Review: Erased is a climate manifesto that explodes from a slow burn to an apocalyptic climax | Canada Voices

• Title: Erased
• Written and directed by: Coleen Shirin MacPherson
• Performers: Nancy McAlear, Sochi Fried, Rose Tuong, Kat Khan, Zina Ahmed, Dylan Carter, jenna geen, Melissa Kiley, Emma Ly, Zoe Magirias, Jobina Sitoh 司徒加恩
• Production & Venue: An Open Heart Surgery Theatre production in partnership with Theatre Passe Muraille
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs to Nov. 30

When the lights come up on Erased, Coleen Shirin MacPherson’s acerbic climate manifesto now playing at Theatre Passe Muraille, you might think you’re watching a deleted scene from Apple TV+‘s Severance.

Three women sit on an assembly line, illustrating greeting cards and smirking at their platitudes. Harsh fluorescent lights beam down on the artists’ work table, and a horrible, industrial buzzing sound all but drowns out their banal conversations. One worker, a Patricia Arquette-ish forewoman named Margie (Nancy McAlear), introduces newcomer René (Kat Khan) to the inner workings of the sweatshop: Make the cards, then send them down the exit chute, she instructs. Don’t worry about where the cards go.

A third woman, the frantic and frenetic Grace (Sochi Fried), side-eyes René, ignoring her questions and focusing intently on her greeting cards. She’s been doing this for days, months, years, maybe. It’s never really clear, and it’s hard to measure the passing of time when you have a daily amnesia that blurs the edges between work and personal time. (Indeed the connection to Severance, an unnerving, vaguely futuristic drama about work-life balance, reverberates against MacPherson’s script.)

The opening breaths of Erased are familiar fare: The climate crisis will come for us all, MacPherson seems to say in both her writing and direction, as the women onstage slowly realize their work station has been sealed off from the rest of the compound. Capitalism will ruin human civilization. Fascism will punish those who speak out against power.

But Erased wanders into alluring, captivating new territory when the women start to disappear. From the very beginning of the play, an ensemble of spectral figures wanders the balconies of Theatre Passe Muraille, peering down at the workers as they illustrate card after card.

However, when the named characters we’ve met – Margie, Grace, René and Oliver (Rose Tuong) – begin to join the army of phantoms, MacPherson’s writing evolves into something more visceral, a ballet for the bodies lost to corporate greed. Erased could as easily take place inside an Amazon fulfillment centre or Shein factory as it does in an unnamed greeting card plant. What we see onstage is no act of pure fiction.

Where Erased splinters into shards of mixed success is in its music. Amy Nostbakken of Quote Unquote Collective contributes spooky underscoring and songs, and while the background music sings in satisfying harmony with Richard Feren’s elite sound design, the songs vault Erased into a frustrating no-man’s-land of not-quite musical theatre. (Audiences who saw Universal Child Care at Canadian Stage earlier this year will instantly recognize Nostbakken’s signature of a cappella layered voices, along with lyrics that occasionally lose their heft to clunky rhymes.)

Meanwhile, MacPherson and set designer Nick Blais’s visual world-building is provocative and jagged, punctuated by instances of choral movement that then relax into almost primal dance sequences. (The fantastic movement direction is by Alix Sideris.) When Erased explodes from a slow burn into its apocalyptic climax, you can’t help but watch as bodies skitter across the stage.

That kaboom makes a memorable, frightening ending to a play with big ideas and serviceable, if somewhat nonspecific, dialogue. The placeless void in which Erased unfurls, separate from any particular era but set loosely in the future, feels a touch derivative of other climate-wary pieces of art, especially when the conditions we see in the greeting card factory have been so very real for more than a century. It’s easy to imagine the victims of 1911′s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, for instance, inside the bodies of the people who haunt the processing plant.

As a script, Erased instantly calls to mind Caryl Churchill’s absurdist Far Away, and were it not for MacPherson’s exquisite direction, I’d argue that the latter is the better play. But it seems these days there can be no such thing as an overabundance of end-of-the-world stories, from Severance to this seismic oddity of a theatrical call to action. Clocking in at a breezy 90 minutes and playing only until Nov. 30, Erased carries in its very form a sense of urgency, one I’ll amplify here: See it before it’s too late.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)