Some of the Toronto Fringe Festival’s most affecting work this year explores what we owe each other and what burdens we carry when someone is gone, leaving, or never arrives.
These shows move through grief, migration, mortality, and estrangement, using dark comedy, devised movement, verbatim testimony, and myth to navigate complexity rather than resolve it.
ABOVE THE HOSPITAL
Soulpepper’s Weyni Mengesha Theatre | Midtwenties Productions | Written and directed by Beau Han Bridge
The premise: In a cramped apartment above a Vancouver vet clinic, a group of broke young artists gather for a casual pregame before a Death Cab for Cutie concert. At the centre is Lauren, an aspiring filmmaker pivoting toward nursing while quietly carrying the news that her estranged mother has just passed via Medical Assistance in Dying.
Why we’re intrigued: Setting a MAID-related grief story against the backdrop of a low-stakes pre-game is a striking tonal choice, and the play’s interest in what we owe our parents and partners extends the question of consent into emotional as well as physical territory.
OUTSIDE THESE WALLS, EVERYONE IS SLEEPING
Soulpepper’s Weyni Mengesha Theatre | Brave City Productions | Director & Choreographer: Kaiya Saravanja-Thomson, Gaia Micciancio
The premise: A devised movement piece following a woman navigating the emotional aftermath of a codependent breakup, told through physical theatre, original projection design, and an atmospheric score structured around the cyclical phases of the moon.
Why we’re intrigued: Building the piece’s structure around lunar phases rather than conventional narrative beats suggests a genuine interest in form matching feeling… codependency as something cyclical rather than a single rupture.
NOSTOS
Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre | Written and directed by Mohammad Yaghoubi | Nowadays Theatre
The premise: Two dogs and an android bear witness to the relationship between two sisters running a dog-sitting business out of their Toronto home, as they navigate love, sex, politics, and revolution. Inspired by Iranian Canadian playwright Mohammad Yaghoubi’s experiences within Toronto’s Iranian community during the aftermath of the January 2026 uprising, the dark comedy honours those who risked their lives and the diaspora who worked to amplify their voices.
Why we’re intrigued: Filtering a very current, very real political upheaval through the domestic strangeness of dogs, an android, and a dog-sitting business is a genuinely unusual formal choice, and one that promises to hold grief and satire in the same breath.
DEAD LUCKY
Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre | A Life Where Productions | Written by Greg Sadler | Directed by Cassidy Sadler
The premise: After a heart attack and near-death experience, Andrew is forced to confront the relationships and regrets that have shaped his life, finding unlikely companions in Wendy, whose heart has taken its own beating, and Bobby, whose compulsive clowning has survived a triple bypass. Based on playwright Greg Sadler’s own experiences, with his daughter Cassidy Sadler directing.
Why we’re intrigued: A father-daughter creative team working from the father’s own brush with mortality gives this dramedy a layer of real stakes behind the stage ones, and the pairing of a heart attack with clowning promises tonal range rather than easy sentiment.
COLD MAPLE CLOTH: THE FAREWELL TOUR OF A DELUSIONAL DIVA
Soulpepper’s Kevin and Roger Garland Cabaret | Luckiest Productions | Created by Sydney Page
The premise: Twenty-seven-year-old failing actress Sydney Page takes her final bow, mourning the career she never had before resigning herself to a “boring, normal person job” — until a surprise visitor from her past complicates the plan. Page, a musical theatre graduate, turned a real crisis of faith after an injury and a string of poor auditions into this meta, satirical, semi-autobiographical musical.
Why we’re intrigued: There’s a sharp premise buried in the joke of the title: a performer building an entire show around the specific, unglamorous grief of a career that never took off, rather than the one that did.
Soulpepper’s Kevin and Roger Garland Cabaret | Roar in the Woods Theatre Company
The premise: A public library becomes a pressure cooker of lives in transition when a self-published writer refuses to stay on the margins and reads her story aloud, uninvited. A rule-bound librarian begins to question her path, and a group of strangers is pulled into a story they didn’t ask to hear.
Why we’re intrigued: Positioning the public library as a space of quiet resistance against rising isolation is a timely and specific setting, grounded in something real about how those spaces actually function in the city right now.
A MOMENT FOR FRAYED NERVES
Theatre Passe Muraille | Written by Kevin Wong and Alysa Pires | Co-directed by Rielle Braid
The premise: An experimental new musical immersing audiences in emotionally linked vignettes inspired by Ghibli cooking scenes, lo-fi study mixes, warm baths, and the quest for existential meaning, this is a love letter to how confounding, infuriating, hilarious, and heartening modern life can be all at once.
Why we’re intrigued: Naming Ghibli cooking scenes and lo-fi study mixes as direct influences is an unusually candid way of signalling a show’s emotional register, and the vignette structure suggests a mosaic approach to anxiety rather than a single narrative arc.
