Re-Casting Erased and Recasting for our Germany Tour

By Coleen Shirin MacPherson, Playwright/Director of Erased and Artistic Director of Open Heart Surgery Theatre 

My play Erased, which premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto in 2024, was selected to take part in the prestigious Heidelberger Stückemarkt in Germany this May 2026. When I received the news, I was immediately excited to bring the work to an international festival. It was an honour not only to create a second production, but also to see the play in a new context—opening a dialogue in Europe about systems of labour, climate collapse, and late-stage capitalism through the lens of an absurdist play.

But then came the daunting task of re-casting three members of our team. While Erased is a text-based play, it is equally grounded in a devised physical vocabulary, shaped through process rather than fixed choreography. Set in a greeting card factory, the work is deeply tied to the rhythms and repetitions of labour, and to the invisible forces that sit beneath the text. In our original iteration, we were particularly interested in the constant movement of hands—where physical score and spoken text exist in juxtaposition. We were not interested in seeing characters as machines, but in witnessing how the human soul pushes against that machinery: a desire to survive, to continue to hope, and not become erased. This tension between body and text became the core of our inquiry.

The work that Alix Sideris undertook as movement director involved a delicate exploration of embodied history and gesture—what the body reveals about character beyond language, and what unconscious stories are shared with an audience through movement. This layered form of storytelling is complex, and it requires a particular kind of actor.

We searched for performers who could learn quickly, work instinctively, and remain open to sharing their impulses in the room—actors who understood our physical theatre practice as embodiment, not simply the delivery of text on a page. We needed performers who could sing, move, and speak poetic text, often while learning material in a compressed timeframe.

We had six days to rehearse the play, along with several meetings with the new cast to ensure they were brought into the conversations that had shaped the original process. In many ways, it was table work on speed. But it was also incredibly rich, generative, and revealing. It became clear that re-casting a work like this holds a particular opportunity: rather than starting from scratch, we were building on the depth of what had already been created and carried forward by the original company. In that sense, we were able to go further.

Working with an archival record of the premiere also gave new performers a point of reference for the original physical and vocal choices. At the same time, each actor naturally sought their own version of the role, allowing the process itself to lead them there. Both Alix Sideris and I are committed to working from the instincts of the performer, and to shaping the work through the specificity of each body rather than imposing fixed forms.

Rather than imposing choreography, Alix builds movement language organically through the performers’ impulses, habits, tensions, and discoveries. As a result, the physical scores shifted significantly between the original production and the touring version. The structure of the piece remained intact, but its physical life transformed with the new cast.

Re-casting therefore meant more than learning lines or reproducing staging. It required each performer to actively generate new pathways into the work while remaining in conversation with the existing world of the play. Because the movement emerges from the performer rather than being mechanically reproduced, each new actor inevitably reshapes the emotional texture of the piece. Much of Erased lives in rhythm, gesture, breath, tension, and the ensemble’s shared physical language—including the Chorus, the seven “Disappeared” workers who exist in relation to the factory system and represent the discarded workers who are victims of a system that erases them.  

The process also opened up larger questions about liveness and the malleable nature of a script. Re-casting inevitably raises the question: how does the presence of a different performer alter the identity of the work itself? Each actor arrives with their own worldview, instincts and embodied relationship to the material. Their relationship to silence, stillness, humour, or even intensity can subtly (or sometimes radically) shift how a story is experienced by an audience.

In a work like Erased, where identity, conformity, surveillance and disappearance are central themes, those shifts become especially charged. The play is not only about systems of control, but is itself shaped through the lived bodies moving within those systems. As a result, casting changes become meaning changes, offering a continued opportunity to rediscover the work.

Some of these shifts became visible in rehearsal. One clear example emerged in the reworking of the final scene between Annika Tupper’s character Oliver and the authoritarian figure Margie (Nancy McAlear). Annika was interested in pushing the confrontation with the system more directly than in the original version. That choice opened the scene into something new: a sharper sense of resistance, but also an unexpected layer of humour in its final turn. In this iteration, Oliver is literally pulled down into the vat, mirroring the greeting cards being shredded and becoming, in effect, another product absorbed and consumed by the system he resists.

A moment that resonated with our German audiences.   

I can’t wait to see what’s next for this production and what new discoveries will be made. This is what I love most about being a theatre maker: the room, the people in it and the live encounter are what create the work.