He flies.
The real Jordan River Anderson, a Cree boy from Norway House Cree Nation born with complex medical needs, never left his hospital bed. For five years, while federal and provincial governments squabbled over who should pay for the home care he had been cleared for, he remained institutionalized. He died in 2005 without ever experiencing home. Two years later, the House of Commons unanimously adopted Jordan’s Principle: the child-first rule that governments must provide services immediately and settle jurisdictional disputes afterward.
Yvette Nolan’s Jordan, now at Young People’s Theatre in a Geordie Theatre production directed by Jimmy Blais, does something quietly radical. It doesn’t dramatize the sadness of Jordan’s story. It reimagines Jordan as a superhero who soars through space and time with his spirit-bear companion Maskwa, helping Indigenous children access the care they deserve. (The superhero, a natural aspirational fantasy for a hospital-bound child, carries its own fraught history of racism and marginalized creators building dreams for industries that exploited them. The resonance is, inadvertently perhaps, almost too apt.)
Braiden Houle’s Jordan is wide-eyed, giddy and guileless. From the moment he wakes at the play’s start, he is an eager learner drinking in every experience. “I can speak,” he marvels. “And I can be heard.” He asks illuminating questions (“What is ‘in care’?”), consolidates his growing understanding (“I am Jordan of Jordan’s Principle”) and—heartbreakingly—learns his own fate, which he accepts and celebrates for its legacy. Houle makes Jordan’s journey from confusion to comprehension to heroism feel achingly real and genuinely inspiring.
Maskwa, his spirit bear, is his effervescent companion and guide. She requests a different name, “Bear Witness” — a pun that names the goal of the play. Wahsontí:io Kirby is utterly delightful in the role. Infectiously exuberant, she channels a sense of wonder and voices deep appreciation for Jordan’s talents. Rachel Quintero Faia’s Maskwa headpiece is exquisite, giving Kirby an uncannily real presence as a living spirit companion. She inhabits it with irrepressible energy, guiding Jordan through what she calls a “Christmas Carol montage” of flights across time. Through them, he meets children like Tyra, Simon, and Kelly (played sensitively by Ravyn R. Bekh), who each face their own impossible choice between getting help and staying with their families; and one of the adults doggedly pursuing legal cases to turn Jordan’s Principle into family-saving reality (a nurturing, righteous Krystle Pedersen, who also plays Jordan’s mother). At key moments, Maskwa cedes the stage and lapses into frozen silence—just a teddy bear off to the side—while Jordan speaks with these figures from past and future.
Amy Kieth’s set captures the play’s dual nature beautifully: tall, angular birch trees stretch upward, with filing cabinets at their bases rendered in the same black-on-white. The natural world and our unnatural bureaucratic history — the soaring and the institutional — exist on a single continuum, which Jordan’s story straddles. Tim Rodrigues’s lighting and potatoCakes_digital’s video design, which project backdrops for Jordan and Maskwa’s flights, transform this simple space into something genuinely magical.
The play necessarily simplifies Jordan’s Principle for its young audience to “No child should be denied services because of who they are or where they live.” But it never talks down to them. Nolan trusts children with difficult truths, then gives them something luminous: a vision of agency, acceptance, and self-worth that the real world denied Jordan, but that his legacy now makes possible for others.
The ending is both devastating and uplifting. Jordan reunites with his mother. Maskwa dances—sweetly, and whole-bodied. And we are left to bear witness ourselves: to a life that institutional failures cut short, to a meaningful step in our painfully slow path of Reconciliation — and to the heroic story which this play gives back to “Jordan, of Jordan’s Principle.”
He flies. And so, for 55 magical minutes, do we.
Jordan runs at Young People’s Theatre (165 Front Street East, Toronto) through October 23, 2026. Tickets are available at youngpeoplestheatre.org.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
