Ensemble Theatre Company’s Peerless riffs on Shakespeare and affirmative action
Part of Ensemble’s summer festival, Jiehae Park’s play references Macbeth as it takes on the power dynamics of U.S. college admissions
(Left to right) Jakobe Jenkins, Hazel 한결 Kang, and Alison Chang in Peerless . Photo by Joshua Dauer
As part of its summer festival, Ensemble Theatre Company presents Peerless, running in repertory with A Streetcar Named Desire, at the Jericho Arts Centre July 8 to 19
AFTER A HIATUS due to COVID-19, and scaled-back versions in 2022 and 2025, Ensemble Theatre Company is back in action with its summer festival at Jericho Arts Centre this July.
This year’s fest, themed Bloodlines, will feature Tennessee Williams’s classic A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Chris Lam, and Jiehae Park’s Peerless, directed by Keltie Forsyth—two meaty pieces of work featuring mainly emerging actors.
Keltie Forsyth
Both Lam and Forsyth joined Ensemble as amateur artists themselves almost 10 years ago, cutting their teeth directing in the company’s annual summer repertory festivals. Forsyth’s first ever paid directing gig was Ensemble’s production of In the Next Room…or the Vibrator Play by Sarah Ruhl in 2017. Now, as co-artistic directors of the company, both Lam and Forsyth felt it was extremely important to bring the festival back to give other budding artists a place to get their start and work on challenging, meaningful material.
“We want to give artists the opportunities to sink their teeth into really intense, well-written, dense texts,” Forsyth told Stir. Lam made a strong case for A Streetcar Named Desire, and—after using a sports-style bracket system to narrow down their selection of about 25 other works—the two chose Peerless as the second piece. The fact that both shows confront similar concepts was a happy accident that informed the festival’s Bloodlines theme.
“There are structural resonances in both plays about sisters, legacy, and what it is like to try to make a life in a world that feels like it’s crumbling around you—all of which feels really relevant today,” Forsyth says. Described as a blend of dark comedy, satire, and psychological horror, Peerless follows Asian-American twin sisters M (Alison Chang) and L (Hazel 한결 Kang) as they scheme for a coveted spot at “The College”. When they discover that the school’s single early admissions spot has been awarded to a classmate, their clever plotting turns brutal and bloody.
“I have a real love of plays that exist kind of one step to the left of the real world,” Forsyth explains. “We’re in a slightly heightened reality. We’re not in a full-blown different universe, but the rules are just a little bit different.” The play is heavily in dialogue with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but subverts it into the cut-throat, hyper-competitive world of U.S. college admissions.
“I think what will fascinate people who are familiar with Macbeth is the ways that it is in conversation with the original text while being completely its own thing,” Forsyth says. “It’s quick, it’s smart, and it features a take-no-prisoners style of humour that I find very appealing.”
Although the play was written in 2015 as a statement on affirmative action in the United States, for Forsyth, the themes of the piece keep it extremely relevant for today.
“What it exposes is the kind of boogeyman story that was weaponized to take down a system like affirmative action, which was flawed but really important,” Forsyth says.
Peerless, she says, ultimately highlights how systems of power pit minority groups against one another to maintain control.
“The system is designed to pit people against each other so that they’re not looking at the systems of power, so that energy isn’t going to dismantle those power dynamics,” she explains. “The people who have benefited for generations are telling campfire ghost stories in order to cast themselves as victims. That is really what we’re going for in this show—to tell you a bit of a boogeyman story.”
Despite its heavy subject matter, Forsyth hopes that, overall, people have a blast with this piece.
“The show is a rollercoaster ride of a play,” she says. “We want people to get on this rollercoaster and experience that breathless, scary, thrilling, fun, slightly silly ride—and get off at the end feeling like they’ve had a great time.” 
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