BLOODLINES Featuring PEERLESS and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Will Come to Ensemble Theatre Festival
The productions, directed by Keltie Forsyth and Chris Lam, will run at the Jericho Arts Centre in Vancouver.
After a three-year hiatus, Vancouver’s Ensemble Theatre Festival returns to full production this summer with Bloodlines, running July 8–18 at the Jericho Arts Centre. The festival will feature two new productions, The hilarious and unhinged dark comedy Peerless by Jiehae Park, directed by Keltie Forsyth, and the iconic A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, directed by Chris Lam.
“After the COVID hiatus which created a time of pause and reflection, this return marks an invigorating and renewed commitment to live performance bringing back inspiring and entertaining theatre productions to Vancouver,” says Director Keltie Forsyth.
Across both plays, sisters navigate ambition, illusion, and survival within systems beginning to fracture and worlds where identity must be performed, defended, and reinvented. Darkly comic and iconic in turn, these plays ask what it means to define yourself at the edge of a fading order. And what it costs to hold on as it slips away.
Peerless is a darkly comic, razor-sharp reimagining of Macbeth, set in the pressure-cooker world of elite college admissions. Following twin sisters M and L as ambition spirals into obsession, the play is hilarious, magnetic, and unhinged. In a moment when debates around affirmative action and “merit” continue to be reshaped and weaponised in public discourse, The play skewers those narratives with a comedian’s precision and a thriller’s momentum, exposing how quickly “meritocracy” becomes myth-making.
A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the most enduring works in the American canon, remains a searing portrait of desire, illusion, and collapse. As Blanche DuBois arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella, Tennessee Williams lays bare the fragility of identity under pressure. Iconic, essential, and defining, it continues to shape contemporary theatre nearly eighty years after its premiere.
Together, these works explore Bloodlines: a festival tracing the invisible threads between past and present, family and system, survival and self-invention. Together, these works ask: What happens when the pressure to succeed, or simply to belong, pushes us past our moral limits?
Forsyth returns to ETC after directing Superior Donuts (2019) and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2017), bringing her sharp comedic sensibility to Peerless. Lam, who previously directed Dark Road (2018) and appeared in A Prayer for Owen Meany (2017) and The Drawer Boy (2019), takes on Streetcar with a focus on its enduring theatrical force.
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