Cicadas
Photo by Jae Yang
Tarragon Theatre, National Arts Centre & fu-Gen Theatre/Cicadas, created by David Yee and Chris Thornborrow, directed by Nina Lee Aquino, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, closes May 24.
I always like reaching an intermission without knowing where a play is going, and that is certainly the case with Cicadas. Sometimes, however, a play can be so engrossing in its accumulation of ideas and tensions that it ultimately struggles to find a fully satisfying ending. That, too, is the case with Cicadas.
To say the play is ambitious is an understatement. The brainchild of playwright David Yee and composer Chris Thornborrow, the two developed the text and music together, resulting in a work in which four live musicians perform backstage while the actors deliver their lines, something surprisingly rare in contemporary theatre. The effect creates a constantly evolving emotional landscape, with the live music deepening the atmosphere of the play in a major way.
The creators have described Cicadas as an “eco-thriller” that functions both as a mystery and a warning. One assumes the warning concerns climate catastrophe and humanity’s growing inability to control the natural world, because nature itself ultimately seems to turn against the young couple who purchase a house in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood. This is not giving anything away because, from the outset, it is clear that there is something deeply wrong with the house.
We first meet Janie, played by Monica Dotter, and her husband Trim, played by Ryan Hollyman, who are also husband and wife in real life, which lends an additional layer of intimacy to their scenes together. We also meet the real estate agent, played by Ellora Patnaik, who takes on multiple roles throughout the play, including Janie’s mother Adeline, who also happens to have been Trim’s mathematics professor. Apparently a gifted mathematics student, Trim broke Adeline’s heart when he abandoned that path in favour of becoming a contractor and builder.
Cicadas
Photo bu Jae Yang
Even though Janie and Trim have been warned that there is something deeply wrong with the house — particularly the basement — they ignore the warning and venture downstairs where they discover that the movers have left some belongings there including one of Adeline’s favourite paintings, which Janie hangs on an upstairs wall. The painting subsequently seems to change over time producing ominous new details neither of them had previously noticed.
Adeline herself materializes periodically throughout the play. In addition to being a gifted mathematics professor, she is also an avid birdwatcher, and the scenes in which she takes Janie birdwatching become increasingly important to the drama. They are not decorative interludes; they are clues, and the audience has to pay close attention because the play is constantly shifting through different time periods and narrative threads. Cicadas is anything but linear.
We move backward and forward through mathematics lectures, family memories, and increasingly unsettling discoveries connected to the house and the picture. Along the way, the audience receives detailed explanations of cicada life cycles, prime numbers, Fibonacci patterns, and quantitative mathematics. There are also unsettling geographical facts about the Trinity Bellwoods area itself.
The biology of cicadas becomes central to the mystery. There are the ordinary annual cicadas that emerge and mate every year, but there are also the periodic cicadas that remain buried underground for either 13 or 17 years before resurfacing in massive swarms. The significance of those prime numbers — 13 and 17 — becomes deeply intertwined with the strange events unfolding in the house.
The result is an extraordinarily dense script, filled with intersecting ideas, scientific concepts, timelines, and metaphors that Janie, Trim, and Adeline struggle to understand even as they are being consumed by them. Complicating matters further is the fact that Janie is pregnant when the couple purchase the house, after what we gather has been a long and difficult struggle to conceive. The pregnancy immediately raises the emotional stakes of everything that follows.
From the very beginning, the audience is essentially waiting for the house to make its move, and when it finally does, the consequences are genuinely frightening. Needless to say, I am not going to reveal them here.
What can be said is that the event opens a profound fault line in Janie and Trim’s marriage, exposing tensions and vulnerabilities that had previously remained buried beneath the surface. The situation is further complicated by a shocking action taken by Adeline herself, one that dramatically alters the emotional dynamics among all three characters.
Cicadas Musicians
Photo by Jae Yang
The musical subtext that underscores this sinister narrative is extraordinary. It follows every rise and fall of tension with uncanny precision and becomes an essential storytelling element rather than simple accompaniment. The instrumental combination of clarinet (Marc Blouin), cello (Amal Arulanandam), piano (Wesley Shen), and percussion (Nathan Petipas) proves remarkably effective, creating an atmosphere that is at once unsettling, hypnotic, and emotionally charged. Equally important is John Gzowski’s sound design, which layers the incessant drone of cicadas over and through the music itself, so that the buzzing seems to permeate the entire theatrical environment.
The acting is uniformly strong. Dotter, whom I have primarily known previously as a dancer and choreographer, delivers an impressive performance as Janie fully grounding the emotional reality of the play no matter how strange events become. Even more striking is Patnaik, whom I also know principally from the dance world, particularly the highly specialized classical South Asian form of Odissi dance. Here she takes on multiple characters, including Adeline, and navigates the complex transitions among them with remarkable assurance. Hollyman, the most traditionally theatre-based actor of the trio, brings an increasingly haunted intensity to Trim. All three performances are beautifully shaped by director Nina Lee Aquino, who demonstrates an exceptional ability to sustain and manipulate tension over the course of the evening.
My principal reservation concerns the set by Jawon Kang, who also designed the costumes. The costumes themselves are entirely effective, particularly the various garb for Patnaik from insurance agent to doula, but the set includes a series of elevated ledges with no visible guardrails. Because I suffer from vertigo, I found scenes staged on these exposed edges genuinely disconcerting, but the hanging curtains and Michelle Ramsay’s play with lighting did add to the mystery. And of course, there is the well-placed basement door.
I do, however, remain uncertain about the decision to have Patnaik appear costumed as a cicada at both the beginning and end of the play. Perhaps the symbolism was necessary, but for me it felt somewhat overstated.
Overall, Cicadas may give some people pause about living in the Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood after seeing this play.