – which feature fragmentary photographs of the setting Myah is discussing – provide an elegant reflection of her persistent sense of disconnection and alienation. And at the show’s end, the dazzling transformation of the projection design – married with the final evolution of the physical space and the addition of new elemental forces – forms an exquisitely punctuated crescendo that wraps around the deeply moving, exquisitely acted culmination of Myah’s arc.
At its core, Shedding a Skin upholds small, everyday kindnesses and connections – and the necessity of shedding old layers that no longer serve us – as essential, ongoing and life-affirming acts of resistance. Wilkin’s script honours the awkwardness, the false starts, and the tentative joys of forming new bonds – especially between different generations, whose experiences might at first seem worlds apart. In Myah and Mildred’s unlikely and cheer-worthy friendship – writ large by Sears, Richards and this amazing production team in this enthralling, synaesthetic production – the play reminds us that sometimes the most urgent and radical thing we can do is to stay open to others and to ourselves.
Shedding a Skin, a Nightwood Theatre production in association with Buddies in Bad Times, runs until May 4, 2025. No measure of praise could be too much for this production. Run, don’t walk to see it. Reserve tickets here.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2025