THE WOUNDS OF LOVE AND OTHER GIFTS
Theatre Passe Muraille | Written by Bruce Dow | Produced by Olivia Daniels, the Artist in Residence Collective, and The Alliance for Canadian Musicals
The premise: Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales, theatre veteran Bruce Dow’s new work of music theatre draws on Wilde and his contemporaries to explore love, sacrifice, and meaning. Shaped by Dow’s own work in psychotherapy, the piece approaches Wilde’s fables not as moral lessons but as intimate, complex human dilemmas.
Why we’re intrigued: Reworking Wilde’s fables (originally written for his two sons) through a psychotherapeutic lens, rather than a nostalgic one, promises a more searching take on stories usually treated as tidy morality tales or simple children’s stories.
A CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF
B Street Arts Hub, Mirvish Rehearsal Hall | Michael Sachter Projects
The premise: Four actors portray 98 characters across multiple vignettes drawing on 800 verbatim writings and conversations, originally gathered at an interactive art installation at Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and Toronto City Hall Rotunda. The piece touches on pivotal life moments, mental health, and wellness, with a reflection space available throughout for anyone who needs to step out.
Why we’re intrigued: Building a performance entirely from real, anonymously shared verbatim testimony is a significant undertaking, and the show’s care in providing a reflection space suggests a production that takes its own material seriously. Content note: This show touches on suicidality, chronic illness, death, and sexual assault.
THE VINE THAT WITHERS
Factory Theatre | Purple Penguin, in partnership with Arabic Theatre Company | Written by May Tartoussy | Directed by Zain Ahmed with Assistant Director Hani Yakan
The premise: Inside an intimate Toronto café, two immigrant Arab women try to build stability in a city where starting over never really ends. As survival, ambition, and identity collide, small compromises begin to feel necessary, then normal, then unavoidable. Written by Toronto-based playwright May Tartoussy, the play grew out of conversations with immigrant women in her own community about dignity and the moral grey areas people enter when pressure builds.
Why we’re intrigued: Tartoussy’s grounding in real community conversations gives this two-hander a specificity that’s hard to fake, and the slow, accumulating nature of the compromises at its centre promises a more honest arc than a single dramatic turning point.
LITTLE ONE
Puppy Sphere, Burroughs Building | Leroy Street Theatre and Dresser Drawer Productions | Written by Hannah Moscovitch | Directed by Alice Fox Lundy
The premise: Adopted siblings Aaron and Claire — one seemingly well-adjusted, the other deeply disturbed — become entangled with their neighbours, a reclusive man and his mail-order bride, in this site-specific psychological thriller staged inside a real Toronto condo building. Directed by Alice Fox Lundy (last year’s sell-out hit The Adding Machine) and starring Wayne Burns and Dora Award winner Izzi Nagel. Seating is extremely limited, so each performance offers a rare, close-range encounter with the piece.
Why we’re intrigued: Staging Hannah Moscovitch’s tense, voyeuristic script inside an actual condo collapses the distance between audience and subject, turning “how well do you know your neighbours?” from a rhetorical question into a lived one.
WHO? HÚ 狐
Tarragon Theatre Mainspace | Yu Theatre and Who? Spirit Production| Directed by Daisy Jia
The premise: Two immigrants’ fragile routine is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious fox in this original dark comedy inspired by Chinese folklore, blending myth and physical theatre to explore survival, trust, and the stories told to us that we then tell ourselves in uncertain times.
Why we’re intrigued: Reaching for folklore — rather than realism — to tell an immigrant survival story is a promising formal choice, and the fox’s ambiguous, trickster-adjacent presence suggests the show is less interested in easy answers about trust than in sitting with the uncertainty itself.
The Toronto Fringe Festival runs until July 12, 2026. Tickets are available at fringetoronto.com.
WAR DOG
Soulpepper’s RBC Finance Studio | Awe! Theatre | Written and performed by Mike D. Smith
The premise: “After 50 years of healing,” a son tells the deeply personal story of “heartbreak, betrayal, trauma and recovery” with a demanding army captain father and a briefly beloved dog.
Why we’re intrigued: Though it sounds like a grim survivor story, the description assures us “This is a love story.”
WHAT WE SAW: Curiosity rewarded! This is a raw and ragged biographical tale of a son coming to grips with inherited trauma and toxic masculinity, and deploying empathy and vulnerability to find forgiveness and love. It’s the kind of show you’ll only find at the Fringe: uneven, but in the most sincere and endearing of ways. There’s no denying its emotional integrity and sincerity—or the work that went into making it. – Scott Sneddon
The Toronto Fringe Festival runs until July 12, 2026. Tickets are available at fringetoronto.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
