In 2023, I was invited to intern with Open Heart Surgery Theatre as they workshopped Coleen Shirin MacPherson’s play Erased through Theatre Passe Muraille’s Buzz In-Development Series. The play employs physical language to communicate the way capitalism and authoritarianism shape the bodies of its inhabitants, and, further, how these workers break free from this reshaping. After my internship, I was invited to return to the Disappeared for Erased’s first professional theatrical run at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2024, and again for its tour at the Heidelberger Stückemarkt this year. As the show lived three quite different lives, there were corresponding alterations in casting. These changes became a new syntax in the language of Erased, physical and beyond, and in many ways amplified certain ideas in the play.
There are some obvious things to say about re-casting: each actor pulls a different tide through the character, asks the story to twist itself in a slightly different way. With that said, I have found it much less obvious how to articulate how these changes impacted my relationship to those characters who were recast. This is largely, I think, because I had a sort of particular, special relationship with them. I loomed about, I possessed them, I drove them up the wall, all without speaking any dialogue. I was one part of the whole mythic Thing of the play, to be sought out or else desperately avoided. The way my Thing-ness pressed on the rest of the cast, then, shifted as the actors did. As Grace was recast between Miranda Calderon and Sochi Fried, I felt something demanded of me, and, conversely, surprisingly, something offered to me in a sort of desperate hope. Similarly, Rose Tuong as Oliver played with me as a childhood friend, poking about in corners while I played hide and seek, then suddenly Annika Tupper put on his clothes and he was ripping about the set frantically, desperate, and I felt almost apologetic that I could not be seen.
And then, the chorus of the Disappeared has been recast, too. Between the workshop and the professional run at Theatre Passe Muraille, only myself and one other Chorus member returned to Erased. Reflecting honestly, I know in some way this change impacted my confidence to explore. There is a sort of unspeakable trust it felt important to me to have with the rest of the Disappeared. I wanted to be able to walk around the theatre like I had a sixth sense, that I could sharply and precisely feel every chorus member around the room like a pin stuck in the side of my body. Importantly, the ability to try something together, let it be wrong, then try again is a means by which the pins can embed themselves more deeply. This is my guess as to why during the Buzz workshop, an environment built around this freedom, I felt so attuned to the rest of the Chorus. I could guess at any moment where someone else was onstage, and despite the quirks of the old building, invariably, I could find them. We were all in a nonstop trust fall, constantly catching each otherーyes, I’ve got you. Yes, I’m here.
The truth is, theatre is not a process which necessarily lends itself to this sort of embedding. After the show in Heidelberg, I asked Coleen how many people she dreamed were in the chorus. She grinned sort of wildly, like the question was a hunk of the sun I’d plopped in her hand.
“Fifty,” she said.
During BUZZ, there were ten of us. In the professional runs, this number shrank to just seven. Maybe, in some universe, there are fifty performers in the Disappeared, and the trust between them is like a language no one else can speak, and Coleen gets to really, actually have the sun in her fist. But the reality is that it is expensive to try something for the sake of learning about a story with no expectation of recreating it. In this sense, the environment in which the play is built is cast and recast, tooーit, too, plays its hand in what happens onstage, morphing it into one shape or another.
So, the grooves of trust got a little lighter at Theatre Passe Muraille for the first professional run. I didn’t always know where everyone was, I got nervous I would fall down the stairs at some point. To be clear, I am not saying there was anything worse about this experience of Erasedーonly that I found myself as an individual struggling to keep up with the pace of the show’s growth. I was scared, a bit, to get it wrong, though no one ever made me feel that way. Slowly, though, I shed the fear in Heidelberg. I knew the other members of the Chorus better, and we were able to grow back into the familiar spaces of the show at breakneck pace. In this way we had no choice but to freefall into one another, sometimes crashing, mostly learning. Ultimately, I did not fall down the ladder (which replaced the stairs. And thank god, because could you imagine if I was afraid of falling down a ladder?). In a way, I wonder what my experience would be like had I never participated in the Buzz workshop. Would I want this trust so badly in the first place? Would I care so much about falling down, never knowing a time when I didn’t worry about it at all?
Something that I think is particularly of note for Erased is that in recasting the play, its thematic hooks become able to bury themselves deeper, as the story in a very literal sense “happen[s] over and over again, in every place”, to quote Oliver. Indeed, as it is re-cast, a new group of performers lives the violences of the play over again. As it relates to my experience of being a part of the Chorus, the process of re-casting also spoke to one of the roots of the play which movement director Alix Sideris often referred to: emergent strategy. Conceived by Adrienne Maree Brown, the philosophy invites us to resist in a manner which centers humanity, joy, and community, to simplify a layered and complex concept. This idea feels analogous to how my confidence evolved through the iterations of Erased. The feeling of stability grew the more care and trust the chorus was able to cultivate, speaking to the truth of emergent strategy that pulses beneath the story of the play.
Finally, at risk of corniness: each time we re-staged Erased, though I was the same performer, I, too, was recast in a sense, as my body changed and I matured. There, I said it. It has also, to continue my corny exploit, shaped who I have grown to be. Before I left, a friend asked me what I was excited for in Germany. I said, sausages. Then I said, every time I get to do this, I come out more sure of myself, more kind, and more generous. I walked into Erased at a very formative time: I reeked of self consciousness, desperate to know when this art thing would start to take the shape of a career. If I’m being honest with you, I still have one foot in this (oh yes, I am still in a formative time, and is it ever annoying). But also, brilliantly, the other foot has become planted firmly in something markedly more confident. When a performer is kinder than they were before, are they re-cast? Who does the character they are playing become if they know themselves more intimately? Do they shape the story differently, can they reach into it more deeply, if they finally decide that they are okay with being honest about not knowing the answers all the time?
In a legal sense, well, no. Dylan is Dylan is Dylan. But in a sense that honours curiosity and felt truth (which, if I might humbly add, are vitally important to artistic endeavour), yes, I think so. Yes, I felt the currents of the story change as I walked into it again. I knew that some of this change had to have come from me, though my name did not change. Now, I am dreaming about my hopes for a new iteration. I am dreaming about how, next time, I will uncover it againーthe thing inside Erased that is never re-cast, yes, never changes: wrapped around a pin in my back, a little piece of the sun.